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Apropos Facebook for business and how to make money from your content and network on Facebook, I found this article on Early To Rise:

7 Sizzling Business "Discoveries" From Stanford's Facebook Project (and How They Can Help Any Entrepreneur Make a Million Bucks)

By Charlie Byrne

Last week, Mark Zuckerberg turned 24. 

And my guess is, he's pretty pleased with himself so far. 

A college dropout, but from Harvard. A self-starter who launched a business from his dorm room. And, oh yeah, the world's youngest self-made billionaire, according to Forbes magazine. 

Make that a "theoretical" billionaire, since nobody is really sure exactly how much his hugely popular social networking website - Facebook.com - is actually worth. It's not publicly traded (although Microsoft recently laid out $240 million for a 1.6 percent stake). It's not clear where it's headed. (Mark himself isn't sure.) To some people, it's not clear what purpose it's supposed to serve either.

But at least two things are sure.

First, people love it. Nearly 70 million visited the site last month alone. And second, it's looking like one of the greatest entrepreneurial innovations since, well, since someone launched the first business that offered sliced bread.

One area that's receiving plenty of attention is Facebook "apps" (applications). From useful tools such as stock market tickers and productivity management helpers… to complete time wasters such as "Give the Imaginary Puppy a Bone" and "Who's the Coolest Person You Know"… there's a Facebook app for just about everyone and everything.

After (if) you've chosen to add one of them to your Facebook homepage, it appears in your browser whenever you sign into Facebook. Most of these mini software programs are developed by third-party entrepreneurs and monetized (not always successfully) through a classic advertising model: Get eyeballs and sell ad space or place affiliate ads.

Facebook apps are so big right now that B.J. Fogg, a professor at Stanford University, launched a semester-long project just to develop more of them for Facebook users. 

At the end of the project, Professor Fogg and his students published a report to name the entrepreneurial "discoveries" they had made. But were they really breaking new ground… or just reinventing the wheel?

I decided to take a look. 

Combing back through the longstanding principles you've come to know and love by reading ETR and Michael Masterson's new blockbuster book, Ready, Fire, Aim, I found at least seven "power principles" with fascinating parallels to the Stanford project.

ETR Longstanding Principle #1: Introducing Products in a "Mature" Market

Consumers aren't looking for brand-new products. They are looking for clever new adaptations of products they already know and love. When it comes to new, the human brain can take only a little bit of it. Eighty percent of the old and 20 percent of the new is a good ratio. Your goal is not to develop brand-new ideas, but to notice trends that are beginning and develop products that anticipate that trend by a little - just enough to catch your customers' attention.

Stanford Students' Discovery: "It's Never Too Late to Create a Winning App." When Stanford launched its project, over 6,000 Facebook apps already existed. Just 10 weeks later, the students had six apps in the top 100. None of them were radically innovative.

ETR Longstanding Principle #2: The Power of Simplicity

You can sell your product very well by talking about its many benefits, but the most successful advertisements are those that highlight a single benefit above all the rest. When this benefit can be presented as uniquely characteristic of your product, you have an advertising proposition that can last and last and last. Consider any great marketing campaign - Burger King, Charmin, Marlboro. Examine any best-selling, non-fiction book - The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, What Color Is Your Parachute?,  Chicken Soup for the So ul, etc. What do they all have in common? Simple themes. Ideas so simple they can be expressed - and understood - in a few short words.

Stanford Students' Discovery: "Simplicity & Clarity Are Key to Success." Too many and too clever features must be avoided. Make the app easy to understand and easy to use.

ETR Longstanding Principle #3: Ready Fire Aim

Prudent entrepreneurs do not want to risk all their time and money on a single product. For the best chance of having a successful business, they need to be flexible about what they are going to sell. If their first product idea doesn't sell well, they have to be able to generate a second one. Innovation matters. And so does speed. Combined, they give your business extraordinary growing power.

Stanford Students' Discovery: "Speed & Flexibility in Launch & Iterations." Many fast and imperfect trials beat deep thinking. Flexibility beats quality. Getting too attached to one app idea can be fatal.

