Take a look, this is great and a true story too...

Last weekend I followed a discussion in Techcrunch on a post titled "LinkedIn traffic up, but is it enough?". The about 30 or so comments from the Techcrunch personal buddy network outed the article as trying to hype up Facebook as a LinkedIn competitor - which is entirely untrue. This example showed me vividly how the bad old times of overvaluation seem to be coming back BIG time. There are a bunch of guys out there whose job it is to hype up certain sites beyond any rational values. Now I read that Facebook thinks they are worth easly 2 billion USD but do not want to sell since they believe the valuation could go even higher. The company has "comparatively only" $50 million of revenues but a heavily growing user group who seem in my opinion to be primarly youngsters sharing their websites and personal stuff. I checked it out briefly for myself and tried to see if the LinkedIn functionality would find me any old colleagues in the US. While in LinkedIn I found about 200 old colleagues, ZERO popped up in Facebook. And still the guy from Techcrunch thought it was set to be the next big LinkedIn competitor. Not sure what dope he took or who sponsored him to say such nonsense. It appears the hypers are all back again so be aware!

Social-networking sites like Facebook have been - not surprisingly - a success with college students in the US where they can show their names, photos of themselves, contact information and other personal details. They can also communicate with each other, meet friends, chat and share other information. According to research firm comScore Inc. those social-networking sites are among the fastest growing of the Internet. In April more than 111 million unique visitors were attracted.

To test such sites for political campaigns seemed an obvious next step. But that proved to be not so straight forward as the WSJ reports (see also below). It needed one of the founders of Facebook to change that. While all presidential candidates us some sort of online campaign noone was as successful so far as Mr. Obama who collected a quarter of the $25 million campaign money via the Internet from more than 50,000 donors. If you go to his Facebook (login required) entry, you see that more than 75,000 people are now listed as his supporters. This looks like someone was able to figure out how to use Facebook effectively for political campaigning as well.

Now I asked myself if social-networking sites could also be used in product marketing and if so, how this could look. Practically they are already used as technical support forums where users share their user experience and problem handling with other users. So this could be used as a starting platform to get other things going as well. For example could beta customers be recruited from these forums (also something that is already done) and market surveys for new product development could be run. One has to be careful though since these forums are customer support owned and if "misused" by marketing might loose their purpose and people are sensitive to that. But done with the necessary caution and respect and in low frequency, I don't see any problems. So we don't need to really invent social-networking sites anymore unless you have no access to such a forum of course because your company does not have one. Then I think a good start could be to look at blogging as a means to get started and attract people and provide very valuable industry specific information to them for which they have to sign on in some way of course. But you can use tools like Feedblitz for example and invite your customers to get new blog entries via e-mail. That let's you at least reach these blog members regularly with every new blog post and maybe can attract them into a forum type of site to share their views with you and others.

• What was long expected seems to have happened now. Both Facebook and YouTube might be up for sale. Facebook turned down an offer for 750 million USD in March and seems now worth the 2bln USD that they were asking for at the time. What a difference 6 months can make! Once more, Good Morning Silicon Valley sums it up nicely: "To inflate YouTube, pull cord, stand clear"
• Back in Europe, German's Deutsche Telekom have been found in the headlines quite a lot recently. Either it is about their US spectrum auction activties, pressure from its private equity shareholder Blackstone and others to replace its CEO, or now, as the CEO himself has announced (sounds desperate and not only to me) that he plans to completely restructure the company. In between one can read from other D-Telecom execs that they have everything under full control. To me this sounds more like a "Houston we have a problem" call.
• The news in the tech community yesterday was that early Skype backer Magnus Lund is at it again with its online brokerage startup Zeeco. What's so special about an online stock broker site? They want to offer online trading for FREE! So finance it with ads. What a courageous step. At least they already have the headlines. But I expect it will be much tougher to make this one succeed since they will have to fight many established, deep pocketed competitors. Techcrunch mentions other reasons too.
• At Siemens in Germany a decision for 30% higher board member salaries has received severe backlash but also some comments from people who think this is justified since Siemens is doing fine currently and also needs to match salaries with other companies. Timing is never a good one for increasing salaries of the top management of course, but the idea that this will finally bring in real top management, able to solve big problems instead of simply getting rid of them, is pretty doubtful.
• How to use Digg and Netscape to generate more traffic on your blog site has been shown by this fellow - and he tested it successfully with Guy Kawasaki's blog site.