Daily Dose of Pras

The work world & social networking world collide. Humor ensues:

From: Martha
Date: Nov 1, 2007 4:18 PM
Subject:
To: Mike; tom; kevin, ralph; bethany

There is a new intern on my team who has called in “sick” on a couple of occasions.  If you scroll down to the bottom you can see the email from him yesterday to my boss Paul saying that he wouldn’t be able to come into work today because of a “family emergency”.  A co-worker of mine pulled up his face book page (similar to my-space) and found pictures of him at a party last night- so he basically said he had to go to NY for a family emergency because he wanted to party in Worcester for Halloween.   Below is Paul’s response to him…he BCC’d the whole office

Thanks for letting us know–hope everything is ok in New York.  (cool wand)

Cheers,
PCD

—–Original Message—–
From: Tom
Sent: Wednesday, October 31, 2007 3:55 PM
To: Jill
Cc: Paul
Subject:

Paul/Jill -

I just wanted to let you know that I will not be able to come into work tomorrow. Something came up at home and I had to go to New York this morning for the next couple of days. I apologize for the delayed notice.

Kind regards,

Tom

_________________________________________________________________

Stories like this beg the question: as social networks grow to the point where they map your social graph, how do they become three-dimensional, so that they understand the social terrain. Tom obviously didn’t mind sharing this awesome pic with his friends, who most likely found it hilarious. But his boss; that’s a different story. As those of us who are new college grads can attest to, how you represent yourself in the working world is crucial to being taken seriously and advancing at companies where the average age is sometimes 30 or 40. It doesn’t help that Facebook has saturated the college market, and that its fastest growing age group is now the 25-35 market - namely - my manager. As our work peers start getting on Facebook, we’ll become increasingly wary of our younger friends posting pictures and comments that make us look irresponsible or wild. We’ll ask them not to post, to un-tag pictures, or delete their comments. The resulting chilling effect will begin to erode on the freeness with which many of us share our personal information online, which is at the cornerstone of what makes Facebook so compelling in the first place. As the social graph grows to include the grown-ups, sites may stop being safe treehouses free of parental supervison; and the kids will then leave to find the next treehouse. 

Greetings, dear readers.  For many of you this is just a new venue for our regular chats, but for others this is your first time really getting to sit down with me, in which case, I’m pleased to make your acquaintance. I hope these conversations will be insightful and fruitful for us both, and most importantly I do hope that I’m not the only one talking. You’ll always be able to reach me at prasid@live.com.

I spend a lot of time looking at my own profile on Facebook. Probably the same way someone looks at himself in the mirror after working out, I check out my Facebook and try to see myself through someone else’s lens. I was examining my favorite quotes and suddenly it occurred to me that “hmm… these kinda suck…” After pondering further, however, I realized that none of my quotes were actually anything profound in and of themselves; instead they were moments from TV & films. Powerful moments that resonated with me, but that you really have to see for yourself, and perhaps even already be familiar with the TV show, to appreciate. This is probably the best one:

“Say they are smug and superior. Say their approach to public policy makes you want to tear your hair out. Say they like high taxes.and spending your money. Say they want to take your guns and open your borders but don’t call them worthless. . . . The people I have met have been extraordinarily qualified. Their intent is good. Their commitment is true. They are righteous, and they are patriots. And I’m their lawyer.”
– Ainsley Hayes, The West Wing

It’s poweful for me because of her struggle to reconcile party politics and the hatred that we often feel for the other side with the awareness that the other side is sacrificing for the good of the country. The struggle to reconcile your hatred and admit that these people, despite their different outlook, are passionate and “righteous.” The moment was about rising above. And not just a little bit about the overwhelming love we all have for Jed Bartlett, the greatest President in American history. =)

So yesterday I was at the Wordwide Public Sector Marketing Summit - it’s where all the Microsoft Government & Education Marketing people in all the countries across the world get together to learn from one another and listen to announcements from the product teams who have been hard at work building new stuff. I was on this new kick about how we don’t do a good enough job showcasing to the world all the cool stuff that Microsoft is doing internally, and how we waste resources building all this cool stuff that never sees the light of day. I was having a conversation with Kathy Quinn who is the Federal Government Marketing Team Manager, and remembered this really cool video about something called Strong Angel III that I had seen internally. After probing, I found out that it was actually made public as a customer video-case-study for our Homeland Security & Defense Department customers. And sure enough I went out on Microsoft.com/Government and found it, downloaded it, posted on YouTube, and here it is vor your viewing pleasure.

Note: This was written 11/6/07 when the Facebook deal was announced rather. Since then some of these details have changed.

Today Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is announcing Facebook’s new advertising platform. (Microsoft’s Jeff Raikes was actually on a panel at the event).

At the core of what Facebook launched today is 3 concepts:

·         Social Ads

o   when I’m on facebook I’m publishing massive amounts of personal information (i.e. like marital status, age, gender, company, interests, hobbies, movies, music, books, work history, education level, and much much more). Facebook can learn from this information, make inferences, and target an ad perfectly.

o   So that an ad for Batman Forever on HD DVD reaches just people who

§  list Batman among favorite movies

§  who are also recent college grads

§  and who are also U2 fans who will buy the DVD simply because it includes “Hold Me Thrill Me Kill Me Kiss Me” Behind the Scenes footage

o   Namely, Me J. They’ve targeted me. And they can target me with a better ROI than today’s banner ads or perhaps even better than Google’s keyword ads

·         Beacon

o   This is similar to Digg, and enables me to “endorse” a product or brand on any partner-page.

§  eBay is a partner, so for example, I’m on eBay and see the Batman Forever DVD.

§  I hit the “I’m a Fan” button on eBay, which publishes something back on my Facebook profile saying “Prasid is a fan of ‘Batman Forever’ on DVD at eBay for only $24.95.”

§  But “viral” is built right into the DNA of facebook, so when I take any action within Facebook, that action is also published to the Newsfeeds of all my friends.

§  So now the next time any of my 1100 friends log-in, they see a news item on their homepage saying “Prasid is a fan of ‘Batman Forever’ on DVD at eBay for only $24.95.”

o   Essentially now eBay is getting referrals from its users who are also Facebook users

·         Analytics

o   So now Facebook knows who is endorsing which product/brand, it knows a tremendous amount of data on the types of people who are endorsing each brand, and it can provide all those Analytics back to advertisers.

Where does MS come in? Sadly, we’re not the one driving this new Facebook Ad engine – our big $250M deal with Facebook last week only covers traditional banner ads, not these new social ads. However, as long as Facebook continues to grow, it diverts the time users spend online away from Google’s ad platform and onto Microsoft’s. Making us a better contender to right Google’s monopoly of this winner-takes-all market.  

And there’s huge potential for what we could do by combining Facebook’s Social Ads with aQuantive in the future:

aQuantive allows us to serve up ads on someone else’s page. So a movie-review-blog needs revenue, they come to us and give us their open ad inventory, and we bring that together with people who want to advertise. Now imagine we know everything that Facebook knows about each user, and when they arrive on the movie-review-blog page, aQuantive can recognize them, and serve up a perfectly targeted ad for the Batman HD DVD. That makes the ROI on the ads our theoretical aQuantive-Facebook alliance could serve-up one order of magnitude better than anything Google-Doubleclick could provide.

Bottom line:  In the long term, Facebook represents Microsoft’s most strategic partner in effectively competing with Google. And Microsoft, thanks to the aQuantive & Facebook deals, represents the favored underdog to take on Google’s near-monopoly. Ironic, I know. =)