ETR Longstanding Principle #4: Teamwork Accelerates Success

Don't even try to be a solo creator. You will get much better results much faster by working with a creative team. Sometimes you might get ideas while showering or exercising or sitting on an airplane. But don't act on those ideas. Write them down and bring them up when you're brainstorming with a group.

Stanford Students' Discovery: "Community Cooperation Leads to Success." Students helped each other a lot, sharing app development tools, tips, and insights.

ETR Longstanding Principle #5: Check Your Ego at the Door

How do you know your product idea is good? Because you think it is? Business is not and must never be about what the business owner thinks is good or right. Business is about providing value to the customer. And that value can be determined only by the customer. Don't let your ego convince you that you can teach the marketplace what it should and should not buy, or you and your ego will soon find yourselves in the poorhouse.

Stanford Students' Discovery: "Individual Opinions About Apps Are Worthless." Don't be swayed by one person's opinion. Just get the app out there and see what happens.

ETR Longstanding Principle #6: Don't Be a Pioneer in a Market

When it comes to answering most of the fundamental questions about selling your product, the best answer will always be this: Imitate the industry norm. If you are always trying to come up with product ideas that are completely new and different, you will likely have a very poor success record. Let others live (and die) on the "bleeding edge."

Stanford Students' Discovery: "Copying Success Is a Cheap/Fast Way to Succeed." Novelty isn't the best approach to apps. If you're desperate for a win, just copy something that's working. Flipside: If your app is doing well, expect imitators.

ETR Longstanding Principle #7: Accelerated Failure

Success isn't usually about genius. It is more often about trial and error. Money loves speed, so spend your time trying new permutations of existing successes rather than endlessly hoping to find the "next big thing." Don't be satisfied when things are "running smoothly." An entrepreneurial business should never be running smoothly. Accelerate failure. Cut your losers and run with your winners.

Stanford Students' Discovery: "Success Comes From the Chaos/Control Cycle." Successful innovation is a process.

So there you have it…

Now I didn't have access to the details of everything Stanford attempted. They probably made a ton of easily avoided mistakes. And it sounds like they had some very nice successes as well.

Over the course of their project, they generated somewhere in the neighborhood of $1 million in revenue from their Facebook apps… not to mention at least three new companies that were formed during the experiment, two others that were acquired by outside interests, and reports of lucrative job offers for all those who completed the program.

But I'm willing to bet they could have had a LOT greater success, a LOT sooner, if they'd spent some time reading Early to Rise and Ready, Fire, Aim first.

That's where you have an advantage. You see, every day you get (for free!) what took about 75 smart Stanford students months and months to learn. (And think of all that tuition you saved too!)

So congratulations to the smart and energetic Stanford students who learned these lessons the hard way - valuable business principles that most people never discover. You're getting them the easy way… but now it's up to you to go out and use them.

Of course, you've got to be careful out there. Just because lots of people are talking and writing about Facebook doesn't necessarily make it a lasting business model. There have been plenty of "next big things" on the Internet that have turned out to be quite the opposite.

But you've got the knowledge to find out quickly, without spending a fortune, if a business idea is going to work. So who knows? Use ETR's ideas to develop an "app"… and maybe YOU will be next to make a million bucks on Facebook!

Apropos types of strategic alliances…

I just love all those free investor newletters that drop into my mail box every day.  Today was no exception. Ann Sosnowski at the Taipan Publishing Group wrote an article about how renegade invesor Carl Icahn was pushing Microsoft and Yahoo together after he starting buying up shares in Yahoo.  She wrote:

*** Also adding to investor optimism is the possibility of another deal between Yahoo Inc. (YHOO:NASDAQ) and Microsoft Corp. (MSFT:NASDAQ).

When Yahoo declined Microsoft’s $44.6 million bid, activist investor Carl Icahn began buying up shares last week.

Carl Icahn is one of the richest men in the world. And he’s the most famous of today’s corporate raiders.

