Exactly one year ago, Facebook officially opened up Connect for all developers, and one year later, Facebook’s identity service is in the lead, rivaled only by Google and Twitter both of which have much smaller representations of the global social graph. Since launch, the company has generated a ton of buzz for the still young service and millions of users have registered for sites using Facebook Connect. While it has yet to become the standard online identity service, there are very few formidable competitors.

Facebook Scores Huge Partnerships

If there is an identity service which has been focused on generating buzz, Facebook Connect is it. That buzz has been a direct result of huge partnership deals with well known brands. One year later, Facebook has now been implemented across numerous sites including some of the following brands:

Microsoft Bing, Yahoo!, Hulu, ABC.com, TV.com, NBC.com, TV Guide, Vimeo, uStream, CNN (Obama Inauguration), Justin.tv, XBox (over 2 million users have used Facebook Connect), PlayStation 3, JibJab, Bejeweled Blitz, Pandora, CBSSports.com, Lufthansa, Rock Band for iPhone, Huffington Post, TweetDeck, AIM, CurrentTV, Tumblr, Disqus, Movable Type, JS-Kit Echo, Drupal, ZAGAT, Nintendo DSi, Orbitz, Eventbrite, Drop.io, Calgary Airport, NutshellMail, Prototype game trailer, CodeIgniter, Trapster, Digg, Discovery, Yelp, Washington Post, potentially MySpace in the near future, and numerous others.

In other words, Facebook has had an extremely successful first year at attracting large names to their rapidly growing identity platform. With this week’s announcement from Yahoo! that they’d implement Facebook Connect across their properties, it appears that Facebook may have almost won the identity wars just one year in. Whether or not competing services have a chance, Facebook Connect has been boasted as a source of increased user engagement and increased registrations across most of the properties that have implemented the service.

While it has only been one year since Connect went live for all, the company has a wide lead over other competitors, at least in terms of the coverage Facebook Connect has received.

Facebook Pushes Out Connect-Enabled Widgets

While Connect was initially rolled out to developers, other sites have been able to take advantage of Facebook Connect through the use of easy-to-implement widgets. The Live Stream widget, which was used for the Obama inauguration on CNN.com at the beginning of the year, has become a widely used tool for live events. In combination with UStream, Livestream, and Justin.tv, the Live Stream widget has been used by musical artists, media companies, and others to create live interactive experiences which users can share with their friends and others.

Facebook also released the Connect-enabled comments box to provide website owners with an easy platform for instant dialogue. Thanks to these widgets, the Facebook share button, and others, Facebook has become the de-facto place for users to share information among their contacts.

Facebook Announces The Open Graph API

The Open Graph API, which was first announced in October, is about the extension of Facebook Pages to the entire web. It also will take advantage of Facebook Connect for enabling Facebook users to interact with brands and any other Facebook-powered object on the web. It’s an abstract concept and little has been disclosed about it so far, however this new service highlights the future of Facebook as it extends beyond the Facebook.com website.

Over the past year, Facebook has seen nothing short of spectacular results with one brand after the other announcing support of Facebook Connect. The upcoming Open Graph API highlights how long-term the vision of Facebook Connect really is. Just one year in, the team behind Facebook Connect has pulled of some impressive wins, and if the momentum continues, Connect could soon be the defacto identity standard of the web.

An Open Letter from Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg

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by Mark Zuckerberg Tue at 6:23pm

It has been a great year for making the world more open and connected. Thanks to your help, more than 350 million people around the world are using Facebook to share their lives online.

To make this possible, we have focused on giving you the tools you need to share and control your information. Starting with the very first version of Facebook five years ago, we've built tools that help you control what you share with which individuals and groups of people. Our work to improve privacy continues today.

Facebook's current privacy model revolves around "networks" — communities for your school, your company or your region. This worked well when Facebook was mostly used by students, since it made sense that a student might want to share content with their fellow students.

Over time people also asked us to add networks for companies and regions as well. Today we even have networks for some entire countries, like India and China.

