Tweets From @tomhumbarger for Week Ending July 23 2010

This blog post is an experiment on creating a blog post from the best of my weekly Twitter Tweets posted @tomhumbarger.

Why The Next Big Pop-Culture Wave After Cupcakes Might Be Libraries : NPR http://ow.ly/

Insights from the AWS Cloud Computing for the Enterprise Event in Los Angeles « my post summarizing @werner‘s talk… http://ow.ly/2feYw

RT @morphlabs: we answer Amazon’s call for SWAG from AWS evangelist @jeffbarr and help decorate their new offices… http://ow.ly/2fek

Impact of OpenStack Project Goes Beyond the Cloud Industry Leaders – ReadWriteCloud http://ow.ly/2fc5b#cloudcomputing

How to increase the value of content without ever changing the content http://ow.ly/2faBM another great post from @dspark

Five reasons why Foursquare’s mainstream success is inevitable – Telegraph http://ow.ly/2eA

What Sucks About @Foursquare Today – an interesting rant and wishlist on geo-social from @jess3 http://ow.ly/2eCX1- posted on Slidesh

@jeffcutler will cover the BP Oil Spill for 2 weeks for the environmental professional @edrcommonground community… http://ow.ly/2eBa7

10 Fascinating Facebook Facts: http://bit.ly/an5bfN

9 Ways To Convince The CEO To Use Social Media and Enter The 21st Century | from @Jeffbullas‘s Blog http://ow.ly/2eAvK - #1=scare ‘em!

Stop Trying to Measure Social Media: 10 Things You Should Be Measuring Instead – Kommein http://ow.ly/2euAD

RT @morphlabs: “We create market value through an open core strategy.” CEO Winston Damarillo interview w/ @socaltech http://ow.ly/2e9ce

The Field Guide to Social Media Weasels – which of the 12 types of social media experts are you? from @ikepigott … http://ow.ly/2egzf

Dr Werner Vogel, CTO at Amazon, speaking at AWS Cloud for the Enterprise …http://tweetphoto.com/33891609

A Look Back at the Last 5 Years in Social Media: http://bit.ly/cTRizn … An interesting retrospective…

RT @davidnour Top 10 Reasons Most Networking Doesn’t Work and Why!: Networking is one of those necessary evils for most http://bit.ly/9S7avw

Cloud Platform Startup @Morphlabs Raises $5.5 Million from TechCrunch…http://ow.ly/2dIhu

2010 Nonprofit Social Media Benchmarks Study – Introduction http://ow.ly/2dBmF – some interesting stats on using social media channels…

The Requirements Payoff — by Karl Wiegers http://ow.ly/2dDTt …1-engage endusers, 2-prototype UIs, 3-review problems, 4-align with biz

Twitter is #2 Search Engine | Google is #1 by wide margin, Yahoo is 3rd and Bing is 4th… Social Media Today http://ow.ly/2dAIO

Can Facebook Best Google With Social Search? – MarketingVOX http://ow.ly/2dAtY

Facebook’s 500 Million Members [INFOGRAPHIC]:http://bit.ly/9IOmo2

10 Fascinating Facebook Facts: http://bit.ly/an5bfN

Is Flipboard Legal? | Epicenter | Wired.com http://ow.ly/2fKFq (Is Flipboard scraping content it doesn’t have the rights to?)

10 Great Behind-the-Scenes Glimpses of Google [VIDEOS]: http://mashable.com/2010/07/23/google-office-tour/ #10 is my fav!

40 Web Design and Development Resources for Beginners: http://mashable.com/2010/07/23/web-design-resources-beginners/

Insights from the AWS Cloud Computing for the Enterprise Event in Los Angeles

The Amazon Web Services team held a Cloud Computing Enterprise Event in Los Angeles this week and the featured speaker was Dr. Werner Vogels, Amazon’s Chief Technology Officer.

Dr. Werner Vogels, Amazon CTO, Presents at the AWS Los Angeles Event

Werner started out his talk by saying that Amazon’s goal is:

“to make cloud computing so simple that you don’t need a Dummies Book.”

After talking about the astronomic growth of the AWS service that now receives more than 120,000 requests per second and has more than 124 billion objects, Werner listed the top 5 myths about cloud computing:

1. Cloud is not reliable
2. Cloud is all or nothing
3. Cloud is all that matters
4. Cloud locks you in
5. Cloud is not secure

Using specific customer stories from companies such as NASDAQ, Lawson, Razorfish, Netflix, Recovery.gov and the US Department of the Treasury, Werner debunked each of the myths with real-life examples.

