Benchmarking success in online social networks has been on lots of Marketer’s minds lately. Have you heard of the latest Facebook group called, Canadian Music Industry Alumni?
The Canadian Music Industry Alumni Facebook group was started yesterday and now sports about thirty members. It was created as a place for people who worked (in one capacity or another) within the Canadian Music industry. It’s a place for those people to reconnect, share stories or brainstorm. I joined yesterday as soon as I saw it. OK, I’ll come clean, I created the group.
I was inspired by a Facebook friendship invitation I got from someone that I had not heard from in many years. When I saw that person’s friend list, I recognized a lot of people from my time spent in the Canadian music industry, and that inspired me to see if we could connect more people. So, I created the Canadian Music Industry Alumni Facebook group.
Why am I telling you this?
Whatever industry you’re in, there are groups of people interested in it along with you. Because of Facebook’s booming user base, Marketers are able to create honest groups around their areas of interest to gauge who will connect with it (and what they’ll do with it). Also, because of the way Facebook is structured, and how it shares in your personal feed what others are up to, all I had to do was create the group and invite a small handful of friends I’m already connected to (and who might be interested in this subject) to join.
I’m testing whether or not the Canadian Music industry people are present in Facebook. I’m testing whether or not someone who joins the group will rise up and take it to another level (brand evangelists). I’m testing if there will be a momentum effect (here’s how WebProNews explains the “momentum effect”: “The ‘Momentum Effect’, is a term created by Marketing Revolution that measures the effect of a brand within a social network and examines consumer -to- consumer communication). I’m testing whether or not once this group gains some traction, if the members will be open to share unique opportunities.
Basically, I’m playing around with Facebook and seeing what the inherent marketing opportunities are.
So no, I’m not pimping for you to join this group (unless you are a Canadian music industry alumni looking to connect with some of your peers). I am, however, having lots of fun watching how people join and find out about the group (it’s a fascinating experiment in online word of mouth). And, ultimately, I’ve had a smile on my face all day just hearing back from people I have not seen in a long, long time. That alone, brings the brand power and momentum effect of Facebook up another notch in my world.
One divergent thought (but still related to Facebook): how come I can’t grab my personal News Feed and dump it (via RSS) into Google Reader?
How sweet would that be?
Facebook Group Enables Us To Experiment With The Momentum Effect
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page views, Mitch … page views.
RSS means less pageviews, and even though its usage still only reaches a small percentage (IMO) of facebook users, it will inevitably grow.
At least that’s what I think. I mean, how hard can it be to implement a feed system on your personnal news feed.
… come to think of it, they could do something feedburner-style and inject ads in the feed though.
Very interesting sort of like a living focus group for marketers, what an excellent idea. I’ll have to create a group or two now, thanks for the idea Mitch. It would be interesting to see what new metrics come ou tof such experimentation or if it’s just a hot or cold gage for a brand or group. With time spent on a website becoming a prevelant metric because of ajax applications who knows what metrics will come out of social media? I believe eventually marketers will figure out how to market to interests and I guess we already are in a way rather than marketing to a demographic. Maybe this is the first step in the social media space, what do you think?