However, as Facebook has grown, some of these regional networks now have millions of members and we've concluded that this is no longer the best way for you to control your privacy. Almost 50 percent of all Facebook users are members of regional networks, so this is an important issue for us. If we can build a better system, then more than 100 million people will have even more control of their information.

The plan we've come up with is to remove regional networks completely and create a simpler model for privacy control where you can set content to be available to only your friends, friends of your friends, or everyone.

We're adding something that many of you have asked for — the ability to control who sees each individual piece of content you create or upload. In addition, we'll also be fulfilling a request made by many of you to make the privacy settings page simpler by combining some settings. If you want to read more about this, we began discussing this plan back in July.

Since this update will remove regional networks and create some new settings, in the next couple of weeks we'll ask you to review and update your privacy settings. You'll see a message that will explain the changes and take you to a page where you can update your settings. When you're finished, we'll show you a confirmation page so you can make sure you chose the right settings for you. As always, once you're done you'll still be able to change your settings whenever you want.

We've worked hard to build controls that we think will be better for you, but we also understand that everyone's needs are different. We'll suggest settings for you based on your current level of privacy, but the best way for you to find the right settings is to read through all your options and customize them for yourself. I encourage you to do this and consider who you're sharing with online.

Thanks for being a part of making Facebook what it is today, and for helping to make the world more open and connected.

Mark Zuckerberg

also noted 350 million users now on facebook! pretty impressive

note to self: check this service out.

Small changes with a big punch coming next week

Posted by Gina Bianchini on November 11, 2009 – 2:00 pm

One of the more interesting challenges of growing a social platform with base of passionate Network Creators is how to communicate the less visible success factors that make a Ning Network a hit. In the case of performance, the data is black and white: if your Ning Network is light and fast, you will grow. If it loads slowly, it won’t.

Performance optimization is also one of those funny things that require trust and a close partnership between you and us. Namely, we must make your Ning Network as fast as possible while still balancing giving you as the Network Creator the flexibility to add all the things that make your Ning Network the exact right social network for your interest or passion. These include third-party widgets, videos, images and especially your own design.

Layer on top of this the fact that Ning Networks exist for every purpose under the sun from lightweight entertainment to support, business networking and professional content across the globe and whatever change we make will be disruptive for someone, even if the feature is used by a small number of people.

For example, the limits to the number of text boxes and types of content you could add to your Main Page this summer weren’t designed to limit your creativity, but to ensure that you could grow your Ning Network into everything you wanted it to become. Speed is the secret component to making this a reality. Any great product needs to be fast or it is not great. And we want your Ning Network to be great.

To this end, over the past month, we’ve identified a set of small changes to the experience on your Ning Network that will pack a huge punch on making your Ning Network fast for members around the world.

Here’s what we’re changing this Monday, November 16th:

Content visible to “Friends Only” won’t show up in Main Page Latest Activity. You’ll still be able to see this content if you click through to your friend’s My Page, but it won’t be an option on the Main Page Latest Activity.

You’ll see a “Send a Message” link instead of an “Add as Friend” link on the detail pages for content. If you click “Send a Message” when the person isn’t already your friend, you’ll be prompted to add them as your friend first.

Pagination is changing to “Previous” and “Next”. When you’re checking out photos or another feature with more than one page of content, you’ll see buttons for “First,” “Previous,” “Next,” and “Last” rather than a button for a particular page like “19.”

Strange as it seems, this set of small changes will pack a punch from a performance perspective. As we get data on the improvements we’re seeing after these changes, we’ll look to share them here on the Ning Blog for all to see. In the meantime, as we get close to the final date of launch, we’ll post it here.

Thanks!

Emerging Tech Talk #36 – Christopher Penn about Google Wave

September 30th, 2009 by Dan York

What is most interesting about Google Wave? Back in June 2009 at an event happening near the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston, MA, I had a chance to sit down with Christopher S. Penn and get his thoughts about the recently-announced Google Wave and how it might be used as a communication tool. As I listened to this recording today, I was struck by how much of it was echoed in a recent blog post I put up about the need for distributed and decentralized systems – we do need that distributed/decentralized approach. I know that while the Wave protocol is published, federation is not yet possible with Wave. Let’s hope it comes soon.

