Facebook - What It Is, And Join VR's!

I was reading a post by John Jantsch, Duct Tape Marketing guy. He's great. He was a keynote speaker at the eBay Live! tradeshow and his blog is super. Check it out. He started to talk about Facebook, the new super duper social networking site where basically the kids post a bunch of jargon about themselves, about a product they're trying to sell or about an event in a local spot they're going to. MySpace version 2.0 I guess.

So I went to Facebook and set up my own account. (Between Squidoo, the VR Blog, and Facebook who is gonna run the company?) What did I find? It was pretty easy to set up. But I was trying to figure out what a marketer selling to businesses (VR) was going to get out of it. Here's what I did:

• I joined the San Francisco network just to see what was going on. Lots of events for youngsters.
  
• I set up a Network for VerticalResponse, I'm not really sure what this might do.
  
• I also set up a "Group" for VerticalResponse - Email Marketing for Small Business. This was cool. Here anyone can talk about how they use email marketing, why they use it, problems, solutions, you name it.
• I created a "flyer". This is a small advertising unit that I can choose to show to different Alumni, grads or undergrads. We'll see how that works.

So if you have a Facebook account do me a favor, join the VerticalResponse Group. For all of you that like the VR Lounge, that's great too. Log into your account and join in the conversation.

Will VerticalResponse "get" new business out of this? I'm not so sure, but it seems like it could provide a great FREE set of tools enabling customers to chat.

Comments

[Rob Wilson]

Facebook is an excellent resource for submitting events. People on facebook are very social and appreciate event listings.

As well, with every event they can see who is attending and invite more people if they wish.

This takes the evite.com style websites to a whole new level.

Try listing your own event, today. You will find the response to be most favourable.

[Joshua Feinberg]

Hi Sombit,

Great comments and we're very interested in diving into the Facebook realm now that we've recently become members and created our own VR group (hopefully you'll join!).

The world of integrated widgets, gadgets and direct hooks is definitely the direction we're headed as we look for great value-adds for our customers and ways to blend two great services into one seamless user experience. We'll keep you posted on our development plans for this and other types of mash-up offerings. Again, thanks for your feedback!

Josh Feinberg
VP, Product Management
VerticalResponse, Inc

[Steven Munoz]

Facebook has proven to be a great tool if you create an application. On this application you can have a link to your opt-in. This is then placed on the page of everyone who has your app. That can be alot of links to your opt-in.

[Sombit Mishra]

If you could integrate newsletter subscriptions with Facebook, where users read the newsletters to which they're subscribed in Facebook, you could hit on something viral.

The success of Facebook is predicated on it being a one-stop shop. Since opening the platform up to developers, Facebook has become somewhat of a Walmart of the web. When you aren't sure whether a cool new toy is available, you check Facebook, pure and simple. Email marketers would be smart to integrate entirely.