The Social

Unsurprisingly, at least one research company agrees that valuing a company at $1.1 billion before it's unveiled a long-term revenue strategy is a little bit premature.

A firm called Next Up Research released a study this week that estimates Twitter's actual value as somewhere between $526 million and $674 million--or somewhere between 47 and 61 percent of what its valuation was in September when Insight Venture Partners, T. Rowe Price, and other investors pumped nearly $100 million into the company..

The positives for Twitter? It's been able to scale to approximately 70 million users while maintaining a single office in San Francisco and about 80 employees--well, sure, but the fail whale does tend to rear its head--and the fact that you can use it almost exclusively as a low-end mobile application means a whole lot of potential for global reach.

Next Up's concerns are pretty predictable: It's not sure how Twitter will keep up its momentum as it prepares to roll out a revenue model. It spelled out a few options that have been tossed around over the past few years--ads on Twitter.com, ads in tweets, charging for access to its application program interface (API), premium accounts, selling data and analytics--but noted that "most revenue generation options available to the company have the potential to alienate at least some of cult-like Twitter's user base."

Regardless, the research firm is guessing that revenues will come. It's projecting $134 million in revenues in 2013, "in an optimistic scenario." Now let's sit back and see how Twitter does it.

Corporate tools take note: You can tell Twitter exactly what you're doing, and it'll tell LinkedIn too.

Chalk one up for the cringe-worthy marketing term "personal branding": there is a new partnership between Twitter, hub for informing the world exactly what you're doing and thinking at all moments of the day, and LinkedIn, the business-networking tool on steroids. In an announcement Monday, the two companies explained that LinkedIn status messages can sync with Twitter.

"The business use case of Twitter is turning out to be very important, and more and more people are finding that the persona they create for themselves on the Web is part of their resume in many ways," Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said in a joint video with LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman that was posted to the LinkedIn blog.

So, in short, LinkedIn's "status" feature now syncs with Twitter with an optional check box--a feature that the two companies say should be rolling out over the next few days. Likewise, can set your Twitter status as your LinkedIn status by using the hash tag #li or #in, so that you can rest assured that your tweet about "watching Gossip Girl and eating cold pizza" won't immediately show up to potential clients or employers trawling your LinkedIn profile. (Full disclosure: This was my Twitter status tonight. If you believe that it renders me professionally unsound, please feel free to let me know.)

All snark aside, this is probably a very good bet for LinkedIn, which continues to grow fast and make money but which hasn't yet really jumped into the latest social-networking trend of real-time, streaming information. Inking a partnership with Twitter is much easier than launching some other kind of initiative to get members to update their statuses more often. Tweets sent to LinkedIn, presumably, could also be grouped in with LinkedIn status messages to form some kind of business-intelligence live stream. The sort of information that people want to share specifically with colleagues and professional associates could be of interest to high-end advertisers or the market research community.

Twitter, meanwhile, is going to want to stay in the limelight of the business community as it considers a long-term business model--one of the microblogging service's potential moneymakers has been launching a "dashboard" of analytics for people and companies who use it primarily for professional purposes rather than, you know, filling the world in on which beer was just discovered in the back of the fridge.

Also for Twitter, this is yet another potential source of tweets as it attempts to become the world's foremost repository of real-time information. Earlier this year, MySpace announced an official way to sync Twitter and MySpace status, and in a matter of weeks its link-shortening service had become the second most popular on Twitter (trailing Twitter's preferred Bit.ly).

Facebook, meanwhile, appears to have been more reluctant: a Twitter app on its platform has pulled tweets into status messages for some time, and an unofficial app lets members tag selective tweets with the hashtag "#fb" to cross-post them to Facebook, but the only time that Facebook has put out a big, official announcement about syncing with Twitter was when it added an easy-sync feature for "fan pages," profiles for brands and marketers.

Not surprising. Twitter is a hot name in marketing these days, and in order for Facebook to establish fan pages as an ideal spot for brands to build a presence, an easy Twitter sync is a selling point. But in the long run, it's an advantage for Facebook, which once tried to buy Twitter and was snubbed, to keep its treasure trove of what-the-world-is-thinking somewhat to itself. After all, it can get away with it: with well over 300 million active users, Facebook is significantly bigger than Twitter, and could be diluting its own product by openly sourcing status messages out to Twitter. LinkedIn, better known for its networking features than any kind of status updating, isn't running that kind of risk.