While I know that Chris’ views on Wave may have changed in the 3 months since we recorded this session, I thought the points he makes are great. More info about Chris can be found at:

• http://www.marketingovercoffee.com/
• http://www.christopherspenn.com/
• http://twitter.com/cspenn

Thanks, Chris, for agreeing to do the interview – and should we have the opportunity to do another one, I’ll try to get it up online sooner! My apologies for the delay.

You can download or play the podcast here (in Quicktime):

 Emerging Tech Talk #036 - Christopher Penn about Google Wave [9:22m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Alternatively, you can watch on YouTube at:

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• subscribing via iTunes
• subscribing to our YouTube account (if you are a YouTube user)
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Thank you.

This Voxeo podcast can be found on the web at http://blogs.voxeo.com/ett. If you have comments or feedback about this show, you can either leave comments here on the show blog site or email Dan York.

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  HOW TO: Measure Social Media ROI

  October 27th, 2009 | by Christina Warren

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  Last month, we reported on a survey that found that 84% of social media programs don’t measure return on investment (ROI). The comments in that post indicated that a lot of individuals and businesses want to be able to measure the ROI of their social media strategies and campaigns, but they don’t know where to start.

  Companies and executives are finally beginning to really jump on the social media bandwagon, and that’s fantastic. However, for social media to fully work (for everyone), businesses and brands need to be able to evaluate the impact their social media use is having, both positive and negative. Measuring social media ROI isn’t impossible, but it can be difficult because many of the pieces that need to be evaluated are difficult to track. This guide is designed to help you track down those pieces and determine the ROI you’re getting on social media.

  ---

  ROI Reality Check

  ---

  Oliver Blanchard’s Social Media ROI Presentation is a witty, fun introduction to ROI in terms of social media. If you’re confused about what ROI is (or rather, how it is measured), in the context of social media, check out his presentation (below), before you proceed with this post.

  Olivier Blanchard Basics Of Social Media Roi

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  Defining Clear Goals

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  As a standard formula, ROI is pretty basic, ROI = (X – Y) / Y, where X is your final value and Y is your starting value. In other words, if you invest $5 and get back $20, your ROI is (20 – 5) / 5 = 3 times your initial investment. In the financial sense, ROI is measured purely in the context of dollars and cents, however, the principles can really apply to any type of investment — monetary or not.

  Having concrete goals and concrete baselines is crucial to calculating your return on investment. So before you set out to measure and monitor your social media returns, you need to have a clear idea of what it is you want to accomplish.

  Once you have your goals defined, you need to gauge the baseline for your levels before starting or changing your social media strategy. For example, if your goal is to increase social media mentions of your company, in order to measure the ROI of any actions taken toward that goal, you need to know where you stand now. You can’t evaluate the ROI accurately without a baseline.

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  Metrics Tools

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  Although ROI ≠ metrics, traditional web metrics like traffic counts, number of comments, Twitter followers, Facebook fans, etc. are an important component when calculating your ROI.

  The trick is to not rely solely on the numbers, but on what the numbers end up leading to. For instance, does your increase in website visitors correlate with higher sales? Are people that find your website from Twitter or Facebook then clicking on your product pages or going to the e-Commerce section of your site? That’s the sort of data you want to be able to look for.

  Back in January, we did a round-up of 50+ Tools for Measuring Web Traffic. Here are some of our favorites and some additional social media related measuring options:

  Google Analytics — It’s free and it can provide a really powerful baseline for a variety of different factors. You can track incoming links and then the activities of the users they send, which can be helpful.

  Omniture — Omniture has a slew of services available for businesses, including components that track Facebook and Twitter metrics.

  TweetMeme Analytics — This is useful if you use TweetMeme’s retweet buttons on your sites. It’s a lot like Google Analytics, but focused on TweetMeme.

  PostRank Analytics — This suite of tools measures social engagement on other platforms and services. What’s nice about PostRank is that instead of just a raw number, you can actually see the messages and comments from other sites that contribute to your stats. This can be really important for sentiment analysis (more on that later).

