What the Orthodox Jewish sect can teach us about how to use Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and the emerging social web.
It would seem that the ultra-orthodox Chabad Lubavitch have little in common with your nonprofit. Whether you are a direct service provider, an international relief agency, an advocacy group or a trade association, you probably couldn’t imagine what a bunch of black-suited, black-hatted ultra-religious Jews could teach you about outreach, marketing and fundraising. And it seems far fetched to imagine that they have something to say about social networking and internet strategy, in all of its universalistic narcissistic decadence.
But alas, they have a lot to teach us.
I don’t know what you know, if anything, about the Chabad-Lubavitch, so first, a little background. Here I am going to quote extensively from the Wikipedia article on Lubavitch.
Chabad-Lubavitch (also known as Chabad, Habad or Lubavitch), is one of the largest branches of Hasidic Judaism and one of the largest Jewish movements worldwide, especially in the United States, the Former Soviet Union, Europe and Israel. Chabad (חב”ד ) is a Hebrewacronym for “חכמה Chochmah, בינה Binah, דעת Da’at” (“Wisdom, Understanding, Knowledge“). Lubavitch, taken from the Russian Любавичи, Lyubavichi, is the name of the town that served as the movement’s headquarters for over a century. In 1993 there were over 200,000 adherents to the movement some estimate today that there are over a million.
OK, so we have this Jewish sect with maybe a million members. If you live in New York, or a college town, you have probably seen some Chabaniks around town. They look like this.
Chabad, unlike other ultra-Orthodox Jewish sects, don’t keep to themselves. They have it in their DNA to go out into the world and, with incredible passion, reach out to every Jew they can.
Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson spurred on the movement to what has become known as shlichus (“being emissaries [performing outreach]“) after becoming Rebbe in 1950-1951. As a result, Chabad shluchim (“emissaries”, sing. shliach) have moved all over the world with the stated mission of helping all Jews, regardless of denomination or affiliation. They assist Jews with all their religious needs, as well as with physical assistance and spiritual guidance and teaching. The ultimate goal is to encourage Jews to learn more about their Jewish heritage and to practice Judaism.
The movement, motivated by Rabbi Schneerson, trained and ordained thousands of rabbis, educators, ritual slaughterers, and ritual circumcisers, who are then accompanied by their spouses to many locations around the world. Typically a young Lubavitch rabbi and his wife, in their early twenties, with one or two children, will move to a new location, and as they settle in will raise a large family who as a family unit, will aim to fulfill their mandate of bringing Jewish people closer to Orthodox Judaism and encouraging gentiles to adhere to the Seven Laws of Noah. They will carefully seek out and search for and recruit Jews they have identified and contact them and start the process of encouraging them to observe Judaism, encourage Jews to strengthen their commitment to Judaism. All over the world Lubavitchers (including those not formally in the position of emissaries) assist and support the religious needs of tens of thousands of Jews.
Chabad Houses
Chabad today has centers around the world. Centers are called a Chabad Houses. They are Jewish community centers providing educational and outreach activities for the Jewish community. Level of observance is irrelevant; no minimal level of observance is a requirement for using facilities. The centers are informal in setup. They primarily serve both educational and observance purposes. Effort is made to provide an atmosphere in which the nonobservant will not feel intimidated by any perceived contrast between their lack of knowledge of Jewish practice and the advanced knowledge of some of the people they meet there.
Mitzvah campaigns
Chabad aims to attract non-Orthodox Jews to become Orthodox, and believes this is part of the process of bringing the Messiah. This practice is called “mivtzoim” – meaning “campaigns” or “endeavors.” At one time, Schneerson issued a call to every Jew: “Even if you are not fully committed to a Torah life, do something. Begin with a mitzvah – any mitzvah – its value will not be diminished by the fact that there are others which you are not prepared to do”. Schneerson also suggested ten specific mitzvot that he believed were ideally suited for the emissaries to introduce to non-observant Jews. These were: lighting candles before Shabbat and the Jewish holidays by Jewish women; putting on tefillin; affixing a mezuzah; regular Torah study; giving charity; purchasing Jewish books; keeping kosher; kindness to others; Jewish education, and keeping the family purity laws.