Until then: "At SFO airport at bookstore. Deciding between @gladwell and @tferriss. Need real, serious insights. Thoughts? #li."

Toilet Cat does not approve of this message.

(Credit: Flickr: Vagabond Shutterbug)

Look what just landed in the department of bad social media campaigns! Toilet paper brand Charmin has put out a casting call for five bloggers who will spend five weeks working as "Charmin Ambassadors" in a pop-up bathroom in New York's Times Square.

I'm going to say it right now: The Procter & Gamble-owned brand has creeped me out for a while with those commercials that feature cartoon bears gallivanting in a forest with rolls of soft and fluffy toilet paper and then sneaking behind trees to do their business. I don't want to think about pooping bears. Sorry. But this new campaign, detailed Tuesday in an article in the Business Courier of Cincinnati, really pushes it to a new level.

"Job requirements include interacting with hundreds of thousands of bathroom guests, maintaining their own blogs and content on Charmin-branded Web sites and popular social media sites, and sharing family-friendly video from the restroom space and surrounding areas," the Business Courier article explained. I'm afraid this is pretty much validating and encouraging those weirdos who like to post to Twitter about bathroom visits.

The new campaign tag line is "Enjoy the go." GROSS.

The bloggers will be paid $10,000 apiece, which I sincerely hope they will use to invest in a name change and a wardrobe of high-end disguises, because if I were one of them I'd be way too embarrassed to go on through life with my current identity.

But don't worry! Charmin has loads of experience so there's absolutely no way this will look stupid. According to the Business Courier of Cincinnati, "This is not the first year Charmin has hosted a temporary, or pop-up, bathroom in Times Square. In 2008, it kicked off a "Plush Potties for the People" tour that traveled from Santa Monica, Calif., to Times Square, where it settled for the holidays."

Plush Potties for the People. As one of my colleagues put it, "You've got to be s***ting me."

Guess what? Facebook is tweaking its home page design yet again--something that invariably seems to tick off members at first before they realize they actually don't mind that much. The company seems to have been previewing the new look to advertisers, one of whom forwarded the details along to industry blog Mashable.

It doesn't look too different. The biggest change is that Facebook's home page news feed will now be divided up into "top news" and a more real-time "recent activity" view.

The explanation:

"Facebook is simplifying the user experience on the home page by introducing Top News and Recent Activity streams. Now, when users log on to Facebook for the first time in a while, they will see the most important stories that they missed while they were away. From there, users can navigate to the real-time stream and toggle between both views throughout their sessions. In addition to making it easier for users to view content that is most relevant to them, this change also speeds up the time it takes for the home page to load and makes birthday reminders more prominent."

A screenshot from a document that Facebook sent to brand advertisers about an impending redesign.

(Credit: Facebook)

Note the mention of birthday reminders. On a given member's birthday, a pop-up version of Facebook's "gifts" application appears on that user's profile so that friends can purchase virtual gifts to display. The "gifts" feature is also currently the center of the fledgling e-commerce plans that Facebook has been bouncing around for quite some time now: It's currently the hub of its "credits" virtual currency, and advertisers can purchase sponsored gifts that members can give to one another. These have also been tested out with a select number of nonprofits.

For users, it sounds like Facebook is correcting some of the changes that members seemed to complain about the most with its last redesign. "Facebook has also put information back into the stream that people have asked for, including photo tags, friend acceptances, relationships, event RSVPs and group memberships," the explanation obtained by Mashable read. Also in there will be information about what a user's friends do on brands' "fan" pages, potentially increasing the exposure for advertisers and marketers looking to jump on the social-ads bandwagon.

Why so much redesigning? Facebook's executive team likes to pitch the company as a living, evolving product. At an event last week in Palo Alto, Calif., Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg underscored Facebook's belief in constant "iteration," a term you'll also often hear CEO Mark Zuckerberg using.

"The great thing about Facebook is (that) we are constantly evolving the site and constantly evolving the usage," she said. "People protested the new home page redesign, but engagement went way up and users continued to grow."

