For starters, the profile looks a lot more modern and polished than the current version. An image you can add as a banner dominates the visual impression, a nice and Twitter-like change from the dull sameness of the current version. There’s an updated 3-column layout, bringing more content above the fold and shifting the emphasis from the old, single-threaded feed to a more modular representation of your interests, tastes, and activities. Scanning the page gives you a sense of who someone is, not just what they’ve been up to. A secondary navigation in the right-most column even lets you follow the milestones in someone’s life from birth to the present. It’s pretty cool, actually, and I find myself looking forward to scanning the life histories of people I know only in the present.

Status options have been expanded to let you more easily indicate life events with just a few clicks, a clear effort to encourage habitual lurkers to jump in and participate. The music I listen to on Spotify now hits my profile directly, for example, neat until I was outed as a Barry Manilow fan by an attentive “friend.” Overall, the new profile embraces the lifestream concept in a much more tangible way, finally showing the fruit of Facebook’s FriendFeed acquisition back in August of 2009.

That was 2 years ago, though, and the word “lifestreaming” seems both pretentious and dated now. In the same way distinctions like Mobile and Location-based are ideas past their prime, lifestreaming is just life now. It’s all mobile, all local, all social… all the time.

So how does this new design change the game?

My take is that Twitter is becoming more and more about real-time attention, and Google Plus all about content sharing and distribution. A lot of people (including me) think G+ is actually a better platform for sharing content than Facebook ever was, and in a way Facebook may be ceding that ground to them to move in a more mass-market direction. Facebook may be moving beyond content, indicating with this interface that it really wants to be about people. Facebook seems to want to be about life itself, and the implications of that could be profound.

Imagine a world where you check in to a hotel, and learn that your parents had stayed in room 301 25 years earlier. Maybe you could browse their photos from that trip, or get their recommendations for restaurants in the area, as they wrote them then. Imagine pointing your phone at a menu and seeing an augmented reality overlay of what your closest friends had ordered and enjoyed there recently, or entering a car dealer and calling up a sentiment analysis of references made to the brand by anyone you know, in just a few clicks.

Imagine, on your wedding day, hitting a kind of real-world “easter egg” in the form of a shared reflection from a long passed grandmother, left in anticipation of a future she knew she would not see. Powerful stuff, all in the line Facebook has just established.

There’s a scene in one of the Anne Rice Vampire Chronicles where Lestat emerges into the modern world after a hundred-year rest. Hearing jazz alongside classical music, The Smiths and Wagner over the course of his first day in this strange new place, he marvels that in the 20th century, musical past and the present mingle and coexist in ways that are strange and magical to an 18th century vampire.

Reflecting on the new Facebook, I wonder if we might not see the same thing a hundred years from now… Not just for music, but for the very lives of of people we are and were connected to.

Heady stuff, indeed. But when 800 Million people are already addicted to your product, I guess the need to think big takes on a whole new meaning.

Related articles

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• Leslie Hendry: Facebook’s Timeline Sells Emotion (huffingtonpost.com)

Anyway… If you’re trying to get rolling in Social Media, consider the 5 P’s:

1. Planning – The strategy stuff.
2. Plumbing – The technical stuff.
3. Posture – The mental stuff.
4. Participation – The active stuff.
5. Programs – The business stuff.

Here’s what I mean.

Planning

Always good to start off thinking about what you want to accomplish, not in social media terms, but in business terms. Are you trying to generate leads here? Build some goodwill? Get closer to customers and prospects, to better understand what they want? What?

Beyond that, you need to determine what your content strategy is going to be… in other words, what kind of content is at the intersection of what you can uniquely provide, and what your target audience is interested in? If you can figure that out, and deliver the goods, you’re halfway home.

Plumbing

There’s a lot of stuff to get set up to make the social media thing work. I think it’s best to start with a blog, but that’s really a channel for long-form content. If pictures serve the story you’re trying to tell, get a Flickr account set up. If you need video, then YouTube. If you’re partial to talking rather than writing, create a podcast. It really doesn’t matter, just add whatever serves your content strategy, and ignore whatever doesn’t.

You might also want to set up some aggregators… places like FriendFeed, facebook, and Tumblr, where all your feeds come together as one. These are a great way to make it easy for people to get all of your content in one place, and to multiply the impact of every investment you make in content production.

After that, put the mouse down, and get into right headspace…

Posture

The posture you maintain in your social media interactions is arguably the most important dimension of it. As important as content is, in the end people will tolerate mediocre content if it’s delivered with sincerity, and maybe a little humor.

