Category Archives: Facebook

Six Emerging Content Marketing Trends

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Three related, clustered events constitute a trend. So, what have we here?

  • February 25: Mindshare appoints a content chief
  • February 27: Edelman names (a new, digital-focused) chief content officer
  • February 27: Facebook announces a content strategy fellowship
  • March 25: Sequoia Capital appoints a head of content
  • March 26: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt names its first chief content officer
  • March 27: Weber Shandwick launches a content marketing unit with 100 staffers
  • April 1: Havas signs a global chief content officer

Chief content officers have been de rigeur in media companies for years. Editorial web sites, magazines, newspapers, and broadcasters have them. Even Netflix boasts a chief content officer.

What’s staggering now is the alacrity with which agencies are now piling into the white-hot content marketing space. Not all of this is new, of course. Content divisions and/or practices have existed for some time at major players such as Leo Burnett, Ogilvy, and OMD. Digital shops, too, have content heads, as do (of course) the small cohort of content-only agencies.

The appointments above reveal these interesting takeaways:

Agencies that don’t have content practices are scrambling to get into the game

From the appointment of an executive with “content” in his/her title to blowing out an entire new division, both ad and PR agencies realize content can no longer be ignored. Clients expect content-related services and advisory. While mileage on the revenue models varies radically, there’s also heated competition on the PR and ad sides for a piece of the content pie. “We’re in a dogfight with the ad agencies,” is how one PR executive put it to me in a private meeting.

Content’s meaning is increasingly (if not almost exclusively) digital

It’s not as if Edelman didn’t have a content officer before appointing Steve Rubel to the role. His predecessor, Richard Sambrook, a former BBC editor, focused on editorial development. Rubel’s purview will be much broader, focusing on relationships both with digital media properties and technology vendors.

PR shops are in the media buying business

Historically, PR firms never, ever bought media. They earned it. In announcing their new content initiatives, both Weber Shandwick and Edelman have stressed that media buying and other forms of brokering will be very much part of what they do going forward. Media convergence and native advertising models make this evolution imperative.

Content is essential for startups

When one of the leading venture capital firms appoints a content head to help its portfolio companies develop and improve their blogs, social media, and video, it underscores just how essential a well-executed content strategy is to success — or failure — in business.

Hire-a-journalist: Will it suffice?

For the past several years, “hire a reporter” has been the mantra of companies eager to get a leg up in blogging or on social media channels. Now that content strategies are more technologically complex and digitally convoluted (converged media, native advertising, video, mobile) than “just writing,” it will be interesting to see what skillsets the next crop of content hires possess.

“Global” appended to content titles

This trend will become increasingly important with holding companies and larger agencies. Brands, too, are beginning to make content hires and shuffle the org chart to accommodate content strategy and execution. One of the biggest content challenges is the one facing large, multinational enterprises that must create content for a wide range of countries, languages, territories, audiences, and products. If any single cohort relies on outside content support, it’s multinationals. Holding companies possess on-the-ground global support and know that coordinated efforts can be a boon to this important new line of business.

This post originally published on iMedia Connection

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Facebook Search Graph To Impact Social Search

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facebook-globe-world-200Search is the de facto way in which consumers navigate content platforms. Not just the Web via traditional search engines, but all types of platforms, from television to radio to music libraries. The fact that search has always been lacking from Facebook has long been a source of criticism and frustration.

Facebook Search Graph

There’s a lot of content on Facebook. Until Graph Search was announced by the company last Tuesday, there has been very little way to find or use it. It’s been impossible to search actual content, aside from given names or perhaps classmates.

Graph Search not only enhances Facebook’s functionality, it also makes the entire platform more useful. It has the potential to significantly increase user engagement as well.

While there are not yet any formal products or features for brands or marketers accompanying the launch; rest assured, there will be in the not too distant future. A much more robust paid search advertising product(s) is almost a given. So is functionality linked to Facebook’s API. The company will be in possession of even deeper and richer user data than it already possesses as users’ search history forms part of their profiles, indicating interests, affinities, purchase paths and purchase intent.

While commercial products linked to Search Graph are in the (not-too-distant) future, brands and marketers should start considering their Facebook presence in the context of search today. There’s no time like the present to prepare for the potential impact of Facebook search on the content of branded Facebook pages.

Read the rest of this post on MarketingLand, where it originally published.