Camps
Chabad has set up an extensive network of camps around the world, most using the name Gan Israel, a name chosen by Rabbi Schneerson for the first overnight camp. There are 1,200 sites serving 210,000 children—most of whom do not come from Orthodox homes. Of these, 500 camps are in the United States.
Campus
In recent years Chabad has greatly expanded its reach on university and college campuses. Chabad Student Centers are active on over 100 campuses, and Chabad offers varied activities at an additional 150 universities worldwide. Professor Alan Dershowitz has said that “Chabad’s presence on college campuses today is absolutely crucial”, and “We cannot rest until Chabad is on every major college campus in the world”.
So what we have here is a group that is mission driven. They have created a vast network of people able to carry their message out to the world. And they are investing in young kids and college kids.
I must mention that the Chabad are not without controversy. Rav Eliezer Shach, who was the patriarch of some of the largest ultra-orthodox communities around the world acerbically called Chabad the “sect closest to Judaism” because of the movement within Chabad to proclaim their late Rabbi Schnerson the messiah.
And while I have a serious problem with both of those issues, there is no arguing with their success in building communities of active supporters all over the world. There is no arguing with their success in getting secular Jews to take on some aspects of Jewish observance (a high priority among those who believe intermarriage and assimilation are the biggest threats to Jewish continuity). There is no arguing with their success in getting high-net-worth individuals to part with their money. And there is no arguing with their success in getting people who don’t even believe in their world view to support them every year with donations large and small.
And don’t think that they have this massive centralized fundraising machine that makes it all happen. More from Wikipedia:
Fundraising
Funds for activities of a Chabad center rely entirely on the local community. Chabad centers do not receive funding from Lubavitch headquarters. For the day to day operations, local emissaries do all the fundraising by themselves. The monies fundraised in the local community is invested in that local community. The emissary takes a minimum salary and seldom goes on vacation. Sue Fishcoff writes, “Emissaries in the field may sink millions of dollars into their center, synagogues and Mikvahs, but their own homes are modest, again patterned after their Rebbe’s lack of personal ostentation.”
So how have they done it? How have they been able to get people who will never adopt their lifestyle or world view to support them financially? How are they able to send ultra-Orthodox rabbis to places like Boise, Idaho and expect – know – that they will make it somehow? How are they able to bring non-religious Jews into their synagogues and to their events when their world view and lifestyle is so foreign? And finally, what can their success teach us about fundraising generally and online social networks specifically?
A Theory of Acceptance – Or At Least Tolerance
If I went into a typical Orthodox synagogue in a t-shirt and jeans during the Sabbath service, I would likely have someone ask me to leave. They would tell me that, while they mean no offense, that my clothes are not appropriate for the day or the place and that I am welcome to return in more appropriate attire. If I walk in to a Chabad synagogue on the Sabbath in a t-shirt and jeans I am likely to be given an Aliah – a special honor when you are called to participate in the Torah service. From the Chabad perspective, the one who doesn’t know enough to wear the right clothes is just the person who needs to be brought in and cultivated, not turned away.
Another example. Most Orthodox synagogues close off their parking lots on the Sabbath. Why? You are not allowed to drive on the Sabbath according to Orthodox rules, so having the parking lot open is an tacit invitation to drive, an invitation to break the Sabbath. Makes sense, no? While the Lubavitch take their Sabbath observance very seriously, their parking lots are open and they won’t tell you not to drive. If you drive, drive. Just come.
