The Cheerleader that never got laid. Friendster: The Story.

This is a classic story of a hot young thing that skyrocketed to fame, got blinded by the dazzling lights of scrutiny and thudded back to Earth to peter out of sight with a whimper.

There’s many success stories lately of Web2.0 companies making successful exits. MySpace and Youtube come immediately to mind at the forefront of these cool, sexy startups that rode on the wave of “youth-phoria” and their new-found social lives on the web. The founders of Youtube and MySpace may have become the new “rock stars” of the Internet Age, but for every rock star, there’s hundreds of has-beens..

Flashback 2002.

Friendster was touted as the coolest shit we had ever seen. A website that allowed internet users to create web profiles, connect with their old and new friends. The social networking industry was born and heralded as the Next Big Thing in the hype-fueled days of 2002. The mags were going gaga over it, from the notable Time, Forbes to chick reads like Cosmopolitan and Entertainment Weekly. Even Playboy was into them. Its founder, Jonathan Abrams, was THE STAR, showing up at events, with “strikingly beautiful women on each arm”, as NYT reports here.

And Friendster had powerful investors that read like the Hall of Fame of Silicon Valley. John Doerr, Ram Shriram, Peter Thiel (co-founder of PayPal) , Tom Koogle (chief executive of Yahoo through the second half of the 1990’s). It was an All-Star Team. No one could touch them. Google tried buying them in 2003 for $30M but was rebuffed. Friendster thought it could be much bigger, maybe something bigger than what Google is today. They wanted to do everything:

We had a new clothing line come out last week. We’re talking about a reality TV show. I thought it’d be a cool Web site, but the whole cultural thing has been amazing. — Jonathan Abrams speaking on MArch 16, 2004 at the SXSW conference.

Besides, those behind Friendster were so convinced that they were destined to be the next big thing that they instead fixated on the actions of their presumed peers — at least that is Mr. Siegelman’s recollection. “I remember going to these board meetings and feeling disgusted,” he said. “Half of every board meeting was taken up by a discussion of what Google’s going to do, or Yahoo.”…

…The performance problems would come up, but the board devoted most of its time to talking about potential competitors and new features, such as the possibility of adding Internet phone services, or so-called voice over Internet protocol, or VoIP, to the site. Source: New York Times

But today, we know what happened, Friendster is literally the jaded cheerleader who never got laid after attending all the frat parties and courted by all the football jocks. It lies listlessly in 14th position in a ranking of all social networking websites, hundreds of time smaller in membership size behind MySpace. Its website still sucks, where MySpace has bands, TV celebrities and cool people hanging out, a $900M advertising deal with Google, Friendster has to make do with lame shit like this on its front page:

Do you want to be a fan of Cornetto ice cream?

So why did Friendster fail? I strongly think it is due to the absolute loss of control of the founders over the company’s direction and strategy. The “too many cooks in the kitchen” analogy came straight to mind. Secondly, the “experienced” investors dun get social networking. They focused too much on the money and not enough on the idea. Social netowrking is a real fuzzy concept that requires a lot of chemistry between the founders and its users. THink Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg who was not even 21 when he started it, MySpace’s young music-loving founders, Youtube’s Chad, Jawed and Steve who digged videos. Can you imagine the 50-something board members understanding this?

The number of mistakes made at Friendster are many:

1. Founder Jonathan Abrams was replaced as CEO in April 2o04.
2. Board members who had great resumes but did not understand the product. The legendary John Doerr was deemed to have “little feel for the product”, and taken off the board by his fellow KPCB partner Siegelman.
3. A rotating-door CEO policy

The board replaced Mr. Abrams with one of its own, Mr. Koogle, the former chief executive of Yahoo. But Mr. Koogle served only three months, a temporary caretaker who showed up at the office only sporadically, former Friendster employees said. The board next chose a television industry executive, Scott M. Sassa, to replace Mr. Koogle. That selection might have made sense if the company had been in position to start cutting big advertising deals. But it was not, given that its Web site was not up to speed. Mr. Sassa left after less than a year, which was nearly twice the tenure of his successor, Taek Kwan, who left at the end of 2005, six months after he started.

I truly believe Friendster is a good lesson for social networking entrepreneurs trying to create the next MySpace. Its way too easy to think any kid can code a website in his room and ask 100 friends to spread the word and them to spread to another 2 virally by themselves and hope for it to scale the Hitwise/ Alexa ranking s subsequently. Yes, myYearbook.com, founded by a 16-year old student, is ranked higher than Friendster currently.