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Yes, There’s Fraud Online. Deal With It.

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Breaking: everything you see and read on the internet isn’t true.

Hope you were sitting down for that surprising revelation.  I know, I know, it’s not that big a surprise, but that’s why it’s constantly surprising that people are…surprised by it.

A reporter from one of this country’s leading metropolitan dailies contacted me recently about the late-summer revelation from Facebook that some 83 million (or 8.7 percent) of its user accounts are fake. Facebook is, after all, a platform based on the value proposition that its users are behind real identities.

Doesn’t this blow Facebook’s value proposition out of the water, the reporter wanted to know. Isn’t this an incredibly high number of fake accounts? How could they allow this to happen?

Relax. The problem is hardly endemic to Facebook. Fake accounts, whether malicious in nature or not (Facebook estimates only c. 1.5 percent of active accounts are, in fact, malicious – the others are mostly duplicates, users under the age of 13, your dog, etc.) come with the territory – online or off.

Facebook is working to identify and disable fake accounts just as the search engines are working to combat click fraud – for years now. As ISPs work to block oceans of spam.

Oh, and did I mention fake online reviews?  Yelp has resorted to a sting operation aimed at shaming businesses that are caught trying to game their ratings system. They’re posting “consumer alerts” on those businesses’ pages, and exposing the emails they send to hire favorable reviewers. (TripAdvisor is also participating in its own version of the walk of shame.) So widespread is the fake-review practice that Gartner estimates by 2014, 15 percent of all online reviews will be fake.

Companies running online sweepstakes often encounter fraud, fakes and undesirable metrics in short order. A few years back, I looked under the hood of several soft drink sweepstakes aimed at males aged 12 – 24 (Coke, Sprite and Mountain Dew, to name a few of the brands). I asked Hitwise (now Experian Hitwise ) to crunch the data. They clocked the overwhelming majority of entrants as low-income females…over 45. They weren’t clicking on ads, but rather on a link on contest-aggregator site Sweepstakes Advantage.

Blame the Internet – Or Human Nature?

Somehow, when fraudulent, misleading or even unintentional things happen online, “the internet” is to blame. Or Facebook. Or Google. Or the dating site that was a 14 year old girl’s first step into a bad situation – never mind that a 14 year old had no business being on the site in the first place.

No one seems to be stepping back and saying things like, “Contests are overwhelmingly popular with low-income, middle aged women. Is it wise to run a sweepstakes to reach young men? If we do elect to go that route, how can we ensure we reach the target audience?”

Just as retailers account for “shrinkage” in financial forecasts, digital marketers must account for wasted clicks and impressions. Comes with the territory. There’s always going to be clickfraud. Chihuahuas and Yorkies will continue to update their Facebook newsfeeds (or, even further violating Facebook’s TOS, allow others to do this for them.) People who aren’t 100 percent neutral (like maybe the owner’s mother-in-law) will review restaurants and hair salons – favorably or unfavorably, depending.

Offline Corollaries are Much Worse

While the media are quick to blame “the internet” for a multitude of crimes related to fraud, companies like Facebook, Yelp, TripAdvisor, Google, Bing, Yahoo, and all the major ISPs get little public credit or acknowledgement for their efforts to combat said fraud. Much of the knowledge we have of online misconduct was revealed by these companies themselves. It’s transparency and disclosure.

Not so their offline bretheren. A quick search of “inflated circulation” results in a veritable rogues’ gallery of news stories indicting companies like Time Inc., News Corp, Newsday and other major publishers of being caught in the act – not openly revealing they are combatting a problem.

Forbes recently indicted USA Today for padding hotel bills to the tune of $82 million annually for those unwanted, untouched copies of the newspaper in front of your door in the morning (nearly one million copies per day that you probably don’t read, and probably are billed for).

Online fraud? Yeah. It’s a problem. It will always be a problem. Just like in the real world.

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Where Does the Creative Idea Originate?

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Those brands that are still ‘just’ advertising have it relatively easy.  They partner with advertising agencies that are tasked with coming up with the creative idea for advertising campaigns. In fact, they have a dedicated staff of “creatives” tasked with doing just that.

Not to denigrate agencies, or creatives, or the vast amount of strategy, research, iterations, testing and refinements that go into creating advertising campaigns, but that model is now radically changing, making the question of where creative comes from a legitimate one.