Carl Icahn votes with his money as an activist investor. Money talks. If he takes a substantial holding in your company, you better be concerned.

Ever since he staged a hostile takeover of TWA in 1985, Icahn is known as a ruthless activist investor who will do everything in his power to make you agree with him about how YOUR business is run. Or he’ll wipe you out.

Although Yahoo does have plans in place to repel a hostile takeover, it decided instead to renegotiate around Icahn with Microsoft.

Now Microsoft and Yahoo are in talks again to combat Google Inc. (GOOG:NASDAQ) in the online marketplace. They’re talking alternatives to a complete buyout at this point.

It would be extremely profitable for Yahoo and Microsoft to team up against GOOG. There’s definite value in Yahoo that Microsoft should be able to unlock for investors.

Angela Wickenberg

P.S. Please join us! http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=54338290656

Strategy Calls! - The Strategic Alliance of Online Businesses - is a new group on Facebook, http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=54338290656&ref=mf 

formed for the purpose of being a forum of opportunity for online businesses to network with each other, and to offer tele-seminars, courses and conferences that may be of interest to the online business owner.

In online marketing, this is known as the JV or joint venture.

As was recently pointed out in the astute online marketer, Rich Schefren's recent article on the subject,
http://www.strategicprofits.com/blog/1-plus-1-equals-3/, many marketers have treated the JV as an email campaign, but a joint venture relationship, or a strategic alliance, is what you make it to be.

Traditionally, the ability of a firm to price higher than competitors is called differentiation. A product or a service which offers something unique,or is or greater value than the competition, could then merit a sustainable higher price.

But a firm may also choose to offer a differentiated product or service at a similar price to competitors in order to increase market share and volume.

It is, of course, of no value in achieving competitive advantage unless it is of value to the user, so that the user has preference for those products or services over those of competitors. Focused differentiation through strategic alliances lead to a perceived added value to a particular product or segment, which may also warrant a price premium.

The aim with strategic alliances is to achieve higher market share, and therefore higher volume, than competitors by offering better products or services at the same price; or enhanced margins by pricing slightly higher.

It is much more difficult for a competitor to imitate a basis of differentiation linked to a mix of activities or features rather than just a product or a service, if the mix is a good one, then this is highly likely to benefit many of the businesses online.

Strategy Calls! - The Strategic Alliance of Online Businesses - encourages businesses of all kinds to join this group to

*network
*find possible partners to form strategic alliances or enhanced joint ventures with
*receive information on the subject
*listen to experts being interview from the comfort of your home or office
*receive information on upcoming networking conferences and seminars.

The Strategy Calls!  website, to be located at http://StrategyCalling.com,  is under construction and a schedule of calls is forthcoming and will be available very soon.

Strategy Calls! Please join us!

Angela Wickenberg
Founder

It’s what you want. The very popular StumbleUpon concept is simple: when you sign up, you provide the service with some of your interests, and you install the neat little toolbar. Once you’ve got the application installed, you can simply begin stumbling and you can tell the system how you feel about the page that was served to you. By clicking on the thumbs up “I like it” button or by clicking on the thumbs-down button, you teach the SU system what content you truly enjoy. By stumbling and sharing your finds to other users, you’re personalizing your own experience and the experience of your peers as well.

The personalization concept — where content is being provided based on your own desires — has proven to be quite successful. Since it was introduced two years ago, StumbleUpon now boasts over 1.8 million users, and is continually expanding. Version 2.90 of the toolbar, which came out earlier this week, is incorporating the relatively new video social search engine that it unveiled in December. StumbleUpon is truly growing…

And so is Digg.

At half the amount of subscribers that StumbleUpon has, Digg is aiming to emulate the SU concept, a recent BusinessWeek article has reported. Hot on the heels of StumbleUpon, Digg (which launched its own video extension five days after StumbleUpon did) is aiming even higher to SU’s core success model: a recommendation tool.