If you're running a business that has a presence in a virtual world, market research firm Gartner thinks you might want to make sure your employees' avatars aren't dressed like Lady Gaga at the VMAs.

"Companies with codes of conduct for other Web activities, such as blogging, should be able to extend those policies into virtual environments," a release Wednesday from Gartner announcing its new report "Avatars in the Enterprise: Six Guidelines to Enable Success" explained. "However, because 3-D environments add the visual dimension, they will need to make sure that their policies also cover dress codes."

That means your avatar might want to lose the sparkly pink torpedo bra, metallic leggings, and giant bat wings. When it's representing your company, that is.

The presence of businesses in virtual worlds like Second Life is nothing new--and has been much derided in recent years. But according to Gartner, it's still on the rise, particularly when it comes to training and virtual meetings. "Avatars are creeping into business environments and will have far reaching implications for enterprises, from policy to dress code, behavior, and computing platform requirements," the release explained. Gartner estimates that 70 percent of enterprises will be regulating the avatars of employees who use virtual worlds for business.

Two years ago, Gartner put out a study detailing the risks and pratfalls of doing business in virtual worlds, among them the difficulty of brand and reputation management. Now it's getting more specific: Gartner now says that employees ought to know how to operate their avatars properly, use the same degrees of discretion and professionalism that they do on social-networking sites, and even keep separate avatars for personal and professional use.

Pretty much everyone in the audience at Sheryl Sandberg's talk on Tuesday morning as part of New York Advertising Week understood the meaning of the slide she displayed that read "Nielsen and Facebook are in a relationship." A nod to announcements on Facebook's homepage "news feed," the "in a relationship" phrase is now a recognizable slice of Internet culture--much as social network Facebook itself has become ubiquitous.

And Sandberg, Facebook's chief operating officer, hopes it will be just as ubiquitous in the advertising world. Her goal on Tuesday was to formally announce the social network's "strategic alliance" with data and audience measurement firm Nielsen, starting with the launch of a product called BrandLift, a market research tool that can measure audience response to advertisements on Facebook "in a matter of days."

Nielsen Online CEO John Burbank joined Sandberg on stage to detail the basics of BrandLift. "We recognize just how increasingly important Facebook is within the whole ecosystem of media," he said, adding that it would be "crucial in building (marketers') confidence in using the Internet as a tool."

Sheryl Sandberg (file photo)

(Credit: Corinne Schulze/CNET)

Burbank confirmed what he told CNET News last night, that BrandLift measurement would eventually reach beyond the hugely popular social network. "(Brands) have asked us to extend this tool beyond Facebook," he said. "Working with Facebook, we expect to do that, too."

But for now, it's all about the social network. Sandberg pitched Facebook to the ad industry audience, as she has done in the past, as a hub for meaningful connections and communication. "Facebook is where people go when they want to share, when they want to connect, when they want to reach out to the people they know," Sandberg said, and she brought up instances as varied as grassroots activism in Iran and the two girls in Australia who updated their Facebook status messages rather than calling emergency services when they were trapped in a storm drain.

"I thank them, and we're glad, we're especially glad they got rescued," Sandberg said, noting that the girls' choice of crisis communication highlighted just how important Facebook is to personal connections in members' lives. "(But) next time you use emergency services, 911. Better option for sure."

What she also talked about: How fast Facebook has been growing. Last year at Advertising Week, she said, she announced that the social network recently had hit 100 million active users. This month, Facebook hit 300 million. And a full 50 percent of them still return to the site every day, Sandberg said, something that surprised her because she'd assumed that late adopters would be far less active than early adopters.

More numbers: Facebook's mobile applications are used by 65 million people. The average user spends 5.75 hours on the site per month. And the average user now has 130 friends, up from 120 a year ago.

Competition and skepticism
Sandberg had good reason to persistently highlight both Facebook's staggering growth and its newfound cultural significance: The advertising industry simply hasn't had a whole lot of faith in social media. "We've had some stumbles, some of our own making, and I think it's fair to say we have more of our fair share of critics," Sandberg said, mentioning that she'd once gotten a phone call from her parents asking whether she was looking for a new job because they'd read a report that Facebook was running out of money.