  HootSuite — HootSuite is a great Twitter manager but also offers impressive analytics. The nice thing about the click data you get from an app like HootSuite (or bit.ly) is by looking deeper you can more easily see if those clicks translate into transactions or impressions on your other sites.

  Be sure to check out our post on Tracking Social Media Analytics for help with these tools and for the type of data you want to look for. Also check out some other reasons to use a URL shortener.

  ---

  Sentiment Analysis

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  Having a metric for something like Twitter mentions is pretty meaningless if you don’t know if those mentions are positive or negative. This is where sentiment analysis is interesting. Sentiment is also a useful baseline to look at before implementing or changing a social media strategy and calculating your ROI.

  We’ve written a lot about different sentiment analysis tools for Twitter and here are some highlights:

  Viral Heat — Viral Heat is an affordable social media monitoring service that includes a sentiment breakdown for Twitter mentions.

  Twendz — Twendz is a very basic real-time Twitter sentiments tool.

  Tweet Feel — Tweet Feel is another real-time Twitter sentiments search-engine.

  Crimson Hexagon — Crimson Hexagon is an Enterprise-level social media tracking tool. The algorithm they use for their VoxTrot Opinion Monitor is really impressive stuff, and will help you determine what consumer sentiment is toward your brand based on social media mentions.

  Sentiment Metrics — Sentiment Metrics is another tool aimed at enterprises or larger businesses. We mentioned them in our round-up of reputation tracking tools last year.

  ---

  Social Media Product Suites

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  These products can be extremely useful in measuring ROI on social networks but are primarily designed for bigger brands and corporations. Still, in terms of all-encompassing tool sets, these tools have the edge.

  Vitrue SRM — We’ve covered the Twitter Pages component of Vitrue SRM (Social Relationship Manager) before, but the whole suite is really dedicated to managing and getting the most information out of your social media accounts. Vitrue does analytics for links posted on Twitter or Facebook and can also plug into third-party services like Omniture and Google Analytics. Vitrue SRM is basically a CMS for controlling and monitoring your Twitter and Facebook accounts.

  ContextOptional — ContextOptional offers both a Social Reporting Dashboard for monitoring engagement and activity and a Social Moderation Console for Facebook.

  Salesforce.com — Salesforce.com’s Service Cloud 2 line of products is really designed to integrate Twitter and Facebook results and pages directly into a company’s CRM. Although this isn’t ROI in the most clear-cut terms, by improving customer service and getting a handle on problems quickly, brands can save themselves from potentially costly mistakes. Those savings can be taken into account when computing your ROI.

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  Making the Data Usable

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  This is the hard part. After you have defined your baseline, you need to take the metrics from your monitoring tools and see how they correlate to higher sales, better customer retention, or whatever your primary markers for output are.

  If your ultimate measurement is sales for instance, look at your sales level. If it has increased, look at the number of referrers on your e-commerce site (assuming you can track this data) from your website or Twitter or the number of coupons used that were given away in a Facebook campaign to start calculating which sales stemmed from your social media campaigns.

  Do you see any trends? Is traffic up to your store after posting on Facebook? What about Twitter? Does store traffic correlate with more sales when evaluating that same data? Does a higher sentiment analysis on Twitter lead to more sales or more visits?

  Finding trends and tracking them back to their point of origin is the key to measuring ROI.

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  What do you think?

  ---

  What do you use when measuring social media ROI? Is ROI the best term for measuring impact of social media, or should something else be used? What have you found to be good indicators of things that work and don’t work when using social media? Let us know!

  ---

  More business resources from Mashable:

  ---

  - 5 Advanced Social Media Marketing Strategies for Small Business
  - Top 5 Business Blogging Mistakes and How to Avoid Them
  - 4 Ways Social Media is Changing Business
  - 6 Must-Follow Steps for Selling in Any Economy
  - 5 Small Businesses Successfully Using Social Media

  (Photo Courtesy of Cambodia4Kids on Flickr)

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Tags: analysis, contextoptional, crimson hexagon, facebook, metrics, ROI, salesforce.com, social media roi, twitter, vitrue srm

via mashable.com

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