Dear Mark,

I read a blog post earlier with the same title as this one. “Dear Mark Zuckerberg” which inspired me to write this blog post.

http://scobleizer.com/2010/05/13/dear-mark-zuckerberg/

He makes some interesting points. To split Facebook into private and public components, to make the private piece easier to set up, to have a third party verify your security, to do a better job evangelizing facebook’s abilties, and to use video more. All valid and thoughtful points.

I’m going to have just one point that I want to sell to you here though.

Take the money.

No not the users money, or corporate money who want to buy people’s information. Not partner companies, or stuff from Mobwars style games. not ad revenue.

You know those investors who wanted to buy Facebook for like thirty gagillion dollars? Call them up today. Fly them out. Have them write a number on a piece of paper. Take the money.

You can haggle a little bit if you like, play more than one off each other to get even more. I’m fine with that.

But you need to have check in hand within 3 months. The sooner the better.

Take your billions you stand to make, and buy an island and an absurdly big yacht that comes with it’s own James Bond supervillain helicopter and undersea base.

I mean some people already think of you as a James Bond supervillain so it’s not like it’s gonna be a stretch right? Am I right?

Seriously, dude. Take the money.

I say this because Facebook is gonna be Napsterized. You came on strong, but as fast as you rose, you’re gonna fall hard. I’m not sure exactly when, but it’s gonna happen, and I’m pretty sure that even if you double the users you currently have in the next year, you’re near peak. You’re probably not at peak yet, but that’s a great time to sell. You can still say “Look how much we’re growing! Look at our projections!” and turn that into an extra volcano lair for yourself.

What you don’t want to do is to start LOSING users. Have new users flatline, have old users stop coming to the site. Have your traffic start leveling off, then slowly declining…then dropping like a rock. That’s not the time to sell.

The time to sell is now.

This summer four kids who seem a hell of a lot less comically evil than you are gonna take a stab at your heart.

http://www.joindiaspora.com/

Oh I’m sure you already know about the Diaspora project, but let me tell the people who don’t know what it is, what it’s about. It’s an open source social network. It’s one where YOUR information is owned and kept by YOU. Not facebook. Most people don’t realize that whatever they post on facebook basically is out of their control forever. The user has no real control over what is shared, and what isn’t. It’s all in Facebook’s hands. Right now something might be private, but tommorow Facebook can change their mind, and poof. It’s public. Once it’s public it’s out there. Forever.

Diaspora aims to change that. They want to make it so that your social network is run more like….say torrents are now. You have your social information, your status, your pictures, etc, all in your own control, on your computer, or on a server somewhere that’s shared, but YOU control the information for it. It’s yours. No company has control over it, like Facebook presently.

Then you exchange your keys for your network with other people. List yourself on listing sites. I don’t know how they’re going to do it, but in the end it’s gonna be just like Facebook just minus the ads. Minus the crap. Minus the privacy questions. You’ll have full control over your information, and they won’t have to worry about the crap anymore.

Plus it’ll be open source, so there will be lots of different fun things people can do. They’ll add to it. There will be applications and websites to use it. You’ll not be limited to ONE company being the social hub of the world.

Because really what sounds more likely to be the de facto social experieince in 10 years? Or even 5? Or even 1? One where everyone in the goddamned world puts their information into your hands, Mark, or one where everyone controls their own information and chooses to use it however they want?

It happened with file sharing. Napster was the big dog, there were a few others but Napster was it. They got hit by the legal bomb, which I don’t think you will, but that didn’t stop file sharing. It went open source. It went to torrents. Now it’s easier and people have thousands of options. They don’t have to use one company who wants to leverage what is really not even their information.

That’s what Facebook has done. They’re taking all this stuff people are sharing and putting it in one place and claiming ownership of it. That’s what your’e doing when YOU decide what is public or not. You think you have a say, not just on your own site, but I think you think it in a more metaphorical sense.

Well you don’t, and either these kids at Diaspora are going to eliminate you or they’re the seed of the future that will. In 5 years I bet Facebook is still around but it’s a sad place that has adopted the new public standard and is trying to eek out an existance, and your market share will have been cut by an order of magnatude or more.

So…Yeah, do what you want Mark, but If you know what’s best for you, I think it’s time to take the money and run.

I hear that there is a monastery on top of a mountain in the alps that would makea a great location for a “laser” that can wipe out the moon.

Don’t ask me how you get your page ranks up if you don’t want to hear the answer. I’ll tell you, and then you probably won’t like it. Why? I think I’ve maybe met one person in the last decade who actually LOVES to do what’s necessary. Everyone else, it’s a chore. Something that takes them away from what they actually enjoy doing. Or worse, they just work for the company and don’t even enjoy the job, and then they’re being asked to put on a smiley face and stand outside the Disneyland gates waving. For a significant number of people they’d rather die in a gutter, apparently.