Facebook has also had to compete for marketer attention with the (at least for now) more buzzworthy Twitter, which rose to fast fame amid celebrity endorsements, a high-profile role during last year's U.S. elections, and the seemingly ubiquitious placement of "tweets" on cable news programs. A Twitter profile and a Facebook fan page can be directly competing products.

But the real skepticism surrounding Facebook's potential as a moneymaking power--at least as long as it remains supported primarily by advertising--comes about because, at least until this point, there has been a lot of marketing buzz-speak but not a whole lot of concrete numbers to measure its actual success.

"You want measurement, measurement you can rely on, measurement that you believe is valid," Sandberg said. That's why Facebook approached Nielsen as a respected third party, she explained.

Brands have found significant success with Facebook fan pages, which are free to create, she said. But adding paid advertisements through Facebook's "Engagement Ads" product can enhance those brand pages significantly, Sandberg explained. (It also means Facebook gets paid.)

"A year ago we introduced Engagement Ads. Rather than having to go to different sites or go to landing pages, consumers were able to engage with marketers directly with the ads themselves," Sandberg explained. "(They can) RSVP to the event, 'fan' a page, watch a video and comment, send a branded gift, or respond to questions from a marketer." As part of Tuesday's announcement, Sandberg announced that Engagement Ads have been expanded to include an easy way for Facebook members to request free product samples.

There were some skeptical questions from the audience, notably one that inquired about the poor searchability and indexing features on Facebook profiles and fan pages. The audience member asked whether this was potentially being upgraded.

"The short answer, is do we want to take content and make you more easily able to find it, find it now, find it later?" Sandberg responded. "Of course. And it's something we're definitely working on."

Update Tuesday 4:14 a.m. PDT: Facebook and Nielsen have officially announced their multiyear deal.

As part of the Advertising Week festivities in New York, Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg is slated to make a marketing-related announcement on Tuesday morning.

The announcement of a partnership with Nielsen on a product called "BrandLift," which polls Facebook users on ads they see on the social network, was first reported by The Wall Street Journal.

There weren't a whole lot of details disclosed, even when the two companies confirmed the news of "a multi-year, strategic alliance" later on Monday. Nielsen BrandLift, a release explained, is the first product created from the deal. It will use opt-in polls on Facebook's home page to gauge user sentiment around advertisements, measuring "aided awareness, ad recall, message association, brand favorability, and purchase consideration." It'll roll out in the U.S. to a number of test partners this week and to all advertisers over the next few months. There will be "hundreds" of BrandLift tests in that time, the release explained.

An end date to the multi-year deal has not been disclosed, Nielsen Online CEO John Burbank told CNET News on Monday evening.

For now, Nielsen BrandLift is part of its partnership with Facebook. But the product "will expand to other websites" eventually, Burbank said. He wouldn't comment on repeated rumors that Facebook would be launching an ad network for sites participating in its Facebook Connect program.

The Palo Alto, Calif.-based Facebook has a history of big New York marketing pushes to further establish itself as a major player on Madison Avenue. Earlier this year, Sandberg keynoted the AdAge Digital conference to pitch Facebook's "active network" of friend connections as a powerful advertising tool, and two years ago Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveiled the social network's first major advertising initiative shortly after Microsoft had taken a $240 million stake in the company.

(Part of that 2007 announcement included Beacon, the ill-fated advertising program that Facebook finally put the kibosh on this week.)

Getting statistics on advertising effectiveness is important for Facebook, especially with a longtime industry player like Nielsen on board. While Facebook has been growing in prominence as a digital ad destination, it's still had to do some convincing to combat the industry attitude that social-media advertising doesn't work.

Also sure to be mentioned at Tuesday's announcement? The fact that Facebook has recently hit 300 million active users around the world and continues to grow fast. That's a lot of eyeballs.

Nielsen's own measurements of Facebook traffic place the social network as the fourth largest unique audience in the U.S. (and remember, most of its traffic is now overseas), and that out of all Web-based brands it enjoys the most individual time spent per user.

This post was expanded at 7:33 p.m. PT.