According to Kevin Rose, Digg’s founder who is quoted in the article, “Digg will be smart enough to know what interests you” and it will serve content that fits within the tastes of its users. For current subscribers, this means that Digg will serve content based on the stories users have dugg or buried. If you used the service to promote pages that you truly liked, the Digg system appears to not be much different from StumbleUpon.

More and more companies are involving themselves in what can be an imminent threat (well, perhaps not just yet — and it still depends on who you ask): personalization. Google’s personalized search is being promoted more heavily. As more and more people realize that there are only a few items that may be of interest to them when they search, systems are learning to adapt to user preferences through their own algorithms. As Google explains it, if you’re searching for “dolphin” because you want to learn more about the football team from Miami, you’re not overly concerned with results pertaining to marine life. Depending on the types of pages you visit and the domains upon which these sites are located, Google’s personalized search will rank these pages higher than the undesirable results, thus providing you with a searching experience that like that of no other user. To Google, this is a move provide quality results and reduce the unnecessary clutter.

 

To make our websites shine through these results and be obvious to the viewer, there will likely be obstacles that we’ll need to overcome. Good content is a necessity. Telling your friends is a good way to get the word out. Promoting these pertinent sites through social search is still going to be very useful.

We’re bordering on a new era, one with incredible challenge and obstacles, but one that does have the end user — you — in mind, and hopefully everyone in all communities will be happy with the results.

When people speak about driving traffic through social networks, the first site that comes to mind is usually Digg. Digg’s popularity is obvious: as the numbers increase above the “digg it” button, the likelihood for increased traffic goes up as well. There is a plefora of information on the Internet on how an extremely popular link on Digg can bring you traffic and links.

A lot of people want to get their page on the Digg main page, but in terms of popularity of other online social mediums, it stops there. There are other means of getting good — perhaps better, when considering that it’s targeted — traffic, such as StumbleUpon.

StumbleUpon is highly personalized traffic based on your interests that is served to you when you are actively looking for new sites to discover. The service requires a download of a very easily-integrated toolbar that sits right under the Address bar on your browser. To begin using the service, you click on the “Stumble!” button on your toolbar, and you can rate a site with a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down sign. As sites are continually rated with a “thumbs up,” the page is served to more and more SU users.

The toolbar, which was recently updated with more eye-grabbing icons due to StumbleUpon’s continuous desire to improve the user experience, is shown below:

StumbleUpon also allows you to “discover” new sites. In your regular browsing experience, you might find a site that you think would interest other people. The “thumbs up” icon works for all sites, and that is how new sites get into the database of StumbleUpon pages that are served to the end user during their stumbling session. When you “thumbs up” your site and it hasn’t yet been submitted, you’ll see this window:

The URL is inherited by default, but you can personalize your initial submission with a title and the brief description of the page. You can then categorize this into any one of the categories listed and you can tag it with whatever appropriate tags would benefit your visitors. Once the site is in the system, people will begin stumbling and learning more about the site you submitted.

How can you leverage your StumbleUpon influence to get your submissions noticed?

• Personalize your page. Upload an avatar, tell people who you are (fill out the “General” section), and share with the community what you like (the “Interests” section). If people are browsing the user community, they’ll get a truer sense of who you are.
• Join the communities relating to your interests and your business. To make sure that you are served pages that truly interest you, you’ll want to join targeted communities so that the traffic is desirable. You’ll also be able to contribute similar pages to the StumbleUpon engine so that they are added. If your page relates to these groups, they will be served to the group members. You can join up to 63 groups in the following main categories, which should cover just about everything:

• Befriend people who have similar interests. Adding friends whose pages interest you means that they will likely appreciate the pages that you’re submitting as well. It grows into a mutual relationship. People who like the pages you submit will befriend you and you will be serving them content based on the relationship. With the StumbleUpon network, you can have up to 200 friends.
• Stumble often. Just submitting and stumbling upon a single page doesn’t bode well for your reputation, and keen users will take notice of this. Stumble frequently. If people like the pages you’ve stumbled upon or submitted, you’ll likely also be rated highly in the community.
• Label and tag your submitted pages appropriately. When you tag your new submissions, be relevant. Pertinent tags will bring you the most targeted traffic from the users who specifically have expressed an interest in the topic you are serving content for. If you cover all the keywords (and tags) that you could possibly think of that don’t relate to your site, your popularity (if any) will be short lived when the thumbs-down button is pressed. Bear in mind that once the page is submitted, tags can be added and removed by the community members (which is a definite indication that they’re visiting the site!)

