We want to encourage and support the facebook developer community. We welcome everyone’s participation in this fantastic journey. It is indeed a great time to be involved in the industry. Feel free to reach out, my number is on the blog (how rare is that).
Rodney Rumford

http://digg.com/software/Get_Productive_with_the_Best_Facebook_Apps

http://digg.com/tech_news/10_Favorite_Facebook_Applications

I really appreciate you starting this series which will hopefully help spread marketing best practices to the early adopters of the Facebook Social Operating System. Since many of your readers are probably Facebook developers, I think that they will especially benefit from paying attention to the marketing tips that they learn here.

Never in the history of software entrepreneurism has there been an opportunity for individual developers to create real wealth without adding a huge marketing staff. In the Facebook economy, we have an almost perfect application development meritocracy where the best idea, best implementation and best integration with Facebook will win. For software engineers like myself, consumer marketing has always been more art than science and most marketing geniuses have only been easy to spot in hindsight (e.g., like Jeff Bezos who managed Amazon’s marketing, Meg Whitman who managed eBay’s marketing and Eric Schmidt who managed Google’s marketing). Were their successes (which I don’t begrudge them) actually the result of their mastery of online marketing science or were they more attributable to being first mover in their field or stepping onto an e-ticket ride to orbit after the rocket had already reached escape velocity or some other equally non-repeatable conjunction of random events?

Let’s Focus on the Science of Facebook Marketing

To be more science than art or even just dumb luck, marketing should be able to demonstrate repeatable patterns of success. As the saying goes in patent law, someone who is competent in the field should be able to take the drawings and descriptions of the invention and recreate a similar system that actually produces the same results. Hopefully, this will be Rodney’s standard for discussing “systems” or “best practices” for Marketing Your Facebook Applications. Telling us how Max Levchin of Slide launched MyQuestions on June 6, 2007 and had 2,797,694 users just 50 days later is not that interesting when the Marketing Formula reads like this:

1. Achieve First Mover advantage with an app like Top Friends that gains 10 million users

2. Use Top Friends profile page screen real estate which recieves 1 billion monthly page views to cross-promote MyQuestions

3. Use Top Friends canvas page screen real estate which receives 100 million monthly page views to cross-promote MyQuestions

4. Use Top Friends #1 app rank to ride Facebook’s growth curve of adding 10 million users in the past 4 months to provide for millions of fresh app installs which allow for chaining of MyQuestions app installs as part of the Add Application process

5. Use Top Friends’ cross-promotion advantages to create a picket fence worth of other Slide-owned, semi-useful and/or fluff applications that can be used in a similar manner to cross-promote MyQuestions

While there are general Marketing Best Practices that can be learned from watching everything that Slide and RockYou (the dominant app players in Facebook) do, the average Facebook Application developer is starting from scratch. Facebook’s throttling back of the App Invite system to 10 per day has made it harder for those who weren’t part of the F8 Platform launch to quickly jump up to the 100K range where the App Cross-Promotion techniques that Slide and RockYou use so well can really take hold.

fbExchange.com is the closest thing to a developer co-op that currently exists for “the rest of us” to leverage the App Cross-Promotion techniques to our advantage when we only have one or two apps that are struggling in the “no man’s land” of only 500 to 10,000 users. Hopefully, the folks at fbExchange.com will get busy adding all of the various viral hooks that Slide and RockYou are using (e.g., chaining together app installs, cross-promoting apps at the top and bottom of the application box on the profile page, deep integration of cross-promotion links as “app features” like Top Friends uses via the tiny icons they recently added under each Top Friend’s picture that encourages you to add FunWall, SuperPoke, etc.).

It seems clear that Slide and RockYou will soon begin to open up their viral engines and their huge numbers of profile and canvas pageviews to other Facebook developers. These valuable assets will go primarily to those Facebook App Companies who have fresh cash from Facebook-oriented VC’s (like Altura Ventures and Bay Partners). This will likely create a phenomenon like in the early days of the internet when AOL and Yahoo’s portal revenue went through roof with each new VC-backed dotcom startup. The rule was raise $30 million from the VC’s, spend $10 million with AOL and $10 million with Yahoo to gain eyeballs, and hope the remaining $10 million lasted you until you could figure out a monetization strategy. This is what passed for “marketing wisdom” in the early internet days. While AOL and Yahoo partied like it was 1999 on their CPM cash they were being funnelled via the VC and public market’s largesse, they missed the boat on the emergence of bid-based CPC revenue that GoTo invented and Google exploited to gave real marketers a measurable tool for delivering a true ROI on their marketing spend.

So, while fully funded Facebook App Companies can take a quick but expensive path to millions of users, the real challenge for the true Facebook Entrepreneur is to figure out how to do it without getting addicted to OPM (Other People’s Money). These are the creative folks that Altura Ventures with whom is really interested in partnering. The Facebook territory represents both vast rolling prairies that are ripe for plowing and planting and huge thriving forests that can be logged into lumber. It is like in the very early days of England when the oak trees were so dense that a squirrel could cross from coast to coast without touching the forest floor. This virgin state of Facebook’s application space won’t last forever and it is up to us pioneers to take the resources that Facebook has given us and turn them into something of lasting value.

It is a pleasure to have sites like FaceReviews where we can share and learn together.

Thanks,
Lee Lorenzen
CEO, Altura Ventures

(feel free to Friend Me anytime or join the Official Altura Ventures and AppFactory Investment Fund Group or contact me directly at LeeL@altura.com)

(c) 2007 Altura Ventures LLC.