Werner also shared the 9 Business Design Principles that Amazon used to develop their AWS service.  Interestingly, many if not all of these principles could be applied by most companies when trying to design and deliver top quality products and services:

1. Design for flexibility
2. Design for on-demand
3. Design for automation
4. Decompose into it’s simplest form
5. Break transparency
6. Design with security
7. Don’t do it alone
8. Continuously innovate
9. Let your customers benefit

Werner closed his presentation by stating that:

cloud computing is still on Day 1 of it’s evolution!

Here is a similar presentation that Werner gave in April 2010 for the London Enterprise Cloud Computing event and most of the slides were the same for the Los Angeles event:

You can learn more about what makes Werner tick by checking out his All Things Distributed blog or by following him on Twitter at @werner.

Twitter Messages for Week Ending July 16 2010

This blog post is an experiment on creating a blog post from my weekly Twitter Tweets posted @tomhumbarger.

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What You’re Missing By Measuring Social Media ROI Online | BrandSavanthttp://ow.ly/2cyJZ – you need to coordinate with offline too…

The smartest people in tech – ranking of top 50 tech savvy people …from FORTUNE Magazine - http://ow.ly/2ct0l

the 4 Most Popular Videos on Cloud Computing « Data Center Knowledge – from the simple explanation to Larry Ellison… http://ow.ly/2c7OU

Should E-Mail Marketing Stay in Its Silo? – thoughts on how social media & email marketing can play together MarketingVOX http://ow.ly/2c6RW

here’s the original ExactTarget and CoTweet report on digital marketing…http://ow.ly/2c6WT

The Creativity Crisis – Newsweek http://ow.ly/2bYKH – interesting article on the decline of creativity in America including why & how to fix

Please Don’t Start a Social Media Marketing Agency – an alternative view from @pc4mediaat @hubspot - http://ow.ly/2bZu3

How to test your decision-making instincts – from McKinsey Quarterly – Strategic Thinkinghttp://ow.ly/2bYII

Jive and Lithium Top Gartner’s First-Ever Magic Quadrant for Social CRM – destinationCRM.com http://ow.ly/2bBQp

from @maggielmcg on mizz information blog: What Your Facebook Page is Worth…To Vitrue http://ow.ly/2b1QD

RT @TomHumbarger: What’s the Value of Your Facebook Fans? | my latest blog post on options for valuing Facebook Fans… http://ow.ly/2akM9

Twitter worth the extra effort :: BtoB Magazine http://ow.ly/2b1AX – i.e. you have to work at social media to get the real value…

Déjà vu for IT: The cloud wave mirrors the PC wave | @davidlinthicum on Cloud Computing – InfoWorld http://ow.ly/2b1lL

Top 10 Ways Enterprise Marketers can Leverage foursquare – fantastic free eBook from Awareness http://ow.ly/2aZ3X – registration required…

Smart and Social — HootSuite Adds Social Relationship and Support Tools – I love the new Klout filter! http://ow.ly/2aZbu

Architecting for the Cloud – the latest slide deck from @simon – Simone Brunozzi, AWS Evangelist… http://ow.ly/2aZ0r #cloudcomputing

@rubysdiner is getting a lot of free advertising during the All Star Game Home Run Derby…way to go! http://tweetphoto.com/32375470

Rethinking the Wining and Dining of Yelpers – MarketingVOX http://ow.ly/2asxM – it’s a bad idea to ‘pay’ for reviews…

Social Media Shell Game: What Do Those Followers, Fan Numbers Really Mean? – MarketingVOX http://ow.ly/2asv4

What’s the Value of Your Facebook Fans?

From my recent social media projects in the restaurant industry, I have become fascinated with brand Fan Pages on Facebook.

In fact, the genesis of this blog came about when I read a blog post from Ignite Social Media where they summarized the top 50 brands on Facebook.  There are 8 pure restaurant brands in the top 50 and I have summarized them below.  To make the comparisons somewhat equal, I added a column for the number of locations and calculated the number of fans per location.

