Welcome to the Sea of Echoes

(Note: This paper on Facebook engagement is written as a talk in case I find a chance to deliver this somehow.  -joel) 

I’m here to talk to you about facebook and viral messages.  Maybe you’re listening to me because you’ve heard about the success of our Facebook Application “KissMe”.  KissMe started as a project in the facebook application class at Stanford and grew to over one million installs worldwide in a single month.  When we originally started working on the application we were planning on having 5000 users.  You might want to know the story about how KissMe succeeded and what KissMe can teach us about Facebook and the social graph.

The most important lesson of KissMe so far is that the ‘message is the medium’.  This means that the immediate emotional experience that an application generates is the force that drives its adoption by users.

It is almost 2008 and it seems that the pace of change has never been so fast.  Some people say that Facebook and the ’social graph’ are the most significant inventions of the new millenium.  We all want to understand this new world, learn to live it it, and learn to ride the wave of impending social change.

Before we get to that though - take a deep breath and walk with me back in time forty three years. 

 

Marshall McLuhan - “The Medium is the Message” 

1964 was also a time of immense social change.  This was the year that Martin Luther King received the Nobel Peace Prize.  The year that the Beatles’ invaded America.  The year that the US started large-scale bombing campaigns against North Vietnam.

It was also the year that Marshall McLuhan coined the phase ‘The Medium is the Message’.  In his book ‘Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man’, McLuhan argued that the form of media is responsible for greater social change than the specific content of the media itself.   For example, the printing press caused certain social changes by its very nature, independent of the specific words that it was used to print.  If you want to predict the kinds of social changes that occur when a new media is introduced, you have to study the media itself and not the specific messages that it carries.

In McLuhan’s time Television was certainly the medium on everyone’s mind.  Television evolved in the 1930’s and had become commercialized with the first advertisments on NBC in 1941.  By the sixties a whole generation of advertisers had grown up and perfected their craft.   A craft of molding human desires and getting people to act.  Politics.  Sex.  War.  Consumption.  All were targets for media manipulators.  We live in a world that they define.

What are the key principles of television advertising?  People’s actions are largely governed by prejudices and impulses which are below conscious.  Even though people are different, there are basic drives which we all share.  Air, water, food are plentiful in our society, but many people suffer from a lack of sex or status.  Ironically our common desire to be better than those around us makes us susceptible at a mass level.  Advertisers do not need to know about any one of us.  Because they can reach so many viewers they only need to understand the behavior of an ‘average’ person. 

The result with television is the ultimate dehumanizing medium.  Cold, distant and impersonal.

Now. Back to Today.

Today Facebook is the new medium.  In contrast with TV it is hard to imagine a media which could be more personal.  And as anyone who has watched the query logs scroll across the screen, the numbers of people being reached are staggering.   What is it about Facebook that makes it so engaging? 

Three Things That Drive User Engagement on Facebook

I think facebook succedes for three main reasons:

• Facebook creates the illusion of a user-centered universe. 
• Facebook is a storehouse of emotionally salient content.
• Facebook has been tuned and optimized to drive user activity.

Let’s look at each of these reasons for a little while.

When I say that Facebook creates the illusion of a user-centered universe, I mean that the content that the user sees is in the immediate social circle around that user.    Newsfeed items in facebook have much higher social relevance than news items in regular media like television and print.  In addition the ability to create and customize a profile allows users to present their idealized self to the world.  McLuhan said that we can look at any technology in terms of the basic biological functions that it ‘extends’.  For example, a hammer is an extension of a hand, and a car is an extension of a foot.  Facebook is an extension of the human face.

The second thing that makes facebook work is that Facebook is a storehouse of emotionally salient content.  Unlike typical web sites, messages and especially photos on facebook are likely to generate re-enforcing emotional responses.  Unlike many web sites which are task oriented (planning a vacation, making a purchase), Facebook content taps directly into our subconscious social needs and desires.

The final thing that drives engagement on facebook is careful engineering of the user experience.  News feed items drive user attention to friend’s profiles and other applications.  Message teasers are sent to outside email addresses, but users are always brought back inside facebook.  Poking has been optimized to produce poke wars between users.  All these little changes make sure that people come back to facebook and that they stick around.

