The Facebook Era
The Facebook Era: Tapping Online Social Networks to Build Better Products, Reach New Audiences, and Sell More Stuff is a 2009 business book by Clara Shih, a Stanford-educated American entrepreneur and writer who developed one of the first business applications on Facebook. The book is written as a practical guide for executives and professionals who wish to understand social technologies like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and LinkedIn and how to take advantage of them for sales, marketing, and innovation.
Synopsis
There are three main premises underlying the book. First, social networking sites more than any technology before it have been able to establish online identity. Facebook, for example, gives individuals, businesses, and organizations a new level of presence on the Web that is more trusted and contextual. It also gives people access to other individuals across the Web and the ability for both parties to see how they are connected to one another.
Second, sales and marketers, in turn, have a new opportunity to implicitly and explicitly mine profile and social data available on these sites while respecting privacy settings to better tailor campaigns (hypertargeting) and encourage referrals (transitive trust) across different networks of individuals to effectively transform existing customers into a bottom-up sales force.
Finally, social networking sites like Facebook are akin to “personal CRM”—that is, a modern contact database that individuals can use to more efficiently cultivate and maintain a greater number of weak-tie relationships. The book asserts that Facebook messages, pokes, and wall posts represent a new form of more casual communication (just like email is more casual than a phone call) and have made it socially acceptable to have more casual, lower-commitment relationships with a greater number of people. This is extremely important and relevant for sales and business development, as well as in recruiting scenarios where people often rely on friend-of-friend networks to source and advance job opportunities.
The book is broken down into three parts. Part I (Chapters 1 through 3) provides the bigger-picture framework from which we can develop a richer understanding and appreciation of the online social networking revolution—what is happening, why it’s happening, and what we can learn and apply from past technology revolutions such as the PC and internet. Part II (Chapters 4 through 7) takes a tour across four major functions in a company—sales, marketing, product development, and recruiting—and explores how each is being affected by online social networking technologies. Part III (Chapters 8 through 12) of the book is a practical how-to guide around implementing the ideas and possibilities presented in Part II.
The book likens the “Facebook revolution” to the emergence of the internet in the 1990s. Shih says the internet revolution was marked by the World Wide Web of information and the power of linking content pages. Today, we are seeing the World Wide Web of people emerge across the social graph of sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social sites. She predicts the business impact will be on the same scale as with the internet.
Origins of the Book
Clara Shih made her name in corporate social networking when she developed Faceconnector (initially named Faceforce) in 2007 with Facebook engineer Todd Perry's help. Faceconnector was the first business application on Facebook. The application integrates Facebook and Salesforce CRM, pulling Facebook profiles and friend information into Salesforce account, lead, and contact records. Faceconnector is available for installation from the AppExchange applications marketplace: https://www.salesforce.com/appexchange/detail_overview.jsp?id=a0330000003z9bdAAA.
In her September 2007 blog post, "Faceforce kickstarts the social business app movement," social media blogger/consultant and former Forrester Research analyst Charlene Li credits Clara for helping evolve thinking about Facebook from "just for fun" only to a serious platform with business potential . Since writing the book, Clara has created a new role at salesforce.com focused on social networking, including leading the company's formal partnership with Facebook unveiled in November 2008 .
Reviews
The book is endorsed by Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, bestselling author Don Tapscott, David Mather (President of Hoover’s Inc.), Tina Seelig (Director of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program), and industry research analysts from Forrester Research, IDC, and nGenera, whose quotes appear printed on the back cover and first few pages of the book. The foreword is written by Marc Benioff, who is the founder, CEO, and chairman of salesforce.com ().
- http://www.startupnation.com/blogs/index.php/2009/02/19/social-media-marketing-tips/
- http://demandbase.typepad.com/demand/2009/02/oh-cluetrain-sounding-louder.html
- http://thepowerofsocialtechnology.blogspot.com/2009/03/facebook-era-and-more-demographics.html
- New York Times Review
Faceconnector / Faceforce
- http://mikeg.typepad.com/perceptions/2007/09/crm-social-netw.html
- http://blogs.zdnet.com/projectfailures/?p=1123
- http://www.duesentrieb.org/2007/10/may-faceforce-be-with-you-or-how-can.html
- http://saunderslog.com/2007/09/14/a-darn-useful-tool-faceforce/
- http://the56group.typepad.com/pgreenblog/2007/09/faceforce-it-sa.html
See also
- Hypertargeting
- Social networking