Facebook Tells Biggest Advertisers: "Before Facebook the web was like a masked ball...3 social Graphs within Facebook"

Here are revealing excerpts from the recent Omnicom Media and Facebook event in London.  It illustrates the dangers of powerful forces shaping our digital media experiences without the kind of disclosure, user control, transparency and privacy rules required for democratic societies.  Excerpts:
 

On the 16 September 2011 over 200 of our agencies’ (OMD UK, Manning Gottlieb OMD, M2M, PHD, PHD North, Rocket) clients, business directors, strategists and executives attended the first ever Facebook OmnicomMediaGroup, UK conference in Shoreditch. The day was designed to explore creativity and innovation in marketing with Facebook and ultimately to open the world of Facebook up to a wider range of our clients’ brands...

 
OmnicomMediaGroup, UK's spend with Facebook has increased over the past 4 years from £900,000 to £9,000,000

Facebook's own stats show its clear leadership in the social media space:

- 90% of social networking time is now spent on Facebook
- 169m PC hours are spent on Facebook
- There are more than 350 million active users currently accessing Facebook through their mobile devices...
Andrew ‘Boz’ Bosworth, Director of Product Engineering, Facebook...Boz has embedded this Hack culture in Facebook and through their internal Hackathon sessions (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackathon)
  Facebook has created 24 new key features or product developments - Facebook Chat being just one example. Born in a Hackathon session not so long ago, more than 7 billion messages are now sent each day on Facebook Chat! To put that into context, 20 billion SMS messages are sent worldwide each day...

 
 

Mark Holden, Worldwide Strategy Director, PHD Worldwide:
...He started by highlighting that we now live in a world where 1.2 billion people in the developed world participate on social networks. These people are not ‘consumers’ but rather ‘independent media owners’. 78% of them are influenced by their friends. Only 12% are influenced by advertising. The next 1billion social network users will come more from mobile than PC....

 
 

Blake Chandlee, VP Emerging Markets Facebook...Blake proposed that agencies will be the new architects of social by design, but we have a long way to go: this journey is 1% finished....

 
 

Brian Boland, Director, Product Marketing Facebook:Word of mouth advertising is nothing new. Digital is just better enabling these conversations. Facebook has enabled these conversations to come online and also helped people to share and express their true identities – for example to show people what they like. Before Facebook the web was like a masked ball. People hid behind avatars and were called things like DarthVAder124, but on Facebook your profile is your true identity. Brian also highlighted that Facebook's content is all user generated. 30 billion pieces of content are shared each month on Facebook. This is the social graph.

For marketers this means we have to create stories worth sharing. The campaigns that make the biggest impact are the ones that people want to share and interact with. It’s key that we understand what really influences people: the advice and opinions of a small number of people connected by strong ties....

 
 

Christian Hernandez, Director of Platform Partnerships, Facebook: There are 3 social Graphs within Facebook
1 identity graph (us)
2 object graph (brand, celebs)
3 connections (the interest graph)
Through Facebook Connect we can now integrate the data on the Open Graph of your profile to help augment your experiences on other sites.
Think of the Facebook platform as a bunch of tools to help build experiences - when these connections are tied together it can become a useful tool for consumers.
For example, on Ticketmaster you can find out where your Facebook friends will be sitting when you’re purchasing your own concert tickets, or through using SongKick you can find the latest concert dates for the bands you like on Facebook.

 
 

...To help drive Facebook Connect’s integration, Facebook is building an engineering team to help UK brands. They will also be launching a preferred development consultant partner’s programme....

 
 

Robert D’Onofrio, Head of Audience Insights, Facebook:   The power of Facebook as a research tool was really brought out in this presentation.

The depth and breadth of Facebook’s users means they can gather accurate insights in a ‘real time’ environment.

30 million users in the UK and 50% of them login daily
• 18-24 years are the most active age group
• 61 percentage of women tell stories on Facebook
• 35 years plus is the fastest growing category
• 35 to 44 years olds check in the most
• 45 plus 7 million likes per month
• A quarter of users share photos of purchases