Really looking for ideas here, anyone with a good approach?

An excerpt from our website:

Whether we work on the development of your marketing strategy or the realization of it: our activities will always be tailored to your situation and the maturity phase of marketing within your organization – do you want to improve within the current phase, or bring your marketing next level? The activities we carry out, consequently, vary from the execution of separate projects to the integral insourcing of your marketing and new business development (on- or offsite). Always at the service of the intended results.

More info on: www.kroese-bb.com

Looking at the geographic distribution of Facebook users based on the 500 million users milestone of June last:

North America : 32.5%
Europe : 27.5%
Asia : 17.1%
South America : 9.2%
Other: about 12,5%

This means that 165 million users are from the U.S.A, making Facebook’s reach probably half that country’s population. With its huge focus on the US market(e.g. Facebook places), a focus I understand, Facebook will have a great advantage when competing locally, but it’s leaving the other 350 million users out. Facebook is currently starting local offices, my hometown Amsterdam is one of the locations, it remains to be seen if this will help their focus in any way. Most probably, the local offices will just be satellite sales-offices and will not do anything but the most basic organizational tasks. First argument; too much US focus.

The second argument is about the system itself; more specifically, the parts that are broken. Obviously there are a lot of things working really well on Facebook; uploading photo’s for example works splendidly and over new year’s weekend, 750 million photo’s were uploaded by users. But it remains pretty shallow, doesn’t it? The side-option groups are what should be most important in your social interaction; obviously there’s 3-8 different groups you communicate with, and just like in real-life, you generally keep those apart. Try sending a status update to just your family? Hard to do, instead of selecting the group to send to you have to choose who not to send it to. Clearly broken.

There’s even a third argument to make; the valuation is too big. A $ 50 billion valuation is huge for a company that’s only bringing in $ 2 billion in revenue, but considering the upcoming IPO the valuation will then be even higher! The question will not be whether they will be able to increase the revenue, but if they can keep their customers in the long run while doing it. I think they will be unable to do so.

Concluding; I think Facebook will not be as important as it is today, it will take some time, but 5 years from now Facebook will be just like Myspace, a player but not the biggest, most profitable or the most important one around.

Gamification is the application of the dynamics used in videogames to increase customer involvement with the brand.

Before social media, companies would just buy the right to send their message to an amount of consumers, the more the better, but Web 2.0 has changed this. Now consumers go through various stages of engagement, and the most influential consumers (ambassadors) are hardest to influence directly by the brands themselves. Jeff Jarvis’ ‘Dell Hell crusade’ against the manufacturer’s bad service comes to mind. The new goal is interaction; talking to, instead of at, your customers and earning the right to do so. The game dynamics explained earlier can help your company do just that.

You can read the full article in english on:

http://www.kroese-bb.com/blog/en/entry/ahead_of_the_curve_by

Or translated into Dutch on molblog.nl:

http://www.molblog.nl/bericht/hoe-game-dynamics-betrokkenheid-van-de-klant-vergroten/

I’m hoping for the day (probably next year) that I don’t have any need for text messaging any more, I could just send my friends Facebook messages.