Oliver Thylmann’s Thoughts

It’s not all art, there is a lot of science to it, or so it seems. Check out this very well commented post on Techcrunch called The Secret Strategies Behind Many Viral Videos. So you think all of the top videos are there by accident? If you take a look at the most viewed videos all time there are a lot of brand videos on there for my taste. This made me wonder a few days ago how this happens and the article seems to be a good pointer.

In general, it’s simple. You spam, a quasi legal way. You have several youtube accounts and comment around, you post on forums, pay bloggers to post a video, use 5000-friends-accounts on facebook to distribute the video, … stuff like that. If the video then has a few qualities that the post talks about, you might have yourself a viral video. Congratulations

I now have this wonderful bit in my newsstream at Facebook.

All in all, too flashy, too annoying but the worse thing is the targeting. I AM IN GERMANY!!! And Facebook knows that. Facebook even knows the city. They also know I have an MBA with a focus on among others Finance.

I have nothing against ads, hell I am in the ads business, making local merchants more successful through Ormigo, but emmm… this is so un-targeted it is annoying and it is 100% not what Facebook is talking about and where the value is supposed to be. It’s a standard UK Lead Gen business that is advertising for conversions. Really wonderful how they are doing. Clicks will likely be high, but Facebook has an advertiser there that tracks it’s campaign very well so we will see how it goes.

The 2008 TED Prize winners have just been announced. They are Neil Turok, Dave Eggers and Karen Armstrong. Congratulations to all of them. Go watch the video to get a clear idea of what they are about.

Even though people loved the video from my last post, back to writing for this one as my 3 month of sun is sleeping next to me.

I started my morning read with a short blog post on the FT Blogs talking about the presentation being very Jobs like and that there will be no opt-out of the new social ads on Facebook. So what is really happening? TechCrunch actually has a good short summary about “Changing the Face of Brand Advertising Online“:

1. Social Ads: Ads targeted at you based on your profile data.
2. Beacon: Widgets that Advertisers can put on their own site, probably linked to special Facebook Pages done by the advertiser … if you as a user do anything with the widget or on the advertiser Facebook page, you quasi make them a friend, endorse them, … . That ends up on your own news feed and your friends news feed
3. Insight: What kind of people are getting your ads and who are clicking.

Social Ads was clear, so nothing new there. Insight isn’t so far fetched either. I mean just imagine the database they are building up there. How many people that like James Bond clicked on Ads for headache pills. Whatever you want to know, you can find out.

The interesting part is beacon, because that is what they are coining as being word-of-mouth advertising. The interesting thing is that through the widgets on advertiser sites, Facebook will also get more users. Venture Beat puts it very well:

Getting users comfortable with sharing e-commerce transactions sets up a virtuous cycle: (1) E-commerce stores can easily track the financial return of promoting Facebook, based on how many users share their purchase information, and how many sales are generated off clicks from friends reacting to it; and (2) the more financial rewarding Facebook is for e-commerce sites, the more those sites will attempt to promote it, say in promotions in confirmation emais. This, in turn, would lead to more users seeing the promotions, taking actions, and spurring still more activity from their friends (and faster Facebook will grow.) That would be Facebook’s hope.

I am not sure yet what Beacon costs though, or what the Facebook page costs. Paul Kedrosky puts it well though:

Notes from the near Facebook future:

Coca-Cola (Atlanta, Georgia) has requested to add you as a friend. Reply ‘a’ to add, or ‘info’ to get profile.

Oooh, I can’t wait.

The problem in my mind is that this is people driven, and people interact best with people and if the company makes money with it, they want their fair share. But I do get the vicious circle bit.

As a final note, and to get all of this in perspective, check out the Facebook News Network.

Here are my first thoughts, quickly recorded via Seesmic.