Social Media Business School - this Friday in London!

I've been asked to be on the panel for a conference this Friday in London, the SocialMedia Business School, organised by SocialMedia Networks. They have a line up of very good speakers, with panelists from Developer Analytics, WE7, Fidelity Ventures, Partygaming and BuzzTone, among others - as well as of course their own guys (and me). 

The blurb:

The purpose of the SocialMedia Business School session is to bring together industry experts to help guide you in building out your applications’ revenue model and preparing your business plan for financing and general planning. SocialMedia Networks, the social advertising network will bring together advertisers, leading developers and analytics gurus to help you build your business. You will learn about the resources available to you to make the most money from your applications, and using supporting materials provided by SocialMedia you’ll apply what you learn into an actual business plan that turns your apps into a sustainable business.

I'll be on the marketing panel, discussing seeding and marketing of applications. Hope to see you there!

Facebook 'Phonebook', One click calling from Palm and Treo, and SMS features...

I was just flicking through my newsfeed and saw that a friend had changed their mobile number. So far, not that interesting... until I noticed that Facebook went on to say 'and it's been added to your Phonebook'. I took a look, and sure enough there were all my friends in alphabetical order, with their different numbers, all searchable. This was interesting, as earlier on I'd just read about the Palm/Treo Facebook application which, according to FaceReviews, allows you to ' Open your Contacts and dial your friends with just one touch.' Sounds a lot like Facebook are moving more and more to integrate your mobile addressbook with your Facebook friend list - similar to what Yahoo! are doing with One Connect, and a few other services people are working on. 

I already use the Facebook application for Blackberry, and occasionally m.facebook.com off my phone browser, both of which are useful for different things, but I decided to delve a bit deeper into Facebook.com/mobile and see what else was on offer. It turns out that there's a lot of functionality just on pure SMS - including not just status updates and private messages, poking etc, but also adding friends, writing notes, and - my favourite - getting the mobile number of one of your friends. You just text in 'cell john smith' and you get a text back immediately with all their contact details.

Quite interesting is the ability to choose certain friends' status updates to follow - and Facebook will text you whenever they change. 

At the moment there aren't any links to the mobile section from the homepage until you've actively gone to the mobile section and authorised your phone, but they're obviously working hard on integrating the mobile Facebook experience in different ways. With all the buzz around mobile social networks going on, and some bloggers proclaiming that the major online social networks will be swept away by these, it will be interesting to watch as Facebook moves more heavily into this space.

Facebook adding in new metrics - weekly active users, more relevant than daily.

Facebook have just announced that they're adding in new metrics for developers, including weekly active users - as opposed to just daily. Although it was of course possible to build this in manually, many developers haven't. Although a small change, this is actually a very important one for the growth of the platform - when I speak to many brand owners thinking of launching applications on Facebook, and even when I speak to ones who actually HAVE applications on Facebook, about 75% of them don't realise that the active user stat that Facebook give out is daily only. This can be very misleading, as for most applications what's important is how many of your users are coming back week on week, not just day to day. When these people go in and see that they only have 2-5% (daily) active user rate they think this is terrible, when in fact if people are only visiting the app once a week, this is actually a 14-35% (weekly) active user rate. 

For more information on retention rate and cohort analysis, see my post on jumping the shark from a talk I did at the April Facebook Developer Garage London.