Sure, advertising agencies own advertising. However in an increasingly mobile world where user-generated content, social media and earned media are burgeoning, advertising is a somewhat diminishing channel and not at all the core creative idea it once was.  In digital (and soon, in traditional media as well), paid, earned and owned media are converging and commingling. Advertising is no longer a stand-alone. It works much, much more effectively in conjunction with broader strategic marketing initiatives that place as much (if not more) emphasis on owned and earned channels.

This raises a chicken-and-egg dilemma for marketers: who’s driving? If paid, earned and owned media all inform a campaign or marketing initiative, and learnings from one channel can be applied to the other for optimization and improvement, which channel leads, and which follow? It the channel that’s doing the driving isn’t advertising, it’s doubtful the creative core of a campaign comes from…creatives.

Together with my colleagues Jeremiah Owyang and Jessica Groopman, I’ve been working on research that looks at how paid, earned and owned media are converging. A growing trend is unquestionably that the creative germ originates in owned and earned media before it becomes paid (i.e. advertising).

Take Facebook ads that ‘pin’ a brand’s wall post in a display ad unit. Or Bazaarvoice’s new ads that retarget shoppers with ad units that feature a geo- and demographically targeted user review of the product they were just viewing.

Brands can even turn lemons into lemonade by taking negative consumer reviews and, by adding a twist of clever content marketing, turn them into positives, as did one local eatery and Austin’s Alamo Drafthouse Cinema.

When marketing creative flows in from multiple sources, the way marketing and advertising work must inevitably shift. How? We’re sifting through findings, but there are some clear initial insights.

Real time: There’s a constant flow of consumers providing insight, feedback, media, and other digital material in real time on the web. Monitoring all this is a given, but reacting to it in real time is increasingly important, and something too few marketing organizations are prioritizing. Small wonder; real time marketing is resource intensive, and it’s hard. Increasingly, it’s necessary and will prove a real advantage to those who do it.

Listening and analysis: If creative ideas flow from chatter on the web, it’s critical to intelligently listen to all that chatter, to monitor it, triage it, and leverage it into ads and other marketing collateral. The SMMS sector is a veritable explosion of M&A activity right now due to this trend.

Content strategy: Owned media matters. Consumers expect it, social media demands it (and all brands are social, whether they’re playing in that particular sandbox or not). The web in general, and social media in particular, demands a steady stream of content, something brands must prepare for strategically as well as tactically.

Shifting agency models: It’s not as if advertising agencies haven’t seen this coming. Many are shifting staffing (as should brands) to bolster core capabilities such as creative and media with more support for content, data, and social media capabilities.  PR shops are doing this a well, of course, and so are the more forward-looking brands.

Others will certainly follow.  Because agencies creatives now only sometimes lead the creative charge, and the media plan is hardly what determines where, and how, that creative message spreads.

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Retargeting the Issue of…Retargeting

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Attention is being retargeted to…retargeting. Last week, Facebook announced Facebook Exchange, a new real-time bidding platform that will replace the marketplace ads on the site with inventory that will be both more profitable for Facebook and presumably more targeted to the interests of its users. Facebook will be able to target ads to users based not only on their social graphs, but also on their recent browsing history.

Over recent years, we’ve witnessed the rapid growth of demand-side platforms (DSPs) in digital advertising, and as a result a sharp increase in the amount of tracking that’s going on out there on the web. A Krux Digital survey released this week claims the average visit to a web page (not a website, a single web page) triggers a staggering 56 instances of data collection.

In a recent Wall Street Journal article, Krux estimated that real-time bidding exchanges contribute to 40 percent of online data collection. Moreover, this type of real-time bidding has shot from virtually zero three years ago to an estimated 18 percent of online advertising marketing, according to a Forrester analyst quoted in the story.

There are plenty of reasons why advertisers and publishers alike have embraced the trend. RTB makes media spend more efficient while eliminating waste. It enables rapid optimization and creative testing, quickly provides deeper analytics and insights, and makes retargeting more effective and scalable. All this results — in theory at least — in better-performing ad campaigns.

Otherwise put, DSPs are closer by a mile than standard CPM-based display units to the “digital nirvana” so many advertisers aspire to: the right message to the right person at the right time. A consumer browses hotels in Baltimore for an upcoming trip and is retargeted with deals and offers that pertain to her trip while she’s still got the planning of it in mind.