But if you think you can be MySpace, what makes you think you won’t become Friendster instead?

If you like this, this article here.

My Thoughts on the Google-Youtube Marriage

I wrote the following in response to a friend’s email, since I don’t have much time to really sit down and blog these days but felt the need to share my views on this deal. This post will be some off-the cuff thoughts as i wanted to bounce some ideas off here. Pardon the factual errors but I really want to get a feel of what some of you guys might be thinking out there..

The Question:

“Some seem to think it’s brilliant for google to buy them out in order to escalate themselves as a media gateway. While other’s think that google’s bringing the bubble back by throwing money on eyeballs and nothing else.

Is it a smart move? Or have they really lost it this time?”

My response:

i think its a wise move at this time. Strategy-wise, its both a defensive and an offensive move at the same time. It fends off the vultures from Yahoo, Microsoft, NewsCorp, AOL Time Warner, who will have otherwise unassailable community bases from their Yahoo groups, IM, MySpace and AOl communities, if they bought Youtube instead.

Community
Hence, buying community is one strategic move Google made, raising its user base to parity level with the other players. Remember, so far they only have “searchers”, not community members, and I dun count Orkut or Gmail users which are insignificant.

I consider this a defensive move, its the last chance to buy a community, other than an expensive buyout of AOL. And Facebook is just a social network, no real technology capabilities like Youtube.

Now for offensive,

Revenue driver diversification

Google is getting shit from Wall Street on its one-trick pony act of relying only on text-based ads. In the realm of advertising, it is king in text while the whole world knows “Video” and “rich media” ads are the next big thing due to the importance of the interactivity factor when reaching out to consumers. Google needs to develop that capability and it is, by signing deals with MySpace and Viacom’s MTV division to distribute their video-based ads on its search engine and affiliated sites. However, all these are only biting away at the huge video pie as the current Google “real estate” is limited to its search pages and its affiliated sites. Hardly a lot of prime video inventory for advertisers to choose from. Crucially, the bulk of their current users are on their search results pages which is video-free and I think its wise to stay that way to avoid looking like Yahoo.

So yes, I think buying the largest video distribution website in Youtube acquires them massive advertising inventory with accompanying users who are used to perusing video content (and wun find them obtrusive to the user experience). This move is both offensive and defensive at the same time. Offensive as they enhance their stranglehold on video ad distribution by having Youtube to complement their Viacom and Myspace deals,. Defensive cos they prevent some other company from buying Youtube and threatening their domineering status. In a way, it has become a two-horse race now between Myspace and Youtube for serving video content. Hence a 2 horse race between News Corp and Google. Google wins by preventing a third player from storming the party and limits competition with a “former old media warhorse” in NewsCorp, forcing the latter to compete on technology which is Google’s strong suit.

But the price? Thats a separate issue. I see numbers floated around of $32 worth of per-user acquisition costs which is decent compared with the $580 million buyout of Internmix Media (includes Myspace) which had close to 30 25M users that time and works out to approx $100 $23 per user. Again, my numbers might be wrong bbut shld be in the ballpark, a fact check is needed but read these numbers somewhere from techcrunch probably and am using them here for illustrative purposes. Based on this, Youtube has 72M unique visitors per month working out to $1650M/$72M= $23/user. For the NewsCorp-Intermix deal, based on this article, the user-acquisition cost is about $580M/ 23M= $25. That is if, you believe into using user-acq costs as a rough valuation model..

To add on, I think a lot of the media attention has been on legal liabilities centering around the copyright infringement issues. That might be why pple are not buying much google stock as they are fearful the courts will wipe out any revenue advantages such a deal will bring.

And that is true, alot of home-made content is amateurish save for a few really good ones made by the next Spielberg… I use Youtube to watch Jon stewart, family guy and some really cool viral ads. But i also use it, for eg today, to watch some amateur clips on North Korea taken by tourists and journalists when they visited in an earlier time Kim Jong Il was less crazy.

Alot of this has to come down to deal-making by the Google folks, which is why I believe the deals signed with the TV networks on the day before they announced the deal was orchestrated to prevent any free-falling of the stock. Its too bloody coincidental to not be. In the long run, they really have to fight with NewsCorp and its Fox network while gaining allies with with cable channels,. CBS, NBC. We forgot someone important here too which has been really pushing the frontiers in opening up Old Media and that is Apple and its new affiliate Disney Networks with ABC.

