FBOOK
In-depth analysis and expert insight into the world’s most popular online social network and its value to marketers.Google Brand Affinity Update
Score one more point for Google’s love of brands: they’re now citing recent searches in new search results. In other words, if you search for “airline tickets” and see a big-brand result, and then do a narrow search for “things to do in portland,” the sites that showed up in your…
Yesterday we covered “Cannibals“—companies whose business model is pure status quo, and whose growth model destroys the status quo. They’re fun to track, but they’re intrinsically speculative: their entire business model is based on the existence of something that they’re arbitraging away.
The opposite is a special case of network effects: companies that have…
Facebook Pages and SEO
According to PageLever, Facebook pages get about a third of their referring traffic from search. This could be a good reason to focus on SEO for those pages, but there are some caveats:
Many of these searches are likely to be navigational. Big brand advertisers often direct people to their brands’…
Statistical Errors and Lifetime Value
Custora, a churn analysis and lifetime value calculation company, notes the results of not segmenting customers by churn rate. This is usually a bigger hypothetical than real problem, since different user categories aren’t usually quite so differentiated. But the hypothetical does illustrate the risks of simplistic user retention analysis.
…
Skype Buys GroupMe
Skype has purchased group-texting service GroupMe for about $85mm, a nice exit for the year-and-a-half-old firm. It’s also an interesting combination: one of Skype’s big strengths is its peer-to-peer structure, which basically coopts users’ computers to keep things running smoothly. GroupMe uses Twilio, which is basically an API for anything a standard…
HP’s Immaterial Move
HP is spinning off their hardware business and shutting down their WebOS products. It’s hard to interpret this in a way that matters to anyone not directly involved: for the web, Apple is still the macro situation. Everything else, including HP, is comparatively commoditized.
TechCrunch says that Apple beat them, but that’s…
2012 will be the first Presidential campaign in which social media is a proven force. And, simply because the search market has expanded so much, search will be a bigger factor, too. That’s a trend that will produce a few surprising winners in 2012, including:
Facebook’s selling stockholders: Facebook is very likely to IPO in…
Who Facebook Thinks Your Friends Are
A programmer has created a simple bookmarklet that reveals which users Facebook expects you to be searching for. This is notable in two respects: first, it’s a look into your Facebook preferences—not just who you’re looking for, but who you’d decide to be looking for given an ambiguous query. It’s also…
Google’s Intrinsically Boring Patent Deal
Google is buying Motorola Mobility for $12.5bn. There are three parts of this deal: the assets Google will immediately liquidate (low-margin phones, cash), the assets they’ll reluctantly liquidate (the set-top box business), and the assets they only bought in order to avoid being sued (the patents).
It’s unfortunate that Google’s…
Buddy Media Raises $54mm for Facebook Marketing
Buddy Media, provider of high-end Facebook pages to large brands, has raised another huge round to fund further expansion. Facebook seems eager to have companies raise money in order to expand on their platform. This, despite Facebook being ranked the worst API in a survey of developers.
Opt-In Privacy on…
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