That’s the promise, anyway. The reality often differs considerably. Everyone knows someone who is still being retargeted with ads for that sofa they bought six months ago. Or that time I visited a local bakery’s site to check the address so I could nip downtown and buy a cake for a party. Months later, I was still being retargeted with “order online and we’ll ship it to you” ads from one of the very few businesses I’d never buy from on the internet, because it’s a bakery, and because it’s local.

Beyond privacy concerns

When forms of digital advertising involving increased cookie collection, personal data, and targeting are in the news as they have been this week, the phrase “privacy concerns” appears frequently in headlines. Yes, privacy is always a concern, and it pays to be vigilant (and all that).

I’d argue that much of what’s raised as a “privacy” problem are the obvious Big Brother aspects of retargeting that are so apparent to users when they become obtrusive and inappropriate — when this type of targeting is used as a blunt instrument rather than a tool of near surgical precision. Getting retargeted with ads for swim fins because you once accidently clicked on a pair in 2009, is far from a best practice and is not how this type of advertising is intended to work, yet it too often does. The results: irritated consumers who dump cookies and tune out or ridicule online advertising.

Turnkey, self-serve solutions come with a measure of responsibility on the part of both the advertiser and the DSP, otherwise the process becomes akin to driving without a license. It’s not helping anyone — not the consumer, the publisher, the advertiser, nor the industry in general — when hyper-targeted ads return to haunt the user again and again. Media buying agencies understand things like frequency caps. Too many small advertisers — the bakeries and the mom ‘n’ pop ecommerce sites — mean well but alarm rather than entice their audiences.

This begs the question: Should buying online advertising be so frictionless and easy when targeted and quasi-personalized ads have the potential to do as much harm as good? And if it’s to remain as turnkey as it has become (which is most likely the case), whose responsibility is it to ensure that the advertisers are educated enough to use their tools wisely.

A version of this post appeared in iMedia Connection

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14 Ways To Turn On The Content Flow

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IBM recently published research finding that about 80 percent of those who begin a corporate blog never post more than five entries. And that’s just blogging.

The Internet is littered with never-updated web sites, near-tweetless Twitter accounts, expressionless Facebook pages, and no-one-home YouTube channels. In the rush to adopt content marketing as a tactic, too many marketers forget that if you’re continually publishing, you have to think like…a publisher.

Increasingly, marketing is no longer about buying media (the advertising model). Media is cheap — often even free. But rolling your own media brings with it a new set of challenges: coming up with enough content to fill all those blank pages, blog posts, profiles and such….and doing so on a regular basis, not just in a one-off burst of Week One enthusiasm.

And hey — this is really nothing new. Coming up with New Stuff to Say has been an issue for content marketers since the days of the corporate newsletter. Only now, there are even more virtual pages to fill with even more information — and in more multimedia formats.

Who’s good at solving that dilemma? Publishers. If you want to win at the content game, it’s time you started thinking like one.

In short, brands are media. Marketers are editors, or at least need to start thinking like editors and producers if they don’t want to come up short-handed. So herewith, steps toward publisher-think to help marketers get beyond that accusatory Blank White Page and start thinking like a true content professional.

Here are 14 steps to get you there: (read the rest of this post on MarketingLand.com)

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Facebook Advertisers ‘Like’ Their ROI

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What’s the ROI of a ‘like’ on Facebook?

For too many marketers, getting fans or ‘likes’ on Facebook is a goal unto itself. It’s about as legitimate a goal as measuring how many ‘hits’ a website got circa 1998. Just as those ‘hits weren’t translating into revenue in the early days of the commercial internet, so too are many Facebook advertisers and marketers having difficulty determining if their efforts are bearing fruit, and how to leverage fans and likes into actual revenue.

Others are being more methodical about it. Research published today by Facebook in conjunction with comScore reveals that of 60+ campaigns measured, 70 percent of major brands have seen 3X to 5X ROI – in many cases offline, in-store sales, as a result of combining paid media buys on Facebook with the earned media from fans and friends of those fans.

On a call yesterday, Brad Smallwood, Facebook’s head of measurement and insights, told me, “These are very healthy numbers. The vast majority of these campaigns had really, really positive ROI.”

The question now, of course, is dissecting, mapping and documenting why these campaigns worked. “Paid [media] for us is actually an amplification of earned,” Smallwood told me, a trend Jeremiah Owyang and I are learning in the process of our in-progress research on the confluence of paid, earned and owned media.