Remember social media is a cocktail party. Walk around, talk to people, get to know them, be nice, add value to the conversation wherever you can. Listen more than you talk. The time will come to hand out your business card (that’s “Programs” below).

Participation

This is the stuff people think about when they talk social media… the tweeting, the blogging, the flickr-ing (??), whatever.

Again… cocktail party. A cocktail party with the valuable and interesting folks on the planet is useless if you don’t show up. So show up.

Program

Here’s where you get to pay the bills. While you’re investing in the creation of “social equity” – the goodwill you can generate in these networks by trying to help other people out – you need to harvest some of that equity once in a while.

While participation must be sustained and ongoing to create value, programs are periodic by definition. Maybe this week you have a special offer, next week a news release, the week after you’re looking for a javascript ninja. Content serving your own interests is totally acceptable within a social community, so long as it’s not all you bring to the table.

So that’s it. When you think Social Marketing, think Planning, Plumbing, Posture, Participation, Programs. Easy breezy.

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First off, for those of you who don’t know me from Adam, my story is here. Nice to meet you, welcome.

For those who know me from my blog, twitter, facebook, whatever, you know I’ve been thinking hard about the intersection of branding and social media for a long time now, at least in Internet years. Here’s what I’ve concluded, as of the Fall, 2009.

1. The intersection of branding and social media is emotional connection.

You know what drives social media participation? Human beings… trying to get through the day and not screw up, needing to fill something empty inside with the affirmation that only comes from a connection to another human being, and all too often settling for a Triple Whopper instead. That’s what social media is all about, folks. What we used to do over cocktails at 5 we now need to do in 140-character snippets, stuffed into the cracks of our daily to-do lists. It may be sad, it may give you hope for the future of mankind, but either way, it ain’t going away anytime soon.

Brands aren’t all that different, really. And it’s hard to imagine a medium better suited to building brand connections than the one defined by its ability to create human ones.

2. It’s going to be big.

See above. Not “wow” big, “holy shit” big. Others have covered this, I’ll spare you the superlative prognostications beyond that. But really freaking big.

3. The echo is now deafening.

I started blogging to learn from the smart kids, and hope I brought something to the party that benefited them as well. That’s the nature of the socialverse… in the end you get out of it just a bit more than you put in, and for me over the past few years I dare say that’s been a lot. The problem now is that the people who are getting and giving the most seem to be the Same Old People, with the inevitable result that the quality of what’s being given and gotten has declined. “Quality” is imprecise, actually, because some of these folks are very good… it’s more a decline in the fidelity of that content, the degree to which it represents the day-to-day reality of the unconverted majority.

4. The world outside is still quiet.

What is that reality? Most people don’t know diddly squat about Twitter. They use facebook, but fear admitting they just don’t get it. They can’t figure out how to get the pictures out of their camera and out to Aunt Gert, let alone what the frak “FriendFeed” is. And those are the people trying to use this stuff in their regular life. The people who’ve had a gun to their heads to apply it in service to a brand – yet another concept the vast majority of normal people are unable to wrap their heads around – well, these people are despondent. They are terrified of Twitter. Just a bit less, in fact, than they are terrified of becoming that guy who used to work here who smelled like salami and couldn’t create his own PowerPoint decks.

5. The cadre of big thinkers who started this revolution will not lead the nation it creates.

All of which leads me to a bittersweet truth. As the gap between the thinkers of thoughts and the doers of deeds rises, it is not the latter who will be left behind. It is the former who will lose themselves in the desert.

It’s time for me to wrestle, full-time, with the question of how to make money with this stuff in the real world. For a while I thought there might be a technology play out there to do it, but I’m afraid the bleeding edge of product-dom isn’t much more grounded in reality than the hairy-edge of blog-dom.

I came to Holland-Mark to help people I respect figure out how to use social media to make more money. It’s not curing cancer, I know, but it’s something I really enjoy, and something I’m pretty good at.

That’s why I decided to return to the agency business, after 15 years of building businesses that sell to agencies. For me it’s about solving the puzzle, I guess, about wanting to be the guy who cracks this thing wide open.

For the few of you who really know me, this probably makes more sense. In a way building an agency brings together the two halves of my career for the first time – the agency part, and the building businesses part.

To be honest, through the bleary-eyed new Web presence launch-day fog, it feels like I’ve come home.

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