Snapshots from Marketing 2.0 Paris: Wincing Lunch Away with Facebook, MySpace and Fred Cavazza

This session razed the Richter Scale of Awkward for too many reasons.

To start with, I don't think reps from Facebook and MySpace were supposed to speak together. They were placed on the same panel in the interest of saving time.

Everyone was anxious for lunch -- which, it turns out, was more of an appetite-whetter than a satisfier; moderator Fred Cavazza spent most of the panel talking about other stuff; Damien Vincent of FB expressed a Freudian allegiance for the other team; and -- oh yeah! -- Cavazza conducted makeshift photo ops during the presentation.

MySpace's Olivier Hascoat was cool though, except for that moment where he reluctantly poses for an iPhone shot while Vincent's talking. Way to be a sport, man.

In the event that you didn't catch all that, take an audio/visual tour:

Fred Cavazza hijacks Facebook/MySpace talk.




Cavazza monopolized at least the first 20 minutes of the program. He's smart and I like him, but he's no presenter -- though he did cover a lot of ground: social media metrics (granted, in an uncomfortably abstract way), and even skittles.com at some point.

We were all there for Facebook and MySpace though. And you could see the reps at left, getting progressively antsier. (See vid: Hascoat HELLA shook his head, all contemptuously and whatnot.)

Meanwhile, in the audience, my stomach eats itself. Wanna know the best part? This was what lunch was like (photo credit: 13stock). It was gone in 8 minutes, give or take. And no, there weren't any plates, which effectively ensured we all remained equally hungry.

Damien Vincent's Facebook faux-pas.

Vincent, top brass of sales for Facebook France, gets so excited about wrastling the mic away from Cavazza that he forgets where he's working.

"Hi, everybody. I'm Damien. Um, so I joined MySpace -- I'm sorry, Facebook..."




Vincent plugs the filter factor.

He could've done more with this topic -- like exploring Facebook's potential as an internet-wide entertainment curator and aggregator. No such luck.




Vincent on various Facebook ad formats.

Jump to 1:26 real quick: Cavazza's got his own agenda.




Olivier Hascoat wraps up by saying brands are just consumer perception.

Food for thought, pun only slightly intended.

Dear People-that-Still-Use-Myspace,

Please stop sending me these. They make me feel sad.

Maybe in 1996 I would've pegged all my self-worth on how many saucily text-rendered Kisses™ I got,* but times've changed.

Now I measure my value by how often I'm reTweeted for saying stuff like this. All. Day. Long.

---

* "7-9 freaken hot." Yeah, baby, yeah.

Democracy's Trendy with the Tech Elite

Websites that've playfully reminded me to vote:

Facebook, right in the header.



Google AdWords -- in the Campaign Management dashboard.



MySpace, between pages. This is actually an interstitial ad for E-Research Council, but still.



Meanwhile, traditional media entities like PBS have partnered with Google to make this year's election the most transparent ever. Got a mobile cam? Covertly video your experience at the ballots. Twitter and My Fair Election are also using crowdsourcing to police the polls this year.

Other sites jumped the gun: betting destinations cast lots for Obama, and even Facebook Lexicon "suggests" (eh, I'm iffy about this) an Obama win.

We'll know in 12 hours.

Are We All Just Chubbettes Obsessed with Movie Stars?

This afternoon I sat around on MySpace, hitting "Refresh" to see what ads I'd get. Must be a slow month in ad sales; every new banner was a weight loss pitch. Here they are, in order of how I received them:

And it isn't just MySpace that thinks my trunk could use less junk. Last month, Rachel Beckman of the Washington Post wrote an article about the "muffin top" ads that barrage her when she logs on to Facebook. I see them too. All that fleshy muffin-toppiness leaves nothing to the imagination:

So what's the deal, socnets?

A study from earlier this year found women are generally more concerned about weight than disease. And because I'm guessing this passel of tacky, over-obvious and insulting ads don't actually improve perceived site value (MySpace, whatever happened to your Cartier days?), there's just one explanation: women must actually click on these things.

I guess that's cool if you feel açai berry juice will really solve your deep-seated problems. But what about me? Why am I attacked with potshots of love handles five times per visit?

Does persistence ultimately persuade? Or maybe every chick just has a day where, in a rush of self-hatred, she finally wants to read Jen's fucking Weight Journal.

God Has Called You

...and from MySpace, no less.

Facebook and MySpace: Batting for Two Different Teams?

When Facebook opened its back-end to outside applications in early spring, it gave users the power to act on preferences for how they'd like to interact with others.

Suddenly, you didn't have to wait until Facebook felt like offering you a functionality; you could just code one up yourself and disseminate it.

MySpace also gives users a freedom they don't have on that other site: they can "pimp out" their profiles. Some, like Tim Gunn's Guide to Style, don't even look like MySpace pages. For this reason, MySpace can be thought of as a personal Web publishing tool for those advertising either themselves or a product. Many do both.

Spacelift, a new Facebook app, suggests there's a bigger difference between MySpace and Facebook.

