A Nation’s Pride Surfaces on Facebook

I’ve had the great pleasure of working with Citizen Sports and Lenovo on Facebook applications for fans of 115 different competing countries for the summer games.  You can read more about it here and here. With the games about to begin, Iceland was making a strong showing with the second highest tally of fans using the application.  As Track and Field took center stage, the fans of Jamaica took center stage on the facebook front, seeing over 8,000 new participants in the last 8 days of event.

Unlike the actual Olympics, Team Jamaica was unable to surge past Team USA.   Apparently, some guy named Phelps had a pretty good Olympics too.  His country had over 45,000 people following Team USA.  All told, over 240,000 people utilized the applications.  Considering these applications were just a gleam in a publisher’s eye in May, pretty amazing stuff.

Congrats to the entire Citizen Sports team!

Dell ReGenerates facebook marketing

Early advertising in a new medium is so often a cut and paste job from the old medium. Early TV commercials were visual adaptations of the radio ads that preceded them. Most early search engines took banner ads. Online video ads were 30 second spots recycled from TV commercials. Nothing wrong with it. A strong advertising message can work in many mediums. I’m always excited by executions where the advertising/messaging is amplified by the platform

I’m really proud of my (tangential) involvement in the Dell ReGeneration project because it is a program that uses the unique strengths of the graffiti application. I wrote about it here previously and thought it worth another mention. After 7300+ submissions and over 1 million votes (all in less than two weeks) the top 150 submissions are available for viewing here (facebook and graffiti memberships required.) Here is a sneak peek of what surfaced after the voting ended.

The LA Times’ Webscout blog liked it too.

Congrats to the Grafiti team (Mark, Ted, and Tim,) Dell team (Andrew, Sean, Casey, et al) and the FM team (James and Matt) that made this happen.

Facebook apps can make money

Mashable’s Adam Ostrow (disclosure – I work for Federated Media which represents Mashable) writes about the “fairly paltry” revenue figure generated by VideoEgg on Facebook applications. He writes:

The bottom line is that $1.5 million in revenue over 5 months for some of Facebook’s top applications simply does not seem like much, especially when you consider that MySpace is estimated to pull in $800 million of revenue this year.

I think the article misses the point and potential of Facebook apps as a business. There are supposedly 100 million blogs and most don’t make much money – even those with decent traction. Some however, and FM represents many of them, do very well and are seeing revenue growth that now rivals the audience growth they saw in previous years. I see a similar dynamic forming with FB applications. A handful of applications are making significant dollars through advertising, affiliate deals, etc. Others are seeing real promise. Most aren’t, and won’t, make much money ever.

Secondly, marketers are just beginning to think about how to create meaningful programs in these environments. I’ve written about one here.

Finally, myspace’s incredible audience and revenue growth came quickly, but most of the revenue came AFTER it was acquired by FIM. A great product is necessary. A great sales team with access and credibility goes a long way. Some applications are now getting these sales forces (I work for one) and revenue will come as a result.

(thanks Shankman!)