Earned media – how to get it at scale and how to leverage it effectively – is a brand new skill. Facebook’s new research (the report is entitled “The Power of Like 2″) demonstrates that there’s not just synergy in combining paid, earned and owned media, but there’s profit in it as well for brands such as Starbucks, Target, Applebee’s, Nutella and Best Western.

Yet doing so requires new alignments in vendors, creative, media, agency relationships and even the internal org chart. Stay tuned for lots more work on this important topic.

 

 

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How Will DoubleClick Stack Up?

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It almost had to happen. Ad stacks are proliferating across the digital media landscape, and corporate behemoths such as IBM and Adobe are refining and growing their suites of digital marketing and advertising software offerings. All the while, Google’s been very quiet on the display advertising front.

No longer. Today at DoubleClick Insights, Google announced its commitment to going full-bore into the stack wars with what Vice President, Display Advertising Neal Mohan described to me in an advance briefing is “the biggest upgrade in DoubleClick history.”

Everything digital advertising at Google: search, the Google Display Network, AdSense, text ads, rich media, YouTube, and mobile advertising (AdMob) will be integrated. A new brand encompassing all of DoubleClick’s platform technology has been created. The components include:

  • DoubleClick Digital Marketing Manager – an upgraded version of the DoubleClick ad server, the control panel for ad scheduling, delivery, reporting and more across premium media.
  • DoubleClick Bid Manager – a revamp of media buying platform Invite Media. Google promises faster processing and better reporting to manage audience buying across ad exchanges.
  • DoubleClick Search (launched last year) enables buying across multiple search engines.
  • DoubleClick Studio – a rich media solution that now incorporates Teracent.
  • Google Analytics integration.

“It’s a rolling thunder kind of rollout,” Mohan explained. Workflow, reporting and portfolio management components won’t be released for several weeks. “We invested very heavily in building out a unified stack instead of kluging together existing products.”

Mohan identifies three core benefits of turning all Google’s ad products into a unified stack (and DoubleClick is the platform used by most top agencies and advertisers). The first is “giving time back to our advertisers and agencies.”  In a typical week, Mohan estimates, up to two full days are spent in various digital platforms that don’t talk to each other. “By bringing all these pieces together we can save up to  six working weeks per person per year,” he claims.

Unified reporting and attribution is the second benefit. DoubleClick promises its suite will provide perspective and insights across campaigns and channels. How did display influence search, or vice versa?

Finally, Google says it’s offering cross-channel campaign optimization that will encompass bidding and campaign management.

How will Google’s stack differ from the other major players, notably Adobe and IBM? Most notably, DoubleClick includes an ad server – those two players don’t serve ads (AppNexus, however, does). Critically, the stack will maintain an open API to enable integrations of other software packages.

An open API is a desirable feature in any ad technology stack, but here it’s critical as (Google+ excepted), social support is something earmarked for an unspecified future date, not the present. Moreover, it’s hardly a secret that Google’s relationship with Twitter is tenuous, and with Facebook openly competitive. Both can be viewed as significant shortcomings in a truly integrated stack – though clearly no stack out there is all things to all advertisers.

Social isn’t Google’s only long-term goal. “Digital, whether on the search or display side, has been a result of performance marketing,” notes Mohan, “The brand opportunity still remains untapped.”

Smashing silos and making digital processes easier, more streamlined and unified is a good thing.  What remains to be seen is if the digital brand opportunity lies in display advertising, or in social channels including earned and owned media.

Image: DumboNYC.com

A version of this post also appears on iMedia Connection

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Facebook Advertising Can’t Succeed (without Marketing)

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Perhaps GM’s ad unit needs more of a social life.

It’s hard to believe there wasn’t some sort of agenda in telling the Wall Street Journal, three days in advance of what’s slated to be the biggest IPO in U.S. history, that advertising on Facebook isn’t working for GM, but that’s what the automaker did. If the company was looking for attention, they certainly got it – the media were scrambling for new angles on the week’s biggest story.

Sure, it’s a big deal when one of the world’s largest advertiser pulls back $10M in spend (or makes such a public proclamation). Perspective is also warranted in this situation.