When Conservative or Orthodox synagogues have group Friday night meals (the beginning of the Sabbath), the evening will include rubber chicken that you most likely had to pay $35 (in advance) to get in the first place. In a Chabad House, you will often get a more elaborate and home-cooked meal (usually prepared by the Rabbi’s wife) and a side order of rousing singing and flowing alcohol. It’s a lot of fun. In fact, the feelings of camaraderie are infectious. No one will ever be made to feel that they are bad or wrong for not taking the Lubavitch path. And no one will ever be asked to pay!
In these three examples we get the core of Lubavitch success that I will try to distill into a few principles:
· Show acceptance and understanding for where people come from
· Never make people feel bad about what they don’t know
· Make them feel welcome in your space
· Teach them by first by example and only explicitly when they ask
· Give them small, non-threatening steps to advance their connection
The most secular person in the world can have a terrific time at a Lubavitch event or even attend their services on a regular basis. They can enjoy speaking to a rabbi whose life is light-years removed from the secular world. And they routinely go out and tell anyone who will listen about the amazing soul that accepts the visitor and gives of themselves without asking for anything in return. That’s magic. Imagine people talking about your organization like that!
Taking the Lessons to Our Fundraising
The lesson I take away from their success for organizational fundraising is that guilt is a losing long-term strategy. Yes, it can work in the short-term. But instead of making me feel bad about what I haven’t done or what I need to do, make me feel good about what you are doing. Inspire me with your dedication. Allow me to participate in a small way, but don’t treat me like a small person for it. Cultivate those who take the first step as if they can become the biggest donor you have and make them feel important for whatever it is they have chosen to do.
The number of organizations that use guilt is staggering. It’s an easy strategy to implement and we see it a lot in direct mail. I recently received a mailing with a nickel in it. “Don’t let this nickel go to waste” they begged me. The same is true with mailing labels. Here are these things with your name on it and you will surely feel guilty is you use them and don’t pay us. This is not how you create deep connections and long-term supporters. (Here is an article in Fundraising Success Magazine that looked at and ranked emotional motivators for fundraising. Guilt was near the end of the list.)
Another lesson that organizations can take from the Lubavitch is in having people on board who are passionate about what they do. Now I don’t expect that most organizations can get to the level of passion of the Lubavitch. These folks believe that their lives, all of our lives, and the future of the universe is at stake. That’s strong motivation and most people who work at your nonprofit won’t come with that level of dedication. But if you are choosing between two employees and one is deeply passionate about your mission and the other one, though more qualified, is seeing it as just another job, pick for passion. (You can see this dedication at work in many organizations. I am seeing it more and more with environmental group staff who are genuinely scared for our collective future and energized by the change that is possible. You can see this dedication in the staff of the New Israel Fund — those in Israel in particular — where I was once a fundraiser. The Israel staff wants desperately to live in a democratic Israel and so they live the change they want to see every day.)
Lessons for Social Networks
The reason I wrote this post was because of a eureka moment I had in connecting the Lubavitch success with social networking. I had this moment last week when I was in Manhattan and I passed the Chabad Mitzvah Tank in Midtown. I had my handy-dandy video camera with me, so you can see:
(I have to pause thank Beka Economopoulos here for planting the seeds of this idea. Beka works for Greenpeace. I saw her speak at the Yearly Kos conference and then suggested that we at See3 invite her to co-present with us at the Craigslist Foundation Nonprofit Boot Camp in New York a couple weeks ago. Beka runs the Greenpeace online organizing program and has seen some amazing success with it and we are grateful for her participation with us in what turned out to be a terrific and well-attended session.)
The average organization, if they have a social network strategy at all, think of social networks as a way to meet people, with the goal of then convincing those people to give the organization their email address, go to their donation link or otherwise become members/donors/activists of the organization in the same way everyone else is. Meaning, they will get the same emails, see the same website, and take the same path to further activity as other prospects. They are using the social networks to meet people, but only see their outreach as successful if they can get those people to do what everyone else is doing.
