Here is what the latest stats from Nielsen report . Facebook traffic fell to 22.4M uniques, down from the 24.9M reported in March, someone out there said it was due to seasonality, but if we look at other young target communities we could say that´s not true, Buzznet keeps pushing up an if we look at the amazing LinkedIn we could notice the 361% growth YOY.

Facebook is struggling with the Profile redesign to simplify user interface and gain back their attention, I think they will need to do an awsome job to accomplish the objective, a recently poll by Mashable returned that facebook users are not as engaged as they were a few months ago , so is that it for FB? how can a community site overpass this phenomenon, how can they engage user for real? what really user want? Communities developers should start thinking in a Biological way and learn to be Betamodeling every second.

Im a loyal LinkedIn fan since it was launched on July 17 2007, the amazing functionality it has is not offered by any other, at least as far as I know. So why LinkedIn users are not getting tired with it? because it gives users something more than just Gossip and a little entertainment, it gives users the chance to show everyone how succesfull they are, interchange points of view, being recommended and of course, getting new jobs.

So, some years ago the Bubble was created by site owners and developers, that wont happen anymore, users have the power, users decide when to hit the Bubble, they are in control… a long time ago…

I´ve been doing some research about the industries that will must focus their strategies on Beta Models, and one of the most nominated is the Telcos industry, a few years ago they were focused on acquistion, just that, get as much as clients as you can before your competitors. Then some SMS and thousand of contest driving people to send SMS were done per week, and it worked, so they keep doing the same for some years, and users continue sending SMS because they were told they could win some prizes. Its happening the same that happend to Motorola, they got the RAZOR, it worked and they deploy Razor 1, Razor 2, Razor the third, Razor Fish, any modification of the razor was in the market, why? because the first version worked, but that drives Motorola to the point it is at this moment, losing Market Share against competitors like Nokia and Sony Ericsson that push innovation a little harder to surprise users even if they are happy with the last launched phone. So Telcos could innovate in the same way, users are opened to new alternatives, don´t keep them looking at the same picture for long periods of time, try to move forward and give user more alternatives.

Why is so hard to do it? Why Telco´s still doing SMS and ringtones downloads? because that´s the simplest profit source they found, they have no time to rethink a new way to bring profit, they reload as many times as necessary a methodology until it will stop working.

Telcos need to find user oriented services, those ones that make their lives easier, and I know they are psuhing hard on it, just need a little time…..

Just try to deploy some service different that “ringtone downloads”, think on your users, there are other ways to achieve it, but Telco are not moving fast enough, they need to adpot the Beta Model ASAP.

Does your telco gives what you want? or knows what you need?

Recently I got a link from a coworker about sign up forms, admit it, we are in the data era, we want to ask our user everything, phone, email, address, gender, age, select a password, your location, verify this strange word, agree to our terms of service, some other questions related to what Im trying to sell them and finally, you will get what’s behind the form . We deployed campigns, acquire optins, and after that we just sat on the data and wait for years until the database gets obsolete, we focus on getting data but sometimes we have no idea what to do with it.

Well, after reading the article I got, that has nothing to do with using the data you got in past campaigns, its rather focused on how to ask for inormation , there could be 2 general ways to ask for information, some sites drop me a banner in some site, after I got to the site the first thing is see is a huge form, I have to go through it, otherwise I wont be able to get inside the content, in my experience with campaigns, near 45% people drop off at this moment.

And why do we need to ask information in such way? It should be a better one, don´t you think? users visit your site for content, information, entertainment, you name it, but they don´t visit you to leave their entire history behind in a Sign Up Form. We need to give user reasons to give us data, relevant data.

The idea around the sign up forms is that we should “gradually engage” the users to give us information, show them how your app will be usefull to him and then ask a piece of information, after that if he wnats to get a more personalized service he will need to give us more information, but please, rethink the way you plan your Sites, try to move the Sign Up form from the homepage, and try to get user information without asking.

Betamode, betamode it, the way you ask information is not working.

I have been doing a lot research on Opt-In Rates, and guess what, I´ve found nothing, there are millions of sources with different information regarding this issue, that´s why I won´t focus on the sources of information, they are pretty wide, from a 2% Opt In rate up to a 50%, everyone has their own standards, and that´s exactly what I´ve been doing, gathering information from hundreds of campaigns deployed for different clients, in different industries and with different Consumers, and the results are not “standard” as we could think, its amazing how different the campaigns perform, if you have a nice prize, should that increase the Opt In Rate? Sounds logic, but is not real, a big prize could raise your rate or maybe could lower it.

Instead of trying to find an industry standard, we are committed to increase it, every project will need to have a better rate than the one deployed before, that´s a normal requirement when a big client needs to get millions of contacts, you will always need to pay less per contact. And that´s what we have done for years and as a result we got projects with rates up to 78% with no prize at all, we just focused on what users look more, dialog, relationships, they just want to have fun, it´s easier that what we always think, we keep trying to make it complicated.

What we did for the campaign is to create a site with two Colombian celebrities that will engage users in a dialog, a dialog that will drive them to register in a different way, that will also let them get to know the product, and this way achieving both objectives, Opt-Ins and product showcase.

The hostess will ask you for your information, and reinforce the Opt In by a cute phrase, just take a look at it clicking here, and find out how we achieved 78% rate and more than 50K contacts.