It's finally over for Beacon, the ill-fated advertising program that the social network initially launched with splashy Madison Avenue fanfare nearly two years ago.

The social network has settled a year-old class action lawsuit that targeted the social network's alleged failure to provide adequate information and privacy controls to users with regard to Beacon, which shared information about users' information on third-party partner sites in Facebook news feeds.

One of the terms of the settlement? Any last vestiges of Beacon, which failed to gain traction amid a barrage of negative press stemming largely from advocacy groups like MoveOn.org, will be shut down completely.

Also as part of the settlement, which is still pending approval from a judge, a $9.5 million "settlement fund" has been established to set up an independent foundation to "fund projects and initiatives that promote the cause of online privacy, safety, and security," according to a release. Up to a third of that fund, however, can potentially be recovered by the plaintiffs' lawyers.

"We look forward to the creation of the foundation and its work to educate Internet users on how best to control their privacy; engage in safe social-networking practices; and, generally, enjoy themselves more online by having knowledge that gives them a greater sense of control," a statement from Facebook representative Barry Schnitt read. "We fully expect the foundation to team with other leading online-safety and privacy experts and organizations that have been working diligently in these fields."

The suit was filed in August 2008 on behalf of 20 plaintiffs, most of whom were Texas residents. Named as defendants were Facebook, along with current and former Beacon participants Blockbuster, Fandango (owned by Comcast), Overstock.com, STA Travel, Zappos, Hotwire (owned by InterActiveCorp), and GameFly. Another, earlier Beacon-related lawsuit had been filed against Blockbuster several months earlier, claiming that its participation in the advertising program violated the Video Privacy Protection Act of 1987. Facebook was not named as a defendant in that suit.

Shortly after the negative buzz about Beacon started, Facebook began tweaking and modifying the program to allow more user control over the feature. But it was too late: advocacy groups claimed that it still wasn't enough, some existing partners pulled out, and others were likely deterred from participating because of the unsavory implications. Surprisingly, a "small number of customers" were still using it; Facebook will work to transition them out of it.

Facebook's experiments in social-media advertising turned instead to "engagement ads," which have come under some scrutiny themselves, and the "fan pages" that it encourages brands, organizations, and celebrities to create.

The irony behind Friday's news is that the thinking behind Beacon ultimately evolved into the phenomenally successful Facebook Connect, the universal log-in standard that, among other things, shares third-party activity on members' Facebook profiles.

The privacy controls on Connect are clearer and more extensive, but perhaps more crucial to Facebook Connect's success has been the fact that it's been marketed as a utility for ordinary members rather than an advertising tool for paying clients. It's free for third-party sites to implement, and with only a few exceptions, sites working with Facebook Connect code it in through the social network's application programming interface, or API, rather than ink a formal partnership.

And offering Facebook users the chance to register and log in to external sites without separate usernames and passwords gives Facebook Connect's marketing a slant of user convenience--and security, as some Web users may be more comfortable hitting a "Connect with Facebook" button than registering for an account with a new Web service.

"We learned a great deal from the Beacon experience," the statement from Facebook's Schnitt read. "For one, it underscored how critical it is to provide extensive user control over how information is shared. We also learned how to effectively communicate changes that we make to the user experience. The introduction of Facebook Connect--a product that gives users significant control over how they extend their Facebook identity on the Web and share experiences back to friends on Facebook--is an example of this."

Hey, here's an idea! When pitching your women-oriented company to a panel of investors and experts, why don't you make fun of fat chicks in the process?

(Credit: Josh Lowensohn/CNET)

SAN FRANCISCO--Let's not kid ourselves. Nobody was expecting the audience at the TechCrunch 50 event to be full of women. That's just the reality of Silicon Valley, notorious for its boys-club culture (and plethora of complaints about how hard it is to find a girlfriend).

So it was undoubtedly a challenge for two of the start-ups pitching to TechCrunch50's all-male panel of industry insiders in Tuesday morning's "Subscription & Commerce Marketplaces" category. They were offering the first look at companies that are geared toward a demographic that's just about the opposite of the conference's audience: women, and not necessarily tech-savvy ones.

The pitches from the two companies, high-end invitation service Cocodot and personal-finance resource Learnvest, couldn't have been more different.