I am guessing, really a wild guess here, that Google is relying on the advertising model to roll out media and videop content over the web while Apple is advocating you download the clip and pay. Google will prefer to stream it over their vast fiber optic capabilities and give content away for free over Youtube, by allowing ad placement where as Apple is a direct download, pay-per-clip model that allows ownership of the content. The competitive dynamic in terms of content delivery and revenue model is interesting and I like to see more discussion on this.

Apple-Disney, NewsCorp-MySpace and now Google-Youtube. Who’s gonna try to crash this party next?

Related post: Business 2.0, Techcrunch, SGEntrepreneurs

Entrapment!… in Online Social Networks

I have officially become a Facebook junkie.. and stalker too, if you count the amount of times I have clicked on profiles and groups in order to identify patterns and behaviors for my thesis topic. Plus its an incredible time waster getting really distracted by cool stuff i find and not working on my thesis instead, thats the real killer.. I wonder how anyone doing research in this field can really do it without getting hooked eventually..

Maybe its not a good idea after all to write about about the web, cos I am really trapped in it now. =) But i’m luvin’ it. I also realize I am not an academic because all i can think of, while surfing Facebook, are not theoretical concepts but marketing ideas and revenue models.

My thesis topic is “Influence on Online Social Networks”. I am trying to investigate how information diffuses across virtual communities such as Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Friendster, by understanding individual motivations and also how social structure affects the desire to perform the action of passing along a meme. My goal is to work out a model for designing online marketing campaigns for online social networks. Particularly in the context of viral campaigns like the adidas world cup campaign on myspace that garnered thousands of “friends” within a week..

Such self-organized and organic evangelizing of memes hold massive potential for marketers. Being an avid user myself, I am  trying to think of a mechanism to ride on such trends as a marketer, but I cannot find a scientific way to re-create such viral behavior, much less find literature by academics who offer some insights. There are exceptions of course, Danah Boyd and Fred Stutzman. Which comes back to what I always believe in, only our own generation hold the key to the digital revolution. Online social networks are a slightly different ball game in terms of its sociological profile, they are not “real” and are only the “horizon” too what Fred calls the study of “socio-technical” behavior of web users on such networks. The disengagement of reality in some online interactions might just be turning some of us into cyborgs…

Back to the topic, some friends are asking me what I am writing about exactly. So here’s a draft abstract i crammed out of my confused mind:

In this dissertation, we will examine how ideas gain influence among members on online social networks (OSNs). An online social network is a virtual community of web users and is characterized by its consumer orientation and a platform that enables the creation and maintenance of web identities in addition to interactive features for the purpose of social exchanges between its members.

This computer-mediated form of communication is wildly popular among youths today. OSNs have been lauded for the swift propagation of recent pop culture trends due to the enhanced network effects offered by the internet form of information transmission. By studying the many interest groupings and movements in OSNs, we build a model that allows us to understand the diffusion of information. In particular, we seek to explore how network independent variables such as personality and network-dependent variables such as connectivity, social structure has an impact on the formation, growth and influence of web-based ideas/ memes. We compare the studies of such groups across some of the most popular networks today and attempt to apply these findings to the field of online marketing.

Some questions simmering at the back of my mind:

1. What causes an idea to spread in online social networks?
2. What is the “DNA” (genetic structure) of an influential/ viral idea on OSNs?
3. Is it the presence of “power connectors” or does the topology of a successful viral movement reveal how social structure helps in idea diffusion?

Think about this: why did you join a particular social network? You were not forced to by the company itself, no way. There’s no one who can command you to press a button and fill up a tedious form over the internet. Its your choice. And a conscious choice at that.

You were most likely influenced by your friends, people you trust who had sold you on the benefits of linking up on that network. It could be humor, could be voyeurism, gossip on friends, sharing interests, keeping in touch.. There’s an immense social blanket we wrap around us and an OSN membership might just help provide that extra comfort.

So we establish that a social network membership was obtained due to viral, peer to peer marketing. Most of your friends joined, and hence you join, and you move on to ask others to join. The cycle continues. No external influence, its all intra-community peer pressure plus maybe that self-initiated curiousity and desire.

But membership does not equate active participation. Some people never upload photos, nor leave testimonials, wall writings or update their profile. These activities are important in filtering the active members from the passive ones. Its a volitional/ conscious choice again. These people may just be passive consumers or voyeurs of your updates or they just fail to log on after that intial spike of interest. A social network has no value for any user nor marketer without constant activity. Hence, I postulate on the existence of an “effective social network”, one that creates and communicates social value, or what Malcolm Gladwell might call the mavens, connectors and salesmen.