Part of the problem here is that organizational management hasn’t yet internalized social networking metrics. For Greenpeace, those 68,000 friends on MySpace are just like 68,000 email addresses. For most organizations that would not be true. You are looking at email opens and average gifts from your online donations and these metrics are not really reflective of the potential you have in social networking. (Allan Benamer, a big believer in these tools, writes about this problem on his blog. You should also be reading Beth Kanter and Ruby Sinreich on these subjects.)
Now think of the Lubavitch philosophy. You are a MySpace person. You are comfortable on MySpace. I build a MySpace page to show you I can speak your language. This is where you live. Acceptance means I have to stop trying to get you to leave. Acceptance means creating things you can do right there on MySpace. Acceptance means treating my ability to message you on MySpace the same as if you are on my email list – without forcing you to change.
When you start to care enough you might come on over to our site. When you are impressed with how we “walk the walk” you might get out of your comfort zone by doing something offline. I am not going to force you to change. I am not going to limit your access or the information you can get because you live this “alternative lifestyle”. I am going to respect you for who you are! (Or at least I am going to pretend to.)
All of this is connected to the permission-based marketing society we are in today. Top down advertising is working less and less. Word-of-mouth is more important than ever.
Showing people what you do and why it matters is critical to capture people’s attention. Getting your supporters to recruit others is becoming a central strategy. Your content and your passion are what will carry the day and bring people to your cause. Social media marketing is not about tricks or techniques as much as it is about finding your authentic voice and inviting people to share in your passion at the level they are most comfortable in the venue of their choosing.
[The irony of all of this is that Chabad-Lubavitch does everything wrong on their own MySpace page, which I assume is run by one person in a decentralized way. They don’t follow their own script for offline engagement, which would also bring them online success. On MySpace they seem insular, political and shrill – everything they don’t seem in person.]
In Sum
Be passionate in your work and be grateful to those who come and take interest – at every level. Meet people where they are without judgment or condescension. Make your programs and your content accessible to those who come from a different place than you do. This philosophy is the core of what you need to be successful in social networking strategy.
Tell me how you do or don’t apply these principles to your own online and offline marketing by leaving a comment.
On Friday I went to a social networking panel at Yearly Kos and this is the last thing I have to write up from the conference. The title of the session was “Politics 2.0 – How social networks and new media are changing politics.” On the panel we had Amy Rubin, Stephanie Taylor, Beka Economopoulos and Ruby Sinreich. I didn’t stay for the entire thing, but what I caught was good.
First up was Ruby Sinreich. Her subject was, what makes for effective social networks. Here are some notes:
1. Strong Social Ties
a. personal relationships
b. trust
c. awareness – you have to know the network exists
2. Common Story – we have to be on the same page (eg. Sorry Everybody)
3. Communication grid so people can talk to each other
eg. drinkingliberally.com which is online and offline
one-to-many. You have to have the ability to communicate.
4. Shared Resources
a. data information – eg. wikipedia
b. skills and expertise
c. money
d. space
5. Clarity of Purpose
a. do you feel like a member?
b. knowing what the network is for
After her talk she showed different types of network diagrams. According to Ruby, the mesh network is the best because it is not dependent on a single point — if one person leaves it stays together.
Amy Rubin, the Deputy Director of New Media from the John Edwards campaign then talked about their social network strategy as it related to promoting a webcast after the last debate.
My take-aways from her talk:
1. You can reach out to lots of online communities, but you need a single site that brings all the information together.
2. Meet people where they are, don’t make MySpace people come to Facebook or try to create groups that cross network platforms. Yes, it is more work, but you have to meet people where they live online.
3. Focus on influencers. Not everyone is equal, let the people who influence their friends move your message.
4. The list will grow naturally as you give people what they want where they want it. Don’t make them leave their comfort zone to do something you want them to do. List growth comes when people are interested.