Spacelift enables users to import their MySpace profiles onto Facebook so they don't have to deal with the MySpace interface. (Check out before and after shots of a transitioning profile on Mashable.)

What once may have been written off as a "lifestyle preference" -- your love of a pink background versus a green one, and that MySpace lets you exercise that preference while Facebook does not -- may betray the reason why Facebook is increasingly the preferred site for social networking.

MarketingVox notes Spacelift could inspire "[others] that move regularly between MySpace and Facebook [...] to leave one in complete favor of the other."

That's a scary statement. The question is, why would users on the fence actually leave MySpace for Facebook? Don't they want access to a profile page that lets them be as individual as possible?

For one, the sheer simplicity of Facebook's design probably works in its favor. While MySpace may still boast the largest number of users, last April Facebook grew 106 percent to MySpace's 70 percent.

And in the UK, Facebook has already overtaken MySpace in terms of Internet searches.

The advent of Spacelift, however, suggests to me that maybe we've been comparing apples to oranges all this time. The users leaving MySpace for Facebook are probably not the same ones that significantly manipulate their MySpace pages, then use those pages to generate sales or draw attention.

Because that's another difference: you can't look at a Facebook profile unless you're part of a user's network, or already friends with that user. It's a walled garden. MySpace, on the other hand, gives you the option to make your profile visible to non-MySpace users.

Facebook's decision to keep a tight grip on its form, while letting users experiment with its functions, is a formula that forces users to focus less on the appearance of their profile pages and think more about collaborative opportunities.

If you're a social networking site, that's what you want: for users to interact with one another on your platform. This keeps them coming back.

That MySpace users spend less time networking than self-promoting may mean it's less a social networking site than a personal publishing tool. And if that's the case, this puts it in a completely different competitive realm.

Maybe in the future we'll be holding MySpace up to blog/community hybrid sites like Xanga or LiveJournal.

Originally published on CMSWire.com.

Anecdotal Effects of MySpace, or Web 2.0 in General

(...it's not just for your kids anymore!)

An older female colleague pulled me aside to divulge some personal problems that have been taking a toll. She explained that she thinks her 50-year-old boyfriend is cheating on her with a woman around my age.

Well, that's an old, familiar story. "How do you know?" I asked.

She leaned over conspiratorially, even as she dabbed at her eyes. "I checked her MySpace," she replied. "She wrote about it there. And he denied it, but he saves all his IMs and I found those too."

Yeesh; that's never easy. I said hang in there. She blames the internet for her troubles; I admitted I'd sooner blame the man.

"The internet makes it more possible to meet somebody and fall astray," she moaned.

I thought about how hard my parents fought to keep me in the house in the angsty teen years when I had crappy boyfriends. No restriction of media could save me or the chastity they imagined I still had.

"No," I answered. "If a person wants to cheat, he'll cheat." I didn't know what else to say.

I think it was silly of me to imagine, however subconsciously, that the social effects of Web 2.0 belong to only a small generation - my generation mostly, and a handful of the early adopters in Gen X and the Baby Boomer stratosphere.

I'd include the kids born in the '90's, but a disparity even there can be felt - they'll grow up thinking this is simply another way to relate to people. It'll never occur to them what kind of impact this Web 2.0 stuff had just a few years prior. When my 8-year-old sister registered for a MySpace, for example, I had no idea what to do and no yardstick for gauging its appropriateness. It's not like I can look back and go, "Well, when I was a kid I had (or didn't have) one..."

The internet continues to break new ground in our personal relationships. And clearly not just for those of us who feel as if we've been personal, active witnesses in the transition from the "a/s/l?" days to the broad universe of MySpace, Flickr, Youtube and Xanga. It's fundamentally shaken the norms of an older generation, like those of the nice older woman who among other things must now redefine old-school definitions of cheating (cybering: faux-pas or innocent pastime on a par with passive porn-watching?). And it's altered what a younger generation will learn to call normal.

But I'm preaching to the choir, aren't I?

Here's some eye candy that I think decently demonstrates the evolution:




In other news, I just saw Pan's Labyrinth with said 8-year-old sister. (Probably not the best film to see with an 8-year-old.) She didn't like it, but she ripped off the storyline to create one of those creepy MySpace bulletins that conclude with, "If you don't send this to 10 people in 10 minutes, you'll end up like this kid."

I felt disappointed. I don't know if she's old enough to play on MySpace, but she clearly hasn't yet learned the etiquette of an older generation: you don't put spoilers in a bulletin, and you don't perpetuate chain letters.

The point this entry is approaching, I think, is the effects of our new webiverse are eyebrow-raising (regardless of how profound people think they are or aren't), and while I won't say they've made human relations any better or worse, I'll say they've certainly added a layer of complexity. And maybe that's not really saying anything. It's possible that this isn't news, it's just the natural evolution of man and technology.

What was that thing Marshall Mcluhan said? The medium is the what?

What's our medium of choice got to say to us lately? *checks MySpace bulletin* Oh awesome. Another one of those survey things.