These connectors are the true engine of a social network which thrives on content and media generated by its own users. They lubricate the entire operations of the network by contributing, publicizing, modifying, “stealing” and criticizing all this social content of their own, of friends or strangers. It is them which spark off “flame wars” or the next meme that will fuel a huge flurry of online activity that makes social network contribution so fun.

The focus of my thesis is on understanding the topology/ social structure of these social sub-networks, (the groups of users who have consciously rallied and engaged in activity around common memes) and the roles and importance of “influencers” (mavens, connectors, salesmen). I will also be attempting to create a link between how the process of meme propagation can be extended for application to consumer marketing campaigns in the form of memes.

It all sounds rather scattered now, lets hear what you can make of it.

The Revolt of the Masses in Facebook

Update: Even Time Magazine wants a piece of this action.

Facebook, the No1 social networking site for college students, is undergoing massive internal turmoil among its online community.

The launch of 2 new features, “News Feed” and “Mini Feed”, which allows for real time updates and tracking of one’s online activitiy, (from new friends added, change in relationship status from attached to single, change in favorite movies etc..) has acquired Facebook the new and unsavory tag of “Stalkerbook”. This is sparking privacy concerns that used to be synonymous with MySpace and not Facebook which offers “exclusive” membership to only college students and certain corporations.

Here’s more about it from Scoble and Bitemarks, and here’s what I think:

People should understand an online social network is still a really “raw” innovation in terms of its impact on real people’s personal lives, or specifically, the self-realization of that impact by a social network user) Its one thing to want to expose your life on the web but another for everyone to know you are exposed. When you are dealing with real people and their lives, you should be sensitive, more so for Facebooking which is a major part of a college student’s social life. This is not about social networking anymore but social engineering when you try to meddle so much as to make everyone’s Facebook activity so transparent. Be subtle, make the new features opt-in, beta test it before a full public network-wide launch.. is what facebook sould have done.

Of course, there’s way more posts about this highly unpopular feature within the Facebook network, especially the proliferation of anti-Facebook groups, protests and boycotts, ironically within Facebook itself, showing the high dependency of Facebookers’ social life on the network and which had perhaps held the community at ransom to its founders.

There is even one Facebook group that calls itself the “Official Group for Petition” and has amassed more than 100,000 thousands members within one day, (update: it now has 591,888 members at Singapore time 135am , see pic)… UPDATE UPDATE: its up to 601,000+ members at S’pore time 230am) thanks to a new feature called “Global Groups” that enables Facebook-wide, non-college specific group formation.

Looks like Facebook is fast cultivating its reputation as the new “Evil Empire” or the “Old Microsoft”. Where’s their “Scoble”?

How to Be a Social Network Superstar

Hail! All hail the “Queen of MySpace”, newly crowned by Vanity Fair in their March 2006 issue. The Queen herself has almost a million Myspace “friends” and counting (982229 at time of posting), including real celebrities such as the band Nine Inch Nails.

Christine Dolce, who also goes by her Myspace alias Forbidden, used to be a cosmetics salesgirl at some mall before her inspired take towards her MySpace profile shot her into stratospheric fame. Reading her blog is like a “Celebrities for Dummies” tutorial.

Whats her formula? Pics always tell the truth, not words (unless you are JK Rowling)

The last pic above is from Stuff Magazine, one of many “lad mags” you will find her on. But the first two photos are symbolic of her style that got her fame.

A buxomic figure + Edgy/ Punk Rock style + Good photography + provocative poses = glamorous shots, which are damn viral on social networks and ensure high attention and profile views from all the men. The professional and methodical approach to marketing herself and even branding herself as “Forbidden” is simply alluring and differentiates herself from so much of the MySpace sluts. Not to mention throwing in dozens of photos, blogging frequently about her road to glamor and glitz, “mentoring” wannabes, being nice and welcoming to all friend requests on MySpace. Christine kept her story real, keeping to her amateurish roots on Myspace, told the story faithfully through personal media such as blogs and balanced it well with her increasingly professional studio shots.

She has rode on her initial fame to also launch her own clothing line(Destroyed Denim jeans) like many other self-respecting celebrity would too, think JLo, Britney. And similarly, she also has multiple product endorsements on her profile of her photographer, media firms, all neatly tied in with her own personal brand which shines ever so brightly on MySpace. It was her latest conquest of Unilever that caught my attention as she’s hired to market the consumer giant’s line of Axe deodorant products.