Facebook’s success as an advertising medium, or a public company for that matter, is far from guaranteed. Blazes of glory in this industry are often nasty, brutish and short (AOL, Yahoo, MySpace). But herewith, seven reasons to temper GM’s very public proclamation against Facebook’s advertising:

Facebook advertising isn’t even 1.0. It’s still beta Facebook is developing new advertising products, refining them, killing others, and tweaking some more.  The company’s IPO is a $100B bet that eventually, they’re going to get the model right, just as the search ad model was (and remains) very much in evolution when Google went public. For many advertisers advances can’t come fast enough, but the old term “new media” is very much in play in this contest.

Paid media can’t succeed without earned and owned integration Shortly after the GM story broke, rival Ford tweeted: “It’s all about the execution. Our Facebook ads are effective when strategically combined with engaging content & innovation.” Sounds simple, but integrating paid, owned and earned media into a viable, sustainable strategy in which each informs the other is hard. It requires silo-busting, new metrics, and an entirely new approach to media. Yet it’s a task marketers and advertisers must master – first in social media channels like Facebook, then across the rest of digital as well as traditional media.

Advertisers are only now testing the waters. “We believe that most advertisers are still learning and experimenting with the best ways to leverage Facebook to create more social and valuable ads,” Facebook says in its IPO filing. Best practices for advertising on social networks, or integrating that advertising with owned and earned media? Barely even embryonic. Like Facebook’s evolving ad platform, how to effectively advertise in social channels is still in the earliest stages of evolution

Facebook advertising is not about direct response Those ads on Facebook about tooth whitening and belly fat? Going, going gone says the company. Yet GM’s complaint was that its Facebook ads weren’t moving enough car sales, a pretty disingenuous argument.  GM is certainly sophisticated enough to know that advertising has many purposed other than direct sales: branding, consideration, and purchase intent for starters. It’s very hard to believe the company expected to sell X number of vehicles per Y Facebook ads.

Display is down across the board Why integrate paid, owned and earned media? Because fewer and fewer consumers engage with display advertising. It would be a lot simpler if that weren’t the case. Advertisers could plop creative into ad units and meet goals. But banner blindness and declining click trough rates call for more creative and integrated solutions – again, particularly in social environments.

Content Counts Even GM cedes to Facebook on this account. “We remain committed to an aggressive content strategy,” is one of several quotes GM made in the wake of its ‘no-advertising’ bombshell.

Facebook is biggest media company in history Ever. Of all time. Why doesn’t anyone ever state the obvious? No print or broadcast medium has ever even remotely approached a one billion user base. That old adage about advertising going where the eyeballs are? There are more eyeballs in the world focused on Facebook than anything else man-made. That’s a pretty compelling argument to get this advertising thing right – both internally at Facebook, as well as for advertisers and marketers.

Addendum: I’ve done quite a bit of talking to the media about this issue. Here’s a particularly insightful article from Venture Beat’s Jolie O’Dell: Why Facebook’s GM ad drama won’t impact this IPO.

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Beyond the IPO: 9 Implications of a Public Facebook

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image credit: http://www.llow.it

Susan Etlinger & Charlene Li are not only co-authors, they contributed more to this post than I did.

The run-up to Facebook’s IPO reminds me a bit of a wedding: everyone’s attention is on the big day (expected to be Friday May 18), without much regard for the weeks, months and years afterward. Charlene, Susan and I sat down to discuss some of the implications of a newly public Facebook: on shareholders, business and Facebook itself. — RL

Whether or not Facebook’s IPO ends up being one of the world’s largest (this Washington Post article places it sixth, between AT&T Wireless and Kraft Foods), it will certainly earn a respectable position in the history of the public markets, a lofty spot for an eight-year-old company in a relatively unproven business.

We identified ten areas where we are watching Facebook closely, as an indication of its success in the future. We picked these topics because they intrigue us, because they provoke discussion and, ultimately, because we believe they are the issues most central to Facebook’s future.

#1. Leadership
In a media frenzy in which anything (such as, for example, wearing a hoodie on a road show) can spark a news cycle, it’s to be expected that Mark Zuckerberg would have kept the lowest possible profile during Facebook’s quiet period. But now during the roadshow, on the first day of trading, and afterwards, he’ll need to step out, step up and set the tone for how he will lead this company into its next major phase. Can he pull it off?

