Mitch Joel
Sun

It’s funny how new things can sometimes feel old. And, in the same breath, it’s one of the most ridiculous things that can happen to a business. That “thing” is following whatever new and shiny object is currently the mass-media darling when it comes to technology and new media.

As new as Facebook still is (the company was founded in 2004, but only started opening its online social networking doors to those without a university e-mail address in late 2006), there are now many people who feel it’s “sooo May 2009″ and have moved on to other online social networking platforms like Twitter. Even Twitter seems to be feeling a little old-ish when compared to foursquare.

What? You haven’t heard about foursquare yet? (Fret not, we’ll look at the latest mobile/web craze that lets everybody know where you are in an upcoming column). The truth is, none of this is old, and most of these online spaces haven’t even hit the business equivalent of their puberty yet. With all of those people connecting and all of this media attention on them, it’s important to remember that Facebook is still fairly new and evolving … right before our eyes.

One of the most fascinating facts about Facebook came from the blog, ReadWriteWeb, this past July, where it was announced that there are now more grandparents than high-school students on Facebook (it’s a stat I quoted in this column about a month ago, but it bears some more in-depth explanation). On one hand, it totally contradicts everything the majority of us thought about Facebook. We all believed that Facebook was overflowing with university students more interested in posting frosh photos of themselves (and their friends), doing things that none of us would want in a public forum (let alone on a space that any and all of our future employers might see). On the other hand, that many grandparents on Facebook makes perfect strategic sense. And if you have teenage children, you know exactly what I’m talking about: The best person to monitor what your kids are up to online are those kids’ grandparents. In North America, it’s not uncommon for kids to have four, six or even eight grandparents. So, they join Facebook to see what their grandkids are up to. But then grandma gets a friend request from a third cousin who lives in Europe whom she hasn’t seen in over a decade, then she gets another friend request from someone she dated back in high school before she met granddad, and the next thing you know, it’s like a scene out of The Matrix, and grandma just took the red pill right down the rabbit hole. Now, she’s hooked on Facebook and getting all of her friends and family to join. Just like those high-school students … and just like you and me.

As this growth and transition of its user base continues, Facebook has been adapting. From issues of privacy and terms of service, to figuring out how to make advertising work and other monetization strategies, Facebook is not utopia. It has been challenged, and will continue to be challenged. What community with over 300 million active users doesn’t have its kinks? According to Facebook statistics, more than eight billion minutes are spent on Facebook each day, and the average user has 130 friends. Beyond the pokes, status updates, and rounds of Mafia Wars, there’s some other, deeper and more powerful connections happening … and this has a huge impact on how business works.

Earlier this week, Sysomos (a Toronto-based social media analytics company) released a report titled Inside Facebook Pages, which analyzed nearly 600,000 of these pages that are essentially profiles for brands of all kinds (organizations, companies, and celebrities of varying degrees of popularity). These Facebook pages have a similar look and feel to those of our personal profile pages, but they have additional functionality. The pages were introduced back in 2007, and have had a huge impact on how brands build community and connect to their consumers. This first large-scale study of Facebook pages looked at everything from popularity, amount of content posted, number of fans, and more. The report also provides businesses with a birds-eye view into what people are doing and what they are connecting to.

According to the report, the average Facebook page has 4,596 fans, and only four per cent of the 600,000 pages analyzed have more than 10,000 fans. Only 297 Facebook pages (about 0.05 per cent) have more than a million fans, and those pages have nearly three times as much owner-generated content than an average page. But those same pages have nearly 60 times as much fan-generated content. These stats reiterate how hard it is to get consumers to create content for brands, and how hard brands must work to truly build any semblance of community.

Just because Facebook is so popular does not mean it is any kind of marketing silver bullet for your business. In fact, just because people are there, interacting and connecting, doesn’t mean that they care about your business or brand. Beyond figuring out what the business case is for you on Facebook (which is a great first step), what we do learn from reports like Inside Facebook Pages is that brands can effectively communicate and connect with their consumers and fans in ways they could never do before. It’s exciting. It’s still early days. And it’s all still very new.

Mitch Joel is president of the digital marketing agency Twist Image and the author of Six Pixels of Separation.

© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun

Backup drive protects everything on your computer

Matt Hartley
Sun

Bryan McLeod puts the emphasis on Clickfree’s easy backup rather than pure storage.

Bryan McLeod just might be the best insurance salesman in the tech industry.

For the sake of his company, Storage Appliance Corp., he had better be.

Mr. McLeod knows the technology his firm sells isn’t something the average person tends to think about on a daily basis. After all, computer backup drives are hardly a sexy business.

Like fire or flood insurance, he knows that just because people don’t tend to think about backing up the thousands of digital pictures, songs and movies stored on their computer’s hard drive, it doesn’t mean they don’t need to, or want to.

“It’s not like when you buy an iPod,” he said. “With an iPod, you do the setup process… and then all of a sudden you’re listening to beautiful music.

It’s great. There’s instant gratification.

That’s how people think. What do you get when you back up? All you get is peace of mind. It is truly insurance.

You’re protected for ‘someday.’ ” In this case, the insurance Mr. Mc- Leod is selling arrives in the form of the Clickfree Automatic Backup, a line of computer storage products designed to make the backing up of digital files on one’s computer as simple and painless as plugging in a lamp.

Simplicity is the “secret sauce” that drives Clickfree, Mr. McLeod says.

Like the product’s name implies, users don’t need to do anything but plug one of the company’s drives into their computer via a USB connection, and the software on the device automatically begins the backup process and starts transferring files.

That dedication to simplicity is quickly gaining attention from some of the biggest names in the consumer electronics retail space. Clickfree devices are now available in 25 countries and more than 10,000 stores, including Best Buy and Office Depot in the United States and Future Shop and Henry’s outlets in Canada.

While there are dozens of technology heavyweights – including Hewlett- Packard, Seagate and Western Digital – building storage devices, Mr. McLeod contends Clickfree can differentiate itself by pushing the benefits of easy backup, rather than pure storage.

However, retailers not only need to be convinced to carry the Clickfree devices, but also to charge $30 to $40 more than similar-sized computer storage devices sold by competitors, a data point he admits is the biggest stumbling block to getting his devices on to store shelves. (For example, a 250-gigabyte Clickfree drive costs about $140) Of course, Mr. McLeod’s personal track record helps. This isn’t the first time he’s launched a device into a crowded market with a price tag well above that of his competitors.

Before he invested in Clickfree – which was founded by Toronto entrepreneur Ian Collins in 2005 – Mr. Mc- Leod was chief executive of a Torontobased company that made universal remote controls for entertainment systems, called Harmony Inc.

Prior to Harmony, universal remote controls often were difficult to program and cost as little as $10. But by creating a remote control that could download information about the different devices in a user’s home entertainment system over the Internet, Mr. McLeod and his team were able to sell Harmony remotes for anywhere from $100 to $500.

“It seemed like the higher we went in price point, as long as we added the proper features into it like colour LCD screens… the more units we sold, because it was just a way better experience that actually was easier to program and could control your entertainment system,” he said.

Eventually, Harmony was sold to Swiss computer peripheral giant Logitech SA for US$29-million in 2004.

After spending three years with Logitech running the Harmony business, Mr. McLeod left and took over at Storage Appliance Corp.

“One of the things I’m always interested in is trying to take a commoditized category and try to turn it into a value proposition,” he said. “The reason I look for existing categories to turn into a value proposition is because it’s way less work.” “When you design a new product, you have to think, are you designing a product looking for a problem, or are you designing a product by identifying the largest unsolved problem?” he said.

The first time he realized the true scope of Clickfree’s potential was when the devices made their first appearance on the U.S. shopping channel QVC in April 2008. The channel reaches more than 90 million homes and has a predominantly female viewer base.

QVC had purchased 6,000 Clickfree drives and planned to showcase the products during eight, 10-minute spots throughout the day. During the first airing, QVC quickly sold out.

Mr. McLeod was forced to crawl out of bed in the middle of the night to call his manufacturer in China and place an order for 22,000 more devices so the company wouldn’t lose the rest of its time-slots on QVC that day.

“It tells you there’s a massive pentup demand if you can show somebody that there’s a solution that’s demonstrably easier,” he said. “All those women watching knew they had a problem that needed to be solved, they didn’t want their photos to be lost, their videos to be lost, so they bought all 6,000 units in the first 10 minutes.”

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