Everyone loves a rags to riches story, particularly one that is gathering in steam like Christine’s. Its way cooler to be part of the making of a celebrity on a social network than just witnessing the finished product which skips the social participation stage like so many other offline manufactured celebrities.

>And if you think softcore porn photographs are not enough for her to hit the mainstream, you will be surprised to hear of her mentions on established mainstream media such as the Economist, Wall Street Journal, Business 2.0 who have lauded her as the icon of the New Media wave that Rupert Murdoch is betting his fame on to ride it successfully. Business 2.0 went as far to laud her as one of the hits in their “Hits and Misses” feature, alongside Valley luminaries such as Steve Jobs, the godfather of PC Bill Gates, and the Google rock stars of Sergey and Larry.

Christine Dolce’s meteoric rise through the Internet is set to go even further when she appears on Playboy in October 2006.

While her achievements are certainly noteworthy by themselves, her role in our cultural world today has a deeper significance. A new message to all aspiring fame-seekers:

Celebrity status is no longer a monopoly of media giants but a democracy for web-savvy amateurs.

Christine’s a web-born celebrity, one of a few that have escaped the monitor screens to really hit paydirt and gain fame in the offline world. The empowering influence of the internet used to centre around existing offline celebrities such as Britney Spears, Baywatch babes, Beyonce who occupy top spots on search engine traffic but the Youtube phenom has spawned multiple amateurs who have relied on sheer ingenuity and raw talent or looks to rub it with the multi-million dollar image makeovers by professional firms.

Christine certainly won’t be the last web celebrity we see to have been pushed to the top of her career by a mass of gawky internet users on a social network.The Internet has given birth to the voices of millions who clamor for celebrities or cutural icons that are truer reflections of ourselves rather than the manufactured superstars of yesteryear. That fuzzy, warm feeling, of knowing someone who was equally an unknown as you were years ago to have made it and become a celebrity through a social network alone, is truly inspirational.

Related Articles:

Is MySpace the Future of Web Marketing?

Teen Spirit worth a $60 billion bet?

More here…

The Long Tail Theory – Our Dilbert of the Digital Age

I have a very good friend who always asks me: “How do you make a million bucks?”

There’s a lot of vaporish theories lotsa smart alecs try in wrestling over this question.

But, here’s a smart-ass answer I like: Make a $1000 a 1000 times.

There’s another way to interpret the question though. A two-sided answer to this classical question:

1. Sell a lot of a few items (be it goods or services)
2. Sell a few of many items.

The Autocratic World of the Creator Age

The thing is, in a time not too long ago (before the Internet Age), there’s an amazing homogeneity in the products we buy, the clothes we wear, the books we read, the movies we watch, the songs we listen to. You go into a shopping centre and you end up buying the same birthday gift for every friend, disappointing the poor fella who wonders what he did wrong to receive three CDs of the latest hit album which he hated but was considered a safe choice.
Many successful enterprises today subscribe to Point 1. They hold a carefully-groomed, meticulously-managed product portfolio and hire legions of pesky salesmen, clairvoyant crystal-ball-gazing marketing gurus, self-righteous management consultants in an attempt to uncover the Next Big Thing before their “Auld Enemy” or competitor beats them. In order to manage the scarcity of their resources enforced upon by the classical laws of “brick and mortar” economics, they focus their efforts on a select small group of products and attempt to homogenize product selection choices of customers. They treat customers as target boards and call effective marketing “targetting” as if finding customers was an activity akin to shooting at the rifle range. During selling, some seek to convince you honestly, some to brainwash you and totally rewire your brain (check multi-level marketing), and some just plain tricking/ scamming. It was a Command and Control Economy.
Jailed by the Space-Time Continuum: The Autocracy of Shelf Space and Distribution Cost

In pre-Internet Days, consumers were dung, subjected to the whims of Creators also known as manufacturers and their partner-in-crime, the Retailers. Retailers had finite shelf space, finite stores, limited human and financial resources to make and subsequently sell products. This is the Spatial Limit.

During the Cold War, the communist regimes best exemplified this as they gave out ration coupons for goods no one had a choice to say no to. With Democracy, we had Sears, evolving to Walmart today with thousands of selections. Yes, the regimes are getting ircreasingly democratic, but the democratization process is by no means complete for us the consumers.