Marketing yourself, your company, your organization, whatever, online is not necessarily easy. Particularly if there is alot of competition. When we went to the second iteration of orcapack.com we changed from being a product focused company to one offering the standard web design and site creation for various companies. This was back in about 2003. I remember talking to one of our business advisors and they asked me “Who is your target audience?” and I said “I dunno. Everyone?”.

It’s hard to market to everyone.

That’s one reason we eventually created oClubhouse.com, oFitnessclub.com, and oDaycare.com because they were businesses we had done alot of work for and had the expertise to turn them into products and they provided us with specific markets for us to target with SEO and Internet Marketing.

So if you want to get your page ranks up, my first advice is to figure out what your target is. Who are you trying to reach? Get that whittled down. The answer can’t be everyone.

I’m gonna skip a few steps here to get the meat of my point, but you’ll want to do all sorts of stuff for tracking your sites, figuring out keywords for your content and SEO, internet marketing, yadda yadda yadda. Ask me again about thos sometime…

Anyway, so glossing over that stuff, we get to the point when we know your target, and we know what words they’re searching for online, and we’re watching for them….Time to get into the social media marketing.

That’s where people’s hearts sink.

I say “You can do it in an hour a day.”

They look at me with a blank stare.

“I hate blogging.”

“I don’t know how to use tweeter.”

“I don’t want to waste an hour a day on that crap.”

“Can’t I hire an indian or malaysian company to do that for me or something?”

I’ve heard it all. It’s like someone asking how you order a pizza to be delivered to your house, and you give them a number to call, and a basic script to follow and they look at you and ask you if you can call for the pizza instead of them.

Twisting people’s arms is probably not a strong enough metaphor. People HATE to do this stuff. They see it as a complete waste of time, but it’s what works.

As I mentioned in yesterday’s post which focused on the book Socialnomics by Erik Qualman, this is how stuff gets done.

Let me give a specific example for a friend of mine. I won’t name names, so lets call him Shawn Rodgers, and pretend he’s a wedding photographer in Pittsburgh, PA and his company is Ovation Images located at http://ovation-images.com/

Ah damn…I named names. Well it’s good for his SEO for me to do that, so I’m sure he won’t mind. Shawn is an amazing wedding photographer. Seriously. I wish he’d shot my wedding. He’s got the expensive gear, and a great eye, and he’s an insanely particular guy (seriously…he’s INSANELY particular….he notices all the little things). Now this is a kind of annoying thing when you’re trying to buy some hot sausage to grill up for your fishing trip, but in a wedding photographer? You want the guy who notices ALL the details and actually cares about making it look perfect.

Anyway they’re like on page 100 of search results for “pittsburgh wedding photographer” and there’s lots of competition, but Ovation Images is probably top 10 in quality in the region, maybe even top 5. They should be up there in the rankings above lots of these other photographers.

Ok so we know the target (young brides and grooms in western pennsylvania) and we know the search terms (there are more than “pittsburgh wedding photographer” but that’s the big one).

So what do they need to do to get their page ranks up now that they have that info? They need to leverage social media.

First they need to use their blog. It’s at http://blog.ovation-images.com/. The last time it’s been updated was January 9th. Before that twice in December of 2009. That’s just not enough. They need to turn that into a mini-site. A targeted website. Have it just be about great wedding photography shots. Every day put up a different picture, talk in a brief paragraph about what makes it an amazing wedding photo, and then have a set signature blurb on the page about them and pittsburgh wedding photographer linking back to their main ovation-images.com site.

If they can’t update it everyday, that’s fine, but they need to spend an hour a day on their overall social media marketing, so it’d be cool to stack up some photos they can use. Doesn’t have to take long. Put up a photo, write it up, stick up the blurb, post. The point is to have more content pointing towards them, more keywords, more stuff people can find that’ll lead them to the main ovation-images.com website.

If possible they should even change the domain on it to somethign with the keywords. great-pittsburgh-wedding-photography.com is available for instance. You get those keywords in the URL it helps.

Maybe also have a contact form on the blog as well that asks some questions. A questionaire about what they’re looking for in a wedding photographer, or in wedding photography, just some sort of little thing to provide a ‘service’ to people to help them find a photographer that fits them. “Do you like natural shots, or pictures of you posed?” etc.

Then every day after posting that picture on the new external mini-site have a twitter account, and tweet about it, using the keywords.

Go onto the ovation images facebook account and post the link there. Put it on your personal facebook as well. Get your network involved.

Now… There’s a ton more they could do. A ton. I’m not going to go into everything else here though. It’s the stuff that whole books are written about. This is just a first step of many to reach the kids that are getting married. I could suggest a hundred more things, but before anything else, there has to be a commitment to doing just an hour a day of regular posting and then leveraging social media.

And no, I won’t allow you to hire a Malaysian company to outsource your blog like I do.