“How can you avoid your past on Facebook? … It used to be that you could grow up, and get a career, and mold yourself into the type of person you wanted to be, and no one would ever be any wiser.”

Zappos was one of the original launch partners with Facebook Beacon. A few people protested this partnership, but having now lived through the Zappos-Beacon experience myself, I’m actually impressed with the way it was executed.

The experiences goes like this: As soon as you complete your purchase, you’re taken to a confirmation screen (pretty standard procedure). There, you’re given the option to share your purchase with your friends in one of several ways. I clicked through too quickly and didn’t get a screenshot of this step, but the options were essentially:

1. Share your exact purchase on Zappos.com with your friends
2. Share only the brand of your purchase on Zappos.com
3. Share only that you found “something cool” on Zappos.com
4. Do not share your purchase with your friends

For me, sharing the exact product or even the brand would have been a little much (see this quote for my thoughts on the matter). But I was more than happy to go on the record as a satisfied customer, so I went with Option #3. The fact that I had these three options is outstanding — it allows people to endorse Zappos and their purchase at whatever level they are comfortable with.

Having made my selection I was given another chance to confirm exactly what would be posted to my Facebook wall:

Great use of feedback to make sure I knew that something was happening (for more on why this is critical in any interface, check out Don Norman’s classic The Design of Everyday Things).

After that, I went to my Facebook profile to see the new post. But it wasn’t there. I was a little disappointed, but I would prefer no story to rampant unauthorized posts.

When I went to my Home page on Facebook, I understood why. Beacon was giving me one last chance to approve the Zappos story. This is also a crucial step: if I had decided to share my purchase on Zappos but had unknowingly been logged into Facebook as a different user (perhaps on a shared machine), that user would be able to deny the story before it was posted.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is the model for Facebook Beacon/Connect integration. Great work, Zappos.

But what struck me recently about the direction Facebook is currently headed is its striking similarity to FriendFeed, not Twitter. At this point I’d wager that most Facebook users have yet to sync all of their other social media outposts with their Facebook mini-feed, but nonetheless the opportunity to do so exists today. Between Facebook’s Import function and the rising number of sites (such as Yelp) that have been fully Facebook Connect-ed, the overlap rapidly becomes clear.  

Just look at the following two screenshots. The first is of Facebook, the other is of FriendFeed. You’ll notice that because I have different platforms synced with each, the feeds carry different content. But they could easily be identical.

My Facebook feed:

My FriendFeed:

As Adam Ostrow on Mashable pointed out on Monday, Facebook recently added “Like” functionality to stories in the news feed, a minor feature attributed to FriendFeed. Twitter remains the target most armchair social media analysts predict to be in Facebook’s sights, but I’ll be curious to see if Facebook ever makes an overt move on Friendfeed, given the clear redundancy in functionality.

A few obvious questions come to mind: Will anyone even pick up on this subtle suggestion? If they do, will Facebook users readily adopt this new pattern of behavior with regard to status usage? And will those who do try it piss off their friends so much that they are immediately de-friended at the altar of Whopper Sacrifice?

What do you think?

A few major media outlets around the world have picked up on recent stories of organized teams of party crashers raiding residential parties in England and trashing homes.  Nick ONeill posted a summary this morning on AllFacebook:

A group calling themselves the “Facebook Republican Army” have rampaged through a 16-year-old girl’s house in Sussex according to Sky News. There has been a continued string of parties, which started on Facebook, that have gotten out of control in the U.K. Less than two weeks ago we wrote about a party in London which “ended in chaos after up to 60 hooded youths gatecrashed the event”.

I’d love to know more about the FRA’s purpose (or manifesto, if you want to give them that much credit). Is it just a bunch of angsty British wannabe-anarchists trying to live the Clockwork Orange dream, or are they trying to make an actual point about Facebook and society through the avant-garde medium of property destruction? I’m counting on folks like Nick ONeill and Justin Smith to keep me posted as details unfold.

Metro Boston, my favorite low-cal daily newspaper, reported this morning on the evolution of “social terrorism.” With the rise of the Facebook Republican Army, are we entering a new era of what might  be considered “social anarchy?”

(Photo credit: Sky News)

Seth Godin wrote recently about the intersection of trust and privacy in the new media age. Godin’s a lot more paranoid than most of us, but he goes so far as to sign all his emails “This note is off the record (blogs, too) unless we agree otherwise.” He makes the complementary (and more significant) point, however, that you only have to betray someone once before they’ll be much more reluctant to trust you again.

Go to a party and take embarrassing pictures of your friends to post on Facebook. That’s fun, certainly, but it’s possible that you won’t be quite as trusted next time.

Take that email your boss sent to the six people in your group and post it anonymously to some web gossip site… wanna bet your boss is a lot more careful about telling you and your peers the truth next time?

The good news is that we all need to act as if we’re on camera… behavior ought to improve. The bad news is that it’s harder to trust people we might have expected to be more discreet or engaged.

If you think you can write something or post a photo or video online these days and have any semblance of privacy, you’re delusional.  It’s absurd to me that there are still a few Virgin Atlantic flight crew members and a Patriots cheerleader who haven’t figured this out yet, not to mention the University of Texas football player recently suspended for a blatantly racist and threatening Facebook status update.