But what does this mean for Facebook Applications?

 

Theory of Engagement for Facebook Applications

We were very successful with KissMe, and during our initial growth ramp, there was very little functionality to the application other than a request-based invitation mechanism.   Although we had implemented several viral loops in the app, the main draw was a small message that would appear in your requests with a pair of lips saying ‘You have been kissed’.  If you accepted this kiss it would bring you to a simple invite page where you could view other people who have kissed you as well as people who were adding the application around the world.

I believe that it was the simplicity and the emotional salience of this message that spawned KissMe’s virality, more so than any of the features we implemented.   The phrase ‘Kiss Me’ is a call to action, and invitation that people don’t often hear, and it makes them happy for a few seconds.  Perhaps long enough to want to share that happiness with their friends.

When I say that ‘The Message is the Medium’ I mean that the emotion impact that the application has on the user in the first second that they encounter it has to be positive and compelling.   These initial positive, shareable messages are the very medium by which applications spread.  It is hard to imagine an application like ‘PokeMeInTheEye’ spreading very far.

Over time, however, we’ve noticed that our virality numbers have declined as copycat applications have popped up, as we added or changed features.  We’ve noticed that users seem to build up a resistance to the initial message of our application, and perhaps to applications in general.   For example, our penetration in the US is fairly low compared to the newer facebook populations in Canada and Europe.

 

Framework - Lifecycle of a Facebook User

This brings me to the framework of user engagement.  I believe that facebook application users go through a lifecycle with two main stages:

• low-resistance: user is new to applications and adds applications at a high rate until they reach a point of saturation within days, weeks or perhaps months.
• high-resistance: user is tired of spammy/annoying applications and only retains/uses selected applications.

It’s not uncommon to see new facebook users with 30+ apps on their pages.  Users from Harvard or Stanford Networks by contrast might have 10 apps, most of which are the default apps provided by Facebook. 

As a result, a very viral messaging app like KissMe has a limited chance to be adopted by users while they are in this low resistance state.  But as users mature they are going to increasingly reject these apps.  As long as the population of infectable users is growing, KissMe can continue to grow.

This brings me to the Petri Dish Model of facebook engagement.

 

The Petri Dish Model of Facebook Engagement

One way to think about facebook and the world is facebook is like a mold growing in a petri dish.  Since people start using facebook when people around them do, growth is typically a slow spreading.   As more users add the app the surface perimeter of the mold grows and growth can speed up.  Eventually the mold fills the available area and growth stops as one might expect.

The interesting thing about this model is that from the point of view of applications, which are mostly used by new users, all of the action occurs at the frontier of growth.  The ‘core’ of mature users is stable and not likely to be induced to install a new application.

 

So how big is the Petri Dish that Facebook is in?  Compete.com estimates that Facebook grew from 15M to 30M users in 2007 (100%).  Google in the meantime grew from 110M to 130M users (~20%).  Google is a very popular and widely used search engine, so it perhaps safe to say that Google estimates the upper limit of Facebook adoption.   Facebook could therefore quadruple in size in this model.

 

Even the most popular facebook apps like FunWall and SuperWall have penetrated only about 10% of the user base, so there is still a potential big win for an app that has very broad usefulness and appeal.   On the flip side, this may be an indication that only 10-30% of facebook users are interested in applications at all.

Summary 

Positive, forwardable messages like ‘Kiss Me’, ‘Hug Me’ and ‘I Love You’ have great power to spread through a user population.  For apps like this the Message of the app is the Medium that the application can use to spread.

Facebook is undergoing a period of rapid growth now, but before long it will probably reach a point of saturation around 100-200M users where the rate of growth will probably slow to the growth of English-speaking internet users.  The Petri Dish model of user engagement gives us a way to forecast and understand the rate of application penetration and adoption.

 

Further Reading

• Marshall McLuhan - The Medium is the Message by Todd Kappelman
  http://www.leaderu.com/orgs/probe/docs/mcluhan.html
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_medium_is_the_message

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