5. Care2, working with them was great to seed the actions.
6. Created private leadership groups within each social network – give the people working the most something special.
The highlight of the session was Beka Economopoulos from Greenpeace. Yes, her name alone would make it a highlight.
She is an online organizer for Greenpeace. Her history is with off-line organizing and so her job is to see how we can leverage social networks and integrate web 2.0 platforms to leverage off-line results. In other words… can you use the web to get people to show up and do things in the real world.
She organizes days of action so people can participate to do bake sales or congressional visits. Greenpeace has 65,000 friends in MySpace. Getting friends is not a communications strategy — MySpace isn’t a web page it’s a network. She had a nice analogy for this. “A friend on a social network is like putting on a bumper sticker.” It’s a sign of affiliation but that’s it.
At Greenpeace, they have a team of interns who work to respond to people it pays off. Their email list is growing and they consider those friends to be an extension of their email list because they send their newsletters and alerts to them as well. So the 65,000 new eyeballs and ears are great, but they are paying close attention to how to convert those people to activists.
She then showed us an amazing case study of action against Kimberly Clark, the big paper company. Kimberly Clark makes Kleenex and they heard that Kleenex was going to be shooting a commercial in Times Square. The commercial was to have real people sit on a couch and tell the camera about their “Kleenex moment.” This makes for great TV because it is an authentic voice. Beka called this the “fetishization of the reality TV genre.” And it set them up for a fall.
Greenpeace inserted themselves into the the story. They are focused on what she called “narrative driven campaigning and culturally focused organizing.” Which is to say, paying attention to what the symbols in the culture are that are resonating and how you can insert yourself into the story and point those symbols in new a direction and with new meaning. So Beka and her merry band brought their own crew and hidden mics and inserted themselves into this commercial shoot. The goal was to educate people about the fact that Kleenex is made from virgin forests and uses no recycled content.
What’s terrific here is not only how well this worked, but how they used the product of it to create a story and training video. The idea with this video is to empower more people to take their own actions and to get people thinking that they too can become an activists. Have a look:
One thing you will notice is that it’s long for web video. She said that friends thought it was too long but it holds together to tell a story — more training video than PSA. All the people in the action are new people. The guy who did the sound bites had never done anything before, now they are all hooked. Beka then promoted this to blogs, focusing on online progressive news and environmental blogs, then promoted it to ad agency and brand people.
Her conclusion was that there is a flattening of politics with over-saturation of media and so organizations should focus their energy and resources when and where you have good content. Amen Sister!
She also said, to my great delight, that there is no such thing as virability. You have to work the communities to get critical mass. She said that on MySpace they are getting very high conversion rates and that people who were individually messaged on a bake sale had a 15% conversion rate to off-line participation and that their average is 10% conversation. That’s huge.
All of our clients are very interested in the number of visitors to their website or the number of views of their videos. Makes sense right. I want to know whether the investment I made in this marketing is paying off. But what we tell clients is that in addition to basic tracking you need to define what you mean by payoff. If you are trying to raise money, count the money. If you are trying to educate people, you have to define a successful educational interaction before you can count it.
When we talk “viral videos” we tell the clients the who is as important as the how many. I can guarantee your video to get tons of views if you let us do Jacksss-style stunts or not-so-subtly incorporate busty models into our concept — but is this the engaged audience you are looking for? Probably not. Will a list acquired this way perform well later when you ask them to do something else? Surely not.
The issue of website traffic is big in the commercial world because it relates directly to ad revenue. Counting site traffic — hits, visitors, “uniques” — have been mired in controversy since the early days of the web. The problem is that my server keeps logs. Those logs only show a kind of raw data about page loads, image loads and the like. To translate that into a number of visitors I have to make some assumptions. For example, someone surfing my site from the same IP address (a unique number that corresponds to the access point of the Internet) who accesses specific pages (based on the logs) over a contiguous period of time represents a visit. Problem is, every program that parses my server logs does this a little differently. So the best use of the numbers is to show trends and growth.
