We’ve been making quick changes to the Social Ad Summit agenda over the past 36 hours but I’m happy to announce a number of new speakers including Jimmy Wales, Founder of Wikipedia, who will provide the closing keynote. Since we’ve been shifting things around at the last minute, I’m providing one more discount code for today. If you are interested in attending the event, you can use the discount code “jimmywales” to get 40 percent off via the registration form.
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We’ve finalized our agenda for the upcoming Social Ad Summit in New York City being held on October 5th. For today only we are providing all interested attendees with a discount of 50 percent off. The event is bringing together marketers, publishers, ad networks, and industry executives. As this space is constantly evolving, we think it’s important to bring together the current leaders and other participants to discuss the trends and the future of marketing on the social web.
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The second annual Social Ad Summit is coming up in three weeks in New York City and we’ve finally lined up our speakers and have finished most of the preparations. If you haven’t purchased your ticket yet, it’s not too late! Are you still on the fence about going? Below are seven reasons you should attend. Also make sure to enter your email in the form at the end of this article for a chance to win a free ticket. We’ll be giving 5 away over the next few weeks at random to members of the Social Ad Summit list.
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As most readers know, I typically refrain from promoting conferences on this site (aside from my own Social Ad Summit confernece) but later this month I’ll be heading out to California to attend the Engage! Expo. The event has a large number of social web industry executives speaking and attending which is why I’ve decided to go to this one. September through November is a busy season for conferences, however I try to limit the number I attend as you can spend all year going to events and never get any work done!
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A few weeks ago we announced the first speakers for this year’s Social Ad Summit. Today I wanted to announced a second batch of speakers and also state that we’ve decided to open up registration. The primary reason for opening registration is that managing the invites while blogging and planning the conference was getting a bit overwhelming. We’ve actually had a large volume of invite requests (close to 1,000) but filtering through them was getting to be a task.
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Just over two weeks ago we announced the 2009 Social Ad Summit and today I’m happy to present the first 8 speakers for the event. The conference is being held at Tribeca Rooftop in New York City on October 5, 2009. So far we’ve had a great response and expect this event to sell out based on the number of inquiries we’ve received so far. If you haven’t received the registration information for the event yet, head over to the Social Ad Summit website and enter your information on the homepage.
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Last year we hosted the inaugural Social Ad Summit in New York City. The event also happened to be hosted on the same day that Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy and the markets began to slide downward. Despite turmoil around the corner on Wall Street, 250 people still managed to get together to discuss the future of advertising on the social web (although many were hopping in and out of the event to see if sky had fallen).
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We’re live at the Facebook Developer Garage in Austin, TX. I’ve embedded a live stream below.
We covered the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), exploring trends in social media as relate to Consumer Electronics (CE). CES is the largest trade show on the planet, with over 100,000 attendees, an unending stream of newsworthy announcements and an unrivaled event party scene in Las Vegas. When reflecting back upon the week, it jumps out at us that there is an amazing level of interest the consumer electronics industry about Facebook. Generally, we were impressed with the amount of widgets and social network feeds that now reach CE devices. Big names like Yahoo!, MySpace and Twitter were active with large CE brands.
Facebook, however, seems to be holding back. Chumby and AMD were the only companies we found who integrated applications with Facebook. However, they did so via open platform APIs and not explicit business and technical partnerships.
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I’m at Web 2.0 Summit, where John Battelle and Mark Zuckerberg will be having a 20- to 25-minute conversation. I’ll be live blogging the conversation so feel free to refresh. They should be taking the stage in the next five minutes, so check back for live updates.
1:48 pm - John Battelle and Mark Zuckerberg should be taking the stage momentarily
John Battelle (JB) asks: How’s the financing going
Mark Zuckerberg (MZ): We had really good terms on the round with Mark Zuckerberg.
JB: Trips to Dubai.
MZ: Oh
JB: Do you need money?
MZ: No.
JB: One of the things you told me related to money is that you are not focused on optimizing for revenue. There have been articles suggesting that you’ll have to focus on it now
MZ: There’s a team at Facebook who worked on building the translations application and now we have more than 20 languages available. We want to make sure people can share and connect with the people around them. In the past I’ve said we aren’t focused on revenue and people have interpreted that as to mean that we aren’t focused on revenue but currently we have two solid revenue streams.
We’re also opening new offices. We have one in France, we’ve opened one in dublin.
JB: How does it breakdown? Brand versus online.
MZ: Both are growing in different ways.
JB: When you did the deal with Microsoft it was a big part of your revenue mix.
MZ: When we did it early on it was a much larger portion of the revenue but that’s no longer the case.
JB: Do you think Steve Ballmer is happy with the price he paid?
MZ: I think it was more about the partnership and lest about the investment. We’ve found that they’ve been a really good partner. They’ve been a very good partner in that we are both trying to “build new things” … not much details there.