The decision Zuckerberg must make, as a CEO who’s famous for his a “go away; we’re working on it” attitude, is whether he will use this milestone as an opportunity to cultivate his newest constituency: investors. As CEO, Zuckerberg needs to be accountable to his shareholders–not to a stock price per se, but to their faith in him. We will start to see clues to this decision during the first earnings call (a trial by fire for the CEO of any newly public company).

Of course, it’s all fun and games until there is a major hit to the stock price. We know, generally speaking, what the triggers will be: a new, poorly received product, a privacy issue, slowing user growth–the registration statement is full of examples. When this happens, Zuckerberg will have to demonstrate a completely new level of leadership. He’s chosen his executive team wisely in that both COO Sheryl Sandberg and CFO David Ebersman are strong, respected executives who have been through this process before. And, despite his youth, Zuckerberg has learned from previous missteps like member revolts, privacy, and Beacon. If you still wonder if Zuckerberg is ready for prime time, imagine how you’d react if a major, highly unflattering motion picture had been made about you while you were still in your twenties. The issue isn’t whether he can avoid controversy, but how well he can quell the concerns of skittish investors.

#2. Innovation
Facebook has a hacker culture; its development mantra, “done is better than perfect,” is at the root of both its growth and its biggest failures. Given the massive number of monthly active users (901 million according to the latest released figures) the strategy has been to release product to the market and learn as it goes.

But as a public company, Facebook will need to choose whether it will continue to release products the way it has in the past or take a more cautious approach. How will it behave when it’s not just the pundits on Twitter, but the shareholders who react?

Although they’d hate the comparison, there’s a strong role model in Google, which, even as a public company, has managed to maintain its agile development strategy. Granted, there’s always the risk of a Buzz (Google) or Beacon (Facebook), but Facebook has demonstrated considerably more focus from the start than Google. Furthermore, the company sent a strong signal in its last quarterly statement that it will continue to make investments for long-term growth, even at the cost of short-term profits. It’s setting expectations that it’s investing for the future, not just for the quarter.

#3. Brands
Will brands buy what Facebook’s selling? Facebook is, after all, a media company, and while it has other sources of income through partnerships, brand dollars are what will ultimately make not only the IPO, but the company itself, succeed or fail. With close to a billion users, Facebook is the biggest media company that’s ever existed, in any medium, ever. Advertisers go where the eyeballs are, which is Facebook’s undisputed advantage. After that, it gets a bit trickier.

Facebook is at the vanguard of developing products that merge and conflate advertising and marketing, that blend content, conversation, paid, earned and owned media with media buys. Advertising is media buying, but those other aspects: owned media (premium brand pages) and earned media (the conversations and comments and interactions brands have with their fans, users and yes, detractors) are part and parcel of what Facebook is working to monetize. It’s still experimental. Brands are still testing the waters and are far from establishing best practices or firm models in a “brand” new environment.

#4. Data

Facebook is also in a position, thanks to its staggering user base, to possess and be able to leverage data on a scale we’ve never before seen. Likes, affinities, social graphs, recent behaviors – it’s all there, together with the basic demographic information. Again, the ability to package, parse, productize, make understandable and actionable this vast quantity of data is as formidable a challenge for Facebook as it will be for the media agencies who buy against these very new models. Facebook’s potential as a marketing data juggernaut is very real, and can potentially take advertising to new levels, if the company succeeds in making that data useful.

#5. Mobile
Most of the coverage around mobile has been focused on Facebook’s “lousy” mobile applications. But we believe this is a red herring – the core issue revolves around the slow development of mobile advertising and marketing. The S-1 says it best in the section on risks related to advertising:

  • “…increased user access to and engagement with Facebook through our mobile products, where we do not currently directly generate meaningful revenue, particularly to the extent that mobile engagement is substituted for engagement with Facebook on personal computers where we monetize usage by displaying ads and other commercial content…”

But with 85% of revenue coming from advertising as of the end of 2011, the more effective Facebook is at appealing to its mobile users, the more it risks shifting revenues from the Web platform where it can monetize users, to the mobile one where it can’t — at least not immediately. So the real question becomes how Facebook will balance creating mobile user value against driving shareholder value.

Facebook can’t risk waiting too long before moving aggressively into the mobile space, but also needs to buy time to help mobile advertising develop. Given this significant risk, the purchase of Instagram represents $1B of earnest money that Facebook is focused on the long term. With the war chest Facebook will have accumulated post-IPO, building a great iPad app and upgrading the smartphone experience is a foregone conclusion. The bigger issue to watch is how well Facebook can develop the mobile advertising market with that experience, in a similar way that it created social media marketing.