Add the Time Limit too. Our world is segregated by our natural universe of Light and Night. Barring nocturnal humans, our modern society adjusts to nature and structure our social and economic activities in line such conventions. Save for 7-Eleven, most stores earn diminishing returns once we go past peak hours of human activity and encounter rising labor costs.

The Democratic World of the Consumer Age

Enter Ebay, iTunes, MySpace, Amazon. No longer are consumers subjected to the tyranny of the physical world. The Digital Age brought us the Internet, a virtual marketplace of unlimited ideas, products and opportunities. It injected transparency into the consumer world, bringing us hope and optimism while conversely bringing gloom to the Creator class that now has to grapple with a “sentient” Consumer Class no longer shackled by lack of choice.

• Why buy a whole CD when u only like one song? It took almost a decade of online piracy and still the music industry, which is supposed to be in the business of providing listening pleasure, is not listening.
• If you thought you liked Artist A, well there’s tons of Artist-A clones, or remixes. And this is just the variance in terms of product – the “What”. The “how” of listening to music by Artist A is no longer only your local record store, you could still choose classicial CD format, or DVD of the music video versions, MP3 format, AAC for your iPod. Same goes for say a book u liked.
• If you thought Dan Brown was good, check out the clones he spawned, the reviews on Amazon, the thousands of retailers you could possibly get it at, at a price cheaper than your local brick and mortar store. Or perhaps you can buy an “ebook”. Maybe you prefer listening as it fits your commuting lifestyle in the mornings while fighting with the peak-hour traffic in the trains or the highways. Buy an “audio-book” then.
• No time to shop because you are at work all the time?

Disrupting the Space-Time Continuum

Well, the Internet Store’s open 24/7/365. Globally. Anytime. Anywhere. Any customized format.

I just had to plug this book. I am halfway through and I can’t stop nodding my head all the time as I read it. The Long Tail by Chris Anderson. He inspired me to write this dead in the middle of the night at 3am.  There’s a Long Tail blog too. Click here to check out Guy Kawasaki’s new-found affection for Long Tail theories too.

Cool FaceBook Advertising

I really like this ad.

Its NOT one of those banner/ tower ads at the side of the toolbar YOU ALWAYS IGNORE that flashes free emoticons, win ipod nanos by clicking a gadzillion links, signing up for useless programs and waiting for eternity for them to send you some free shit. I ever clicked on those.

But I clicked on this ad. Immediately. I think that alone is noteworthy considering how attention-deficient and ad-weary I am.

Let me explain. The 3 banners above display the permutations sequentially. Its one of those flash ads that allows time for processing info in a storytelling fashion. I think the “hooked up” and “resume builder” caught my attention in the first and second main frames. I think that was good enough for me to pique my interest and do whatever that ad wanted me to do in the 3rd frame. haha, yes, i was impulsive, 3 seconds was all it took to sway me to make that important click of my mouse.

I think this ad earns high marks for contextuality, if anything else. College students love to hook up, so it was important that phrase was in the first frame considering how averse pple are to credit card programs. FOr the second frame, any fool loves free stuff, its the Holy Grail of Cheapskateness and the bread of starving college students. yea, u have the $200 but that didn;t mean anything to me, it was the resume builder that was important to career-conscious college students, especially those outside of their freshman year looking at their next internship or career option. I thought thats another winner, showing the world that at least somebody’s using their brain during ad conceptualization and earning their keep.

So are u keen to know more on what happened after I clicked?

Nice way to build a legion of viral marketers by dangling lotsa carrots in front of them. If Chase actually articulated what prizes, maybe it would be more effective. Nonetheless, its still a neat and elegant way to build brand amabassadors in each school. I think the odds are high that there are at least a couple of fools like me in each college for this thing to work. Hell, I think it works and has higher effectiveness than email marketing which is just plain spam.

All Chase has to do to really make this successful is to give real prizes REAL FAST to selected students. Yup, make the marketing crap in this ad reality and actualize hope (of getting those prizes) into real gratification. You can be sure those squealing cheerleaders or rabid frat boys are gonna turn this ad into a real epidemic among their friends. And the cool thing is social networks like Facebook provide all the mechanics to identify the true “viruses” and “opinion influencers” in the network either by number of wall posts they get, events they attend, photos they upload, no. of time they change their statuses etc to get to the real socializers who will kick this whole thing off.

After this, I cant imagine how lame soooo many of the oher banner ads on MySpace and Friendster are. Got a Facebook account? Check it out if you ain’t sick of my gushing of this ad yet.