Top Restaurant Brands on Facebook (Per Ignited Social Media)

While 8.4 million fans for Starbucks seems like an impressive number, it is only 4th in terms of Fans Per Location among the top 50 brands.  Interestingly, Krispy Kreme is doing the best job with 1.6 million fans spread across 615 locations yielding more than 2,600 fans per location.  As a comparison to smaller brands I was following, The Cheesecake Factory chain based in Los Angeles has 150 locations and 370,000 fans which yields 2,500 fans per location.

Which got me to thinking about the value of a Facebook Fan.

From my experience in a 43-location restaurant chain based in Southern California, I know that our Facebook Fan Page was important and the Facbook pageviews on a weekly basis were about 1/3rd of the pageviews from the main website.  In my mind, the Fan pageviews on Facebook are even more important than the website because they are current and interactive, and all Comments or Likes are hitting the newsfeed for each fan with the potential of reaching many more people.  If I had to make a back of an envelope calculation, I would say that the value of a fan would be at least 1 to 2 times the average dinner check for a casual dining or typical restaurant as that is my estimate of incremental visits driven by Facebook activity.  From my experience in managing the Facebook fan page and reading fan comments, I know that we were getting people to think about and talk about our brand when they weren’t in the restaurant – and that we were reminding people to come back and visit us.

To be a little more scientific, I did a Google search of recent blog posts on the subject of “What is the value of a Facebook Fan?”

Augie Ray, a social media blogger from Forrester, made an argument last week that the value of a Facebook Fan was zero.  While he may have been overstating his case, his point was that a fan does not have any value until a company is engaging the fan and working to keep their interest.  In other words, just pumping up a fan base for the sake of sheer numbers is not a way to build value.

Research firm Syncapse released an interesting study last month that said that the value of a Facebook fan was approximately $71.  Their report was based on interviews with more than 4000 fans of 20 top brands and analyzed the spending patterns of fans vs. non-fans.  Gigaom has a blog post summarizing the Vitrue report and you can download the full Vitrue report here.

I also found an interesting tool from Vitrue called the Facebook Fan Page Evaluator.  This looks to be a nifty little tool and uses a concept called ‘”Earned Media Value” to calculate the current and potential value of a brand based on the number of fans, page posts and interaction.  The Earned Media Value is an assumption that the user can change and see the results on the fly.  There are also recommendations for best practices for post frequency, post type and the use of short URLs.  There is a further explanation of the Evaluator tool from the Vitrue blog and at this AdAge blog post by Judy Shapiro.

Krispy Kreme - Vitrue Social Page Evaluation

So, what do you think the value of a Facebook Fan is?  I have some additional ideas about Fan page engagement and measurement that I will share in a follow-on blog post later this week.

Twitter Messages for Week Ending July 10 2010

This blog post is an experiment on creating a blog post from my weekly Twitter Tweets.

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What’s the Value of Your Facebook Fans? | my latest blog post on options for valuing Facebook Fans… #IN http://ow.ly/2akM9

What Is The Value Of A Facebook Fan? | @augieray at Forrester says to assume $0 until you have a plan to create value http://ow.ly/29uhG

Six Social Media Sins – BusinessWeek http://ow.ly/29rSa – my fav – “thinking social media is not work”

Facebook “Like” Buttons Coming to E-mail Marketing http://ow.ly/29pk4 – I like this!

RT @morphlabs Cloudy web services are innovation playground for business | Michael Schrage, Harvard Bus Rev http://ow.ly/29keT #prototyping

Experts Agree: Gen Y Will Not Grow Out of Social Networking [STUDY] http://ow.ly/29iXF- good news for social networking providers…

Blogging advice for people who “have no time to blog” from @dspark – http://ow.ly/28NlE – ingrain social media into your daily life!

Buffett recounts the best advice he’s ever received – (hint: it has nothing to do with money) Yahoo! News http://ow.ly/28LZU

Unlocking the elusive potential of social networks – McKinsey Quarterly – Digital Marketinghttp://ow.ly/28pGa – the power of importance!

great profile on Doug Cavanaugh, the founder and CEO of Ruby’s Diner : from American Express OPEN Forum http://ow.ly/289vI

The Action, Reaction, Management, Process (ARM) for Social CRM | CloudAvehttp://ow.ly/27OyY

F as in Fat: How Obesity Threatens America’s Future 2010 – Trust for America’s Healthhttp://ow.ly/25UDv