Remember, it´s easier than how it looks, users just want some information, dialog, entertainment, just listen, you don´t need to buy what you want, prizes are not enough, remember my “Currency” past blog? Find the right one and you rates will go high.

I started this personal project a few months ago, I decided to start Blogging without focusing on how many people will read what I say, after some weeks I realized how amazing the project is. You will need some SEO strategy, research, writing skills, HTML knowledge if you want to customize the templates, hosting and domains basics, etc, anyway, a lot of Internet and Marketing related stuff.

But I´m writing not just to let you know how difficult to setup a Blog is, because is not, you can have your own Blog running in few minutes, I´m writing to share my Google Analytics Dashboard, after less than 2 months launched Betamode has got 300 Visits, 1031 Page Views, 115 Unique Visitors, and an average time spent on site of more than 6 minutes.

I will encourage anyone reading this post that have not setup a Blog yet to do it, if you are inside online marketing, you must, is one way to look at things from another perspective.

5 months ago we deployed a viral campaign for one of our clients, the campaign was supposed to come flawless, the main objective of the campaign was to engage premium users with the product that was launched, show them its main features and drive them to know about it, well, we deployed a campaign with seeding strategy, “shepherds” as we call people that help us involve users inside blogs and online communities, etc, there was a lot of planning around, we deployed it, and we had pretty good results, until users “discover” what we were doing, we were paying people to help us engage users with the product, somehow, we “lied” the consumer.

As we have talked before, users are not normal users, they have never been before, they are biological creatures, they think biological, and this type of thinking is what makes our job harder, users are learning different ways to avoid us, when we discover a new way to get their attention they changed, move from one place to another.

So after a few months with our campaign online, we got a message from a user, telling us that he discover that all posts from the “Shepherds” were done from the same IP, yes, a small little mistake, not in our scope of work, but users don´t look at your information just as it is, they look, where does it come from, Ip number, and a lot of different information we don´t even dream to have in our project scope.

So, just keep learning, users will always be one step ahead, the few times when we change that and get one step before them is when we can say we have a “Hero Campaign” ready to win in Marketing Festivals.

According to Predictify, June 2008 will be the most accurate date for this to happen, Apple will release the 3G, keyboard included, last generation device, the following chart shows the predictions that the question got inside Predictify, almost 22% of voters said it will be June 08.

Predictify is a new site that lets users predict or ask whatever they want, some of them include a Pot for the most accurate one, Im a little worried here, Betamode concept will be kind obsolete, we don´t need to keep pushing and learning to achieve goals, just need to ask Predictify how the campaign we are planning will perform, that´s it, no more Betamode, no more learnings, no more goals to be accomplished, just go ask users…

Also, if you want to have more fun, you could challenge your friends to a private prediction, so from now on, we oculd challenge internally our co-workers and clients on how the campaign they are paying us will evolve, no more guessing, stop playing with your clients money, go use Predictify.

Will the Google Stock gets over $600 in 2008? just 33.4% think so… can you trust it??

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We have been working arround online communities for a long time, every time a new one pops up we try, with our best effort, to get inside it, trying to catch users with a entertainment idea or Killer application, and sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn´t, the truth is that when you offer a client the posibility to enter and interact users inside the most trendy community in your country, they will buy it instantly, so the responsability we acquired is really big, we need to target appropiate people, and we need to target them with usefull, entertaining content, remember that users will forgive you if you present a nasty TV commercial, but they won´t if you enter their private spaces (Community) with BRAND centric applications and tell them: “come on drink my brand values!!!!”

What I really want to bring in the post is that we always think about Social Networks as a Global Community, when we are thinking in deploying something inside them we hit our heads trying to target the people we want.

Inside the huge universe of a network such as Facebook, with millions of users arround the entire world, we focused in getting the message through a small segment of people located in our country that loves technology. At the beginnig it looks quite imposible to target people with this characteristics in the entire universe of Facebook, but it isn´t, we need to realize that global comunities are not what they seem, they are just a bunch of City based groups. We need to start looking them as groups of people living in the same city, sharing specific information. So next time you need to deploy something inside Facebook, go find them around your friends inside it, and try to find them in your same language, studies reveal that news and content spread faster between same language countries.

Each day, Hitwise provides insights on how 10 million US Internet users interact with more than 1 million websites, across 165+ industries.

What a great service, If you used to think you could never overpass Betamode, here is a solution. You could find out consumer insights based on real experience, real sites and real time….

The question is if the users will change their mind as fast as we can see hitwise reports, we have seen how consumer evolve faster and faster every second, so who will be the fast one? consumer behavior or consumer insights??

Why 240 Million Pounds?? because thats the price EXPERIAN paid for them on April 19th 2007.

In Colombia, the country I live in, TV has always been focused on local TV series productions. Pura Sangre is the most famous these days, the final chapter will be broadcasted tonight at 9pm, its final seems to be pretty good and the TV Channel (RCN) expect to have a huge rating on it.

But, not only Internet speed, global and public atributes affect itself, it afects directly different media like TV; a girl in USA that called herself Tina926 published in YouTube the last few minutes of the final chapter, it has 35,295 views in less than a day, 50+ comments.

Internet is affecting more than just Internet, and the rest of media haven´t realized that, they still produce for a world without Internet, they dont know nothing about Betamode, but they should… they should see more YouTube

Check the final chapter Here