Why should you look at into directing StumbleUpon traffic to your site? Beyond the obvious benefits of extremely targeted traffic, the traffic doesn’t come all at once compared to a site like Digg. There’s the inherent benefit of having that “15 minutes of fame” on Digg until it crashes your server. StumbleUpon traffic is generally much more gradual. In one particular example, Neil Patel explains that StumbleUpon drove 17,209 visitors to his site in 25 days. Traffic coming directly from Digg is much less memorable, and most Digg users don’t venture farther than the front page.

An alternative is to consider sponsoring your site on StumbleUpon. Compared to the most obvious rival, Google Adwords, StumbleUpon traffic is sought and is the only page being served to the user at the time. It’s also incredibly cheap at $0.05 per visitor (with a maximum of 2,000 visitors per day). The results have been pretty amazing and provides “qualified traffic instantly” compared to Adwords, as indicated by a recent user’s experience.

So if you’re not interested in advertising, go social. The StumbleUpon community is a great way to find some pretty neat pages that you’d have never previously heard of.

by Angela Wickenberg

We typically seek first to be understood; mostly, we do not listen with the
intent to understand, we listen with the intent to reply.  We are either
speaking, or preparing to speak, filtering everything through our own eyeglasses
and reading our life stories into other people’s lives.  

“I know exactly how you feel - let me tell you about my experience“ - constantly
projecting our own movies onto other people’s behaviour.  If we have a problem
with someone - then that person just doesn’t understand.  Sound familiar?  But
to understand another person, you have to listen to them, understand them.  We
are so filled with our own rightness, our own stories.  I’m guilty of it too.

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TheRichJerk is launching a new product tomorrow called XRay Domination.  It's an interesting product with a staged launch where the narrator, "Ryan", exposes the RichJerk's keywords in his Adwords campaigns.  There was a series of videos, building up suspense and I thought it was a fun launch.

Some people are offended by the Rich Jerk and his language and the way he talks about women.  I know that some people might find this in bad taste, but I am just amused when I read his emails and the copy on his website.  It's like watching a stand-up comedian, or even listening to hard rock music with insulting lyrics, or even the country western music with lyrics that somehow say hurtful things but have a bit of truth in them.  I usually laugh outloud when I read his stuff.  I just don't take it seriously. There's something releasing about it - the way I see it - laughing is always good, and his marketing info is amongst the best on the market.

Last week, Rich Jerk launched his new Rich Jerk Evolution website in very close proximity to the X-ray Domination launch, which is tomorrow.

In fact, I saw at least a couple of marketers who got their promotions mixed up about this. They actually confused the two launches. They thought they were promoting X-ray Domination, but the link was for Rich Jerk Evolution (or vice versa), which is a totally different thing.

Rich Jerk Evolution (aka Rich Jerk 2.0) is basically the new evolution of the original Rich Jerk ebook, formatted as a membership site with various types of content. It costs $29 a month if you pay for the entire year, $59 quarterly, and $99 on a monthly basis.  But being a member of Rich Jerk Evolution will give you the chance to purchase X-ray Domination a full hour before everyone else. And since they’re limiting it to 500 licenses, it could be a big factor. I have no idea how quickly it will sell out (I don’t even know the price yet), but I figured I’d at least let you know.  I hope I can afford it!

There are about 5 major launches going on right now and so there is a lot of noise on the marketplace and it feels hard to distinguish between all of the claims made for the various products.

The X-ray Domination product itself is launching tomorrow on March 20th at Noon eastern.

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