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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!

I joined Facebook a short while ago and was invited to join a group that was studying  the

psychology of Facebook!  I thought it was going to be interesting and useful and that turned out to be very true.

A representative of the BBC wrote an article, which I am sharing here.  I'll write something a little bit later

when I have time to focus on it.  Here is my Facebook profile:  You can be my friend there, if you wish:

http://profile.to/angelawickenberg/

My Twitter profile is twitter.com/EbizMom

which I update several times a day directly from my Facebook account.

Anyway, here's the article:

Students prepare to learn the secrets of Facebook

A group of students at Stanford University in the heart of Silicon Valley have turned their attention towards a unique course that blends popular culture with the more time-worn principles of psychology.

The Psychology of Facebook is the brainchild of Professor B J Fogg, a pioneering persuasion psychologist who founded the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford.

He says: "When Facebook came along I was one of the developers at the launch and what struck me was how there was this new form of persuasion. This mass interpersonal persuasion."

Professor Fogg says the pivotal moment came when he watched an application on the site go from "literally zero to more than a million users in a week".

He recalls that it was to do with music sharing and buying tickets and that that was when he had his "oh my gosh moment". It was quickly followed by a light bulb moment.

"Where on earth could you get a million customers in a week? That was when I said 'I want to learn more about this' and I thought the best way was to teach a class and look at how persuasion happens."

Usual coterie

It's Thursday afternoon and the sun is splitting the sky above the adobe-coloured Cordura Hall, the venue for Professor Fogg's Psychology of Facebook course. Outside there's a rag tag collection of people dodging the searing heat.

Alongside the usual coterie of students is an older crowd known simply as "visitors". These people are an assortment of entrepreneurs, angel investors, business heads and myself the only journalist.

Facebook right now stands out from the crowd. Can they continue? Professor B Fogg, Standford University

As we wait for the technology