There is an even bigger problem for companies such as comScore, Nielson/NetRatings and Alexa that are trying to tell us how many people went to a site when they don’t even have access to the server logs. So they are using a variety of methods from surveys to panels. comScore, for example, says they have “2 million participants under continuous measurement.” And then they extrapolate.
The big news in this area is that Nielson/NetRatings, recognizing that Web 2.0 is changing behavior, thought they needed a different way to measure. Here’s the issue: On many new website pages, you can see lots of content without reloading the page. For example, my Google home page has RSS feeds from many different news and blog sources. I can click on those feeds and expand them, without reloading the page. I could read all day on the same page.
The big news in social networking and tech is the new open platform of Facebook. Facebook is a hot social networking site and the open platform means that I can build an application and have members of Facebook spread this to all of their online friends. Project Agape, a company that built the first causes application for Facebook, has surpassed 1 million users to their application and raised over $100,000 — in about 1 month. Their application is called Causes, and when you sign up you can pick from many causes, such as Save Darfur or One.org. An icon of the cause shows up on your profile page and your friends get notified about it and anyone on your page can then click to donate or learn more.
There are problems with this Facebook thing, the biggest of which is that the application you build has to run on your own servers, which means only those with the resources to serve data to millions need apply. (If you are interested in these issues read Marc Andreessen.) But I digress.
This is only the beginning and I will write more about where this is going and all of the other players working on bringing nonprofit causes to Facebook.
Most commentators say Facebook’s move to open up is a game changer. MySpace, the biggest of the social networks, has allowed widgets for a long time. Widgets are embedded mini-applications, such as a video player or slide show of my photos from Flickr. But a widget doesn’t harness the native functions of the network in the way Facebook’s platform does. And MySpace has limited what you can put in a widget, not allowing you to have advertising for example. Facebook has not such restriction — meaning they are allowing the companies that will develop application to monetize those application — which will obviously attract more developers.
So today I heard that MySpace is working on opening up as well. The business idea here is that a platform is more valuable than an application. People will use an application. But if many people build many interesting applications on your platform, they make the platform indispensable. It’s kind of like Windows (used to be?) — the platform (Windows) supported and made necessary by all of the applications (Word and Excel and games, etc.) built on top of it.
The open platform idea is not limited to the social networking folks. A pioneer of this has been Salesforce.com. Salesforce is an online application to manage your contacts and sales information. They realized a while ago that they had a very strong database application and invested a lot in infrastructure. So they allow others to use this base and build on top. So, for example, companies have built applications for the tracking of donations on top of Salesforce.com. There is even an application to track blood donations. The buyer of any third-party application must also subscribe to Salesforce.com. For the company producing the application, they don’t have to worry about anything other than the presentation layer, they can hook into Salesforce for the rest.
Amazon has gotten into the act as well. Of course they have big servers and know how to manage data. So they said, in addition to selling books and music and everything else, why not let people use our infrastructure. For example, want to put your products in our warehouse and utilize our mailing and software to pick and ship? Why not? Among other things, they launched a service called S3, which means Simple Storage Service. They are saying… you build a web-based application and you need to store something — data, photos, video, whatever. And you can keep adding servers and paying lots of money, but we already have this, so why not use our servers and pay-as-you-go a small fee per gig.
There is word that Blackbaud (Nasdaq: BLKB), the largest company in the fundraising software space, is moving toward opening up their systems. And I saw something about Kintera (Nasdaq: KNTA), a company that is bleeding cash, thinking of opening up as a way to attract developers who will make the product more useful. I just read that LinkedIn, the business networking site is working to open up as well. I think we should expect this trend to continue.
It seems opening up and that open API is indeed the new black.
There is a lot of talk in the nonprofit world about a social networking strategy. More recently the talk is about a Facebook strategy. I stumbled upon an essay about the emerging class divisions between users of Facebook and MySpace. On the surface it seems Facebook would certainly be a better place for nonprofits looking to find future donor prospects.