Mike Proulx recently coined the term “citizen paparazzi” to refer to the fact that we all could be on someone else’s camera or Flip cam at any moment.  Bono learned this the hard way recently, when photos of him with a couple of 19 year old girls were posted on one of the girls’ Facebook profiles, and then reposted elsewhere.

Bono didn’t post these pictures on Facebook himself — someone else took them.  They were controversial because he’s married, and the girls were 19, but that’s not the issue at hand.  At what point do we no longer have any freedom to act as we see fit within the privacy of our own homes (or mega-yachts)?

What do real celebrities do in the face of the real paparazzi?  (And to be clear, I’m not talking about the Lindsays and Parises who will do anything for attention.)  They hide — behind huge sunglasses, gated mansions, and their agents.  No one really knows who these people are — every public appearance is carefully planned and utterly sanitized.  I have to wonder if there will be a backlash now that the potential for the same kind of uninvited publicity is ever-present in the lives of us regular folk.

Will social media eventually force us all to become more anti-social?

Then again, you wouldn’t want Facebook to get too real…

Update: I just discovered that this story made news at the Concord Monitor, completely unbeknownst to us at Brand Networks.

About a week ago, a couple of industrious colleagues of mine at Brand Networks decided to perform an experiment in the organic viral growth of a Facebook Page.  Of all the things in the world to become a fan of, what did they pick? The state of New Hampshire. (They’re UNH grads, and as a former Vermonter I can understand the love for northern New England states).

They seeded the page with some content: a few photos, NH news via RSS, a link to NH tourism, etc.  All very general stuff — no slick interactive Flash, not even a scenic primary picture. Then they sat back and did nothing.

What happened? The Page blew up. Once it gathered some momentum, it grew at a rate of over 50 fans per hour, to over 5,000 in less than a week. You could sit there and refresh the page and watch the fan count climb. And it’s still growing.

Not only that, but the fans are engaged. A community is being born right before our eyes. 249 fan photos have been uploaded as I write this. 161 posts have been made across six discussion threads. Seven people have posted items such as events and links. 64 people have written on the wall.

There was no media support behind this page, just pure, raw viral growth. Sears is paying users $5 just to become a fan of their page, never mind actually engage with the content. Why does Sears have to spend $50,000 to get 10,000 fans, when New Hampshire is already 60% of the way there after one week?  Here are some reasons I would argue as to why “New Hampshire” went viral:

The obvious: the built-in viral tools within Facebook provide social proof. This one’s true for all applications, pages, and groups in Facebook.  If you’re from New Hampshire, and you see on your News Feed that five of your friends have become fans of New Hampshire, you’re more likely to consider doing so as well.

The not-so-obvious: the complement to the first point is that if you’re from New Hampshire, odds are pretty good that many of the your friends (i.e. the people that see your feed updates) are from New Hampshire as well. They are notified when you become a fan, and the message inherently gets to the right people.

And finally: the main graphic for the page is a simple green outline of the state — boring to some, but effective. Why? Because New Hampshire means different things to different people. There’s a nostalgic element to “becoming a Fan of New Hampshire” that is different for everyone. It’s the same reason that true community is more likely to “happen” in venues that are less than inspiring.

What’s the big take-away here (or as Chris Brogan would say, what’s in it for me?)? There are plenty of ways to go wrong, but here’s a pretty good idea of how to go right: take a step back from pushing your marketing messaging, and then get involved the broader conversations that are going on around your brand. As someone said to me succinctly yesterday, if you’re selling tennis shoes, talk to your consumers about tennis. This New Hampshire page is a tiny example, but could easily be a community for Smuttynose Brewery, or Waterville Valley Resort – this is a deeply engaged audience with a demonstrated interest in the broader category. Find me a brand wouldn’t want to be able to interact with their consumers on this level.

I discovered that Yelp was Facebook Connect-enabled completely by accident. I use Yelp all the time for restaurant and business reviews, but rarely write reviews myself (I guess I’m a freeloader). I wrote one last week for the best tailor in Greater Boston, and was pleasantly surprised when a Facebook Connect dialogue box popped up in the bottom right-hand corner of my screen.

This instance of Facebook Connect was executed flawlessly — subtle and completely opt-in. If I hadn’t noticed this option to publish my review to my Facebook mini-feed, I could have gone on browsing around Yelp like I usually do. Back in Facebook, here’s what showed up in my mini-feed for my 500+ friends to see:

So this is what Facebook Connect looks like in action. Here’s why it works for Yelp:

1. It’s discreet. This isn’t an in-your-face dialogue that takes over your screen. If you don’t notice it or choose to ignore it, no harm done.
2. It’s optional. It’s not an “extra step” in the process of quickly submitting a review to Yelp.
3. I didn’t need to log in to Facebook again. Yelp’s implementation of Connect recognized that I was already logged in to Facebook itself and did not force me to authenticate a second time.
4. The content is something I would actually want my Facebook network to see. I had just given the tailor in question a 5-star review — of course I’d want to share this with as many people as possible.
5. Yelp takes a back seat, and is simply the mechanism for allowing me to create online word of mouth for another business; I’m promoting Jack’s Tailoring, not Yelp. Of course this promotes Yelp along the way, but it’s only because the platform actually provides utility.