First up was Cocodot, which was founded by former MySpace exec Shawn Gold. At MySpace, which he left about two years ago, Gold served as senior vice president of marketing and content. Which means, basically, the guy knows how to pitch. Cocodot, he said, has a very fine-tuned demographic. "The target is women, who really create 90-plus percent of events," Gold said, showing off the service's slick interface. It's an event planning service that aims to make online invitations an acceptable route for high-end events. There's another start-up, Pingg, offering a similar angle, but Cocodot hopes to court brands, PR firms, and corporations as well as individuals throwing parties. And it hopes to particularly target weddings--for which online invitations are still pretty verboten.

Gold, well-dressed and energetic, was clearly aware that his target demographic wasn't going to be found in the room. He demonstrated the site by sending a Cocodot greeting card to his wife that depicted two overweight women with the caption of "Does this card make my ass look big?" (Um, classy) and added at the end as an appeal to those present, "If you give Cocodot to your wife or girlfriend, you will definitely get lucky."

I'm all for a little levity, especially when we've all been sitting in the same overheated room for a half-day listening to one presentation after another. But Gold's pitch was frankly insulting to both the women who he hopes will use the service, as well as to the predominantly male audience with its assumption that the only way they could possibly understand the aim of Cocodot would be to put a fratty, "Dude! Get laid!" spin on it. Which is too bad, because Cocodot looked pretty darn cool, and the judges agreed. One of them, Google's Bradley Horowitz, said, "I don't want to like this" but admitted that "I could easily see this taking off" among the Hallmark crowd.

The next presentation, though flawed, was a breath of fresh air in comparison.

The CEO of Learnvest, a petite twentysomething blonde named Alexa von Tobel, was one of only a few female CEOs pitching companies at the entire two-day event. Her company, an online personal-finance compendium, is "designed to fill the enormous, gaping hole" between financial self-help books and expensive financial planners for hire, she explained.

"Our core audience is women, an audience historically ignored and underserved in this topic," von Tobel said. Learnvest lets members build up profiles for personalized personal-finance advice, set goals, and earn points and badges in a game-style format by accomplishing goals, helping other members, and offering feedback to the company.

Von Tobel was clearly nervous as hell, especially when the reception from the judges was less positive than she may have expected. Several of them were skeptical of the game-like format, wondering if it could really be applied to something as private and serious as personal finance.

"I could easily see guys I know wanting to be a level-19 ninja," judge Bradley Horowitz said. "I don't know anyone who wants to be a seventh-degree debt removal expert."

Another judge, Digg founder Kevin Rose, concurred. "It's going to be really hard to get people to admit that they're in debt and put that on a profile."

They make a very good point. But von Tobel had done her homework, armed with statistics from Harvard Business School studies about the lack of personal-finance resources for young people, especially women, finishing college and entering the workforce under mounting tuition debt.

"It's not taught in schools, it's not taught in colleges, (and) there's really no good resource online," she said. The judges remained skeptical of Learnvest's game setup, but von Tobel's well-informed rebuttal earned a round of unsolicited audience applause.

(Which, in a sense, is really too bad, as though it meant the TechCrunch50 audience was surprised to hear a young, well-dressed blonde offer such a coherent response.)

Conference organizer Jason Calacanis--who is the CEO of Mahalo, a start-up that targets an audience that isn't necessarily tech-savvy either--seemed to be aware of the fact that maybe Learnvest needed some feedback from outside the all-male judge panel.

"We have a number of women in the audience," Calacanis said, standing up and turning around to poll them on whether they'd want to try Learnvest out. Of course, not many hands went up. But that's to be expected when the audience is easily 75 percent male: every woman I could see had her hand raised.

The lesson? If you're pitching a women-focused company to a roomful of Y chromosomes, insulting the target audience--however absent they may be--is still pretty darn tacky. At a start-up pitch conference, the presentations need to be smart, well-informed, and above all, any pitch that's reliant on marketing to a niche demographic has to show that it takes that demographic seriously.

And don't assume that the guys are going to be too dumb to understand the straight sell, either. There doesn't always have to be a get-laid angle. At least I'd like to think so.