Here’s a relevant quote:
The goodie two shoes, jocks, athletes, or other “good” kids are now going to Facebook. These kids tend to come from families who emphasize education and going to college. They are part of what we’d call hegemonic society. They are primarily white, but not exclusively. They are in honors classes, looking forward to the prom, and live in a world dictated by after school activities.
MySpace is still home for Latino/Hispanic teens, immigrant teens, “burnouts,” “alternative kids,” “art fags,” punks, emos, goths, gangstas, queer kids, and other kids who didn’t play into the dominant high school popularity paradigm. These are kids whose parents didn’t go to college, who are expected to get a job when they finish high school. These are the teens who plan to go into the military immediately after schools. Teens who are really into music or in a band are also on MySpace. MySpace has most of the kids who are socially ostracized at school because they are geeks, freaks, or queers.
The Facebook news is big. First a little background. Facebook is the second big social networking site behind MySpace. Facebook used to be only open to college students but, realizing they couldn’t play with the big boys, opened to the public about a year ago. They are growing like crazy. Try 100,000 new subscriber A DAY! And they aren’t all kids. Facebook is still independent — they haven’t been bought by any big company yet. And their pages aren’t nearly as ugly as MySpace pages.
These sites are places where I can make my page, connect with friends, ect. You know all about that. But then you also have widgets. Widgets are big. Widgets are little applications that live on some other page on the web, where the info in the widget comes from some server somewhere else. Technically, an ad server is a widget – displaying a banner coming from DoubleClick, for example. Embedding a YouTube video is a widget, as are fundraising widgets, Flickr photostream, Photobucket, Slide and many others. Widgets make the web mashable – meaning you create your own web with pieces of this and pieces of that. My Google home page has a weather widget, clock widget and of course RSS feed widget. All the data in these widgets come from different places and are assembled for my convenience.
So widget makers have put things like video and photos on MySpace for a while. But what if I want to put an ad in my video? MySpace don’t play that! The VOICE from on high says… “You are a guest here at MySpace with your fancy shmancy widget and please do not even think for a minute that you can monetize my eyeballs! I am Murdoch the Great and I own these users and you cannot have them! We are the only one allowed to run ads. So show your photos or embed your do-dad, but watch out, or we will cut you off at your knees.”
Now comes Facebook. They say… We want to be THE PLATFORM. So we aren’t going to worry so much about whether you make money off our people, in fact, the opposite. If you can make money you will spend a lot of time and effort developing really cool applications that can integrate into Facebook, which will keep people on our pages longer, which will attract more users and so on. So Facebook said go and develop. And they opened up their own development tools to the developers. Go and develop not a simple embeddable widget, but go and development in a native environment that makes use of all the tools we have, the connections between people, for example.
So, Amazon says, OK, we will create an application that allows people to publish book reviews right on their own Facebook profiles, fully integrated into Facebook, but also back into Amazon. Forbes, Twitter, Washington Post… are among the 70 companies that developed applications in time for the announcement. And my assumption is that people haven’t even begun to think about how they can use this. I can imagine almost any application that’s online going native with Facebook.
For us nonprofit types, we have heard that Change.org is going to be developing for the platform as did Project Agape, the temporary name for “a new startup that is applying viral principles to altruism and social causes.”
This feels big. It feels like a moment when we might be seeing the development of another Google, another company that is able to grow very big very fast and stay independent. Just to make you feel a little sick, the CEO of Facebook is Mark Zuckerberg and he is 23 years old.
Continuing to jump on the political bandwagon, MySpace recently announced a series of in-person events that it will host on college campuses with presidential aspirants. This report from CNET also says MySpace is working with Mark Burnett (Survivor) on something called Independent “a new program that uses television and the web to discover budding political minds.”