JB: But do you think Steve’s happy with the price he paid?
MZ: People really obsess over the price.
JB: It was $15 Billion …
MZ: We felt like we got favorable terms and it made sense for us to do. If we can succeed at making it so that a large portion of people around the world are involved in the development and usage of Facebook then it’s really good. We aren’t focused on justifying a $15 billion valuation.
JB: Can you remind people how many people work at Facebook?
MZ: It’s over 700 right now.
JB: Do you have a hiring freeze?
MZ: No … we’re hiring really great people. We’re really aggressively expanding the sales effort. Take France for example, I was just visiting. 7 percent of their population is on Facebook. When I go back in a year it could be 25 or 30 percent of the population and that’s why we put an office there.
JB: Let’s talk about Connect.
MZ: We just announced that anyone can apply. We’re now working toward the full opened release.
JB: There is a criticism that Facebook is a walled garden and that you don’t want to be part of OpenSocial and a broader, distributed web.
MZ: There’s this very clear transition from closed systems to open systems. Overtime I think it’s worth exploring how the companies can work together. Right now the particpating companies are much smaller than Facebook individually. Mark mentions Facebook potentially becoming the open standard.
The reason that Microsoft became such a big company is because they didn’t attempt to build the entire computer, instead they built an open platform for people to build on. We got through this hurdle of people not wanting to put up their information and the way we got through that was privacy settings.
JB: Mentions the multiple people that have been fired due to Facebook just from today alone.
MZ: Well the privacy settings are there. We’re trying to make more tools for people to share information and now with Facebook Connect they can do that from their own websites. If were not on the edge of that we’re not doing a good job.
JB: When you announced this last year everybody ran into their meeting rooms to ask what are web going to build. A year later, there’s a feeling that the platform hasn’t lived up to its potential. There has been some criticism from people here.
MZ: Earlier this year we changed the way the platform works. What we basically did was we skewed the incentives for developers. The amount of attention that an application gets is directly proportional to the amount that they let share information.
JB: Give us an example of applications that are going well.
MZ: With the election Causes has been doing pretty well. When we changed the platform we knew that applications that just put boxes in peoples’ profiles would be hurt. Anything built around user interfaces can now be built on their own website. It’s inherently making a site social to plug into Facebook Connect. We took a slightly slower ramp up period and we learned from the last time that we’d like to be more careful about it.
JB: How do you and your partners make money with Facebook Connect?
MZ: For the first version there is nothing that is revenue generation. The whole model is ad driven. If people are using their Facebook data around the web there is a direct correlation with how their using the site.
JB: Let’s talk about the online ad piece. Is Twitter just a feature of Facebook?
MZ: I think they’re doing really great stuff. Is it a feature? I think they’re a great tool.
JB: Is Twitter a partner for Facebook Connect?
MZ: Yeah.
JB: Is the model an endorsement model or is there another model?
MZ: The brands we are mainly working with now, the ads have been performing fairly well. We have a second iteration of engagement ads. We launched Social Ads last year and we released a new form of engagement ads on the homepage this year. People don’t just want to see news, they want to see what’s going on with their friends. When we see other people and their friends engaging with an ad, it makes it more likely that other people engage with that ad. Mark Zuckerberg is now going over the types of ads that are being run currently.
JB: I want to ask you about something that has come up in the past few days. One of those is that Facebook has been banned in the workplace. There are a lot of things that make FAcebook not useful for inside companies. What do you think of that market?
MZ: Anecdotally we’ve seen a trend in the opposite direction. Financial companies initially blocked them for security purposes, but companies are making it now so people can communicate at work but not directly with their own co-workers. The same type of incentive systems that the site is built off, sharing information and getting feedback, has been working for some companies that use the Facebook platform.
JB: We talked about Connect, exporting a feed, etc. On Google I’d love to check out my Facebook feed so I can make Adsense for Facebook. Is this why you aren’t doing OpenSocial?
MZ: I think people are making this out to be a lot more than it is.
JB: That’s my job, we’re on stage.
MZ: There’s a lot going on between each of these companies and we see a clear trend of people sharing more information online and eventually you can have public streams and things like that. We’ve moved in that direction and on the platform side it’s really early.
Audience Question (US.com Writer): Do you have a plan for retention of members?
MZ: This has always been an interesting stat about Facebook. We always have this pretty amazing stat that 50 percent of users are active every day. What we do is help people share things online. If we continue building things that help people share information with the people they want in the places they want to, we’ll see people continue to share more information online, doubling year after year. I think the best strategy is to contin
Audience Question: We created a huge presence on Facebook with a page around a political issue. It grew to be 140,00 members (Proposition 8). Do you see pages end of life?
MZ: I think people use this successfully. Whether it’s to overthrow regimes or have a policy.