#6. Investors
The first earning call is always rough for a first time CEO, and Facebook will likely be no exception. But what we are watching closely is if Facebook will develop a different kind of relationship with its shareholders. The company is, at its essence, about sharing: will a newly public Facebook use its own platform to share more information with investors? Facebook has an unprecedented opportunity to change the way that it handles investor relations. Will it take this opportunity, or will it stick with the tried and true? We’d love to see Facebook use its own platform as a way to engage with and provide greater transparency to its newest stakeholders: the public markets.

#7. Mergers & Acquisitions
Thanks to Instagram, every venture-backed start-up has dreams of meeting with Facebook’s M&A team. Will Facebook focus on smaller acquisitions to acquire talent or smart ideas, or will it make major deals to really move the ball forward?

One of the more interesting areas of speculation lately is what would happen if Facebook were to buy Bing from Microsoft. With Google arguably its most formidable competitor, the addition of search would give Facebook advertisers a direct response medium they could not get before on Facebook. Google is, at its essence, a search company that has struggled with social. Facebook is a social company that needs search. A Bing acquisition would up the ante in a significant way between Facebook and Google.

Looks good on paper, but acquiring Bing would also be a huge distraction and a departure from Facebook and Zuckerberg’s legendary ability to focus on social sharing. A more likely scenario is that Facebook and Microsoft continue their long-term strategic partnership, integrating Bing deeply into the Facebook search experience.

Regardless of whether it buys Bing or another organization, few companies do the “merger” part of M&A well. We expect that Facebook will focus on smaller acquisitions that it can absorb and leverage quickly, while any large acquisitions like Instagram will be kept running separately, in much the way that Google ran YouTube as a separate entity for years. Again, a focus on the long term gives Facebook the ability to look at M&A in a very different way than traditional companies who much justify every single penny spent on a company.

#8. Culture
Facebook is a private company in many respects (one of which is about to change dramatically), but the internal culture has always been very open. It has invested heavily to create this open culture, and it has slowly but surely been reducing the amount of information shared internally in the run-up to the IPO.

This will only increase, as the company will now be beholden to even more securities industry regulations intended to protect investors from selective disclosure. So again the balancing act, this time between employees (and openness) and shareholders (and fiduciary responsibility). Which leads us to…

#9. Talent
Once it goes public, how will Facebook retain talent, especially top talent? Expect to see the usual exodus as people wait to vest, then cash out (the Bay Area housing market is already bracing for impact). But, again like Google, Facebook will retain its cachet for some time to come, and some will be motivated by the opportunity to change the world from within Facebook rather than from without. Where else can you find a platform of 900M people to try out your next great idea?

#10. Privacy
Zuckerberg has said that increased sharing is core to Facebook’s growth. But with greater sharing also come increased pressures on and threats to user privacy.

Over the past eight years, Facebook has mastered the art of trial and error when it comes to privacy. There have been huge missteps (Beacon), significant improvements (to privacy settings) and escalating tensions as the company has continually pushed its users to share more, and more often, frequently beyond their comfort zones. The company has accumulated a great deal of resilience along the way, and has tried to balance giving people a granular degree of control (at the risk of confusing them) with offering a simplified experience (at the risk of alienating them).

Charlene: The addition of Timeline, and the emergence of “passive sharing,” raise the bar yet again. A few months ago I installed the Washington Post Social Reader on my Timeline. Now I know that it involves social sharing, but one day when I was in need of a little “mental floss,” I clicked on a story about Snooki’s recent weight loss. I didn’t think anything of it until a bunch of friends and work colleagues started teasing me. There it was, on my timeline with comments: “Susan Etlinger read an article: “Snooki Finally Reaches Goal Weight of 98 Pounds – But Has She Gone Too Far?” I was, frankly, mortified. I’d forgotten I was “in public,” and I am someone who is supposed to know better.

Wherever your stance on Facebook’s privacy record, privacy will continue to be a litmus test issue for Facebook. User outrage is one thing; shareholder outrage is quite another. We will watch to see how Facebook balances continued innovation against privacy. Where will Facebook stand when and if privacy issues affect the stock price — will they pull back or forge ahead?

As always, we’d love your thoughts on these issues. What are you watching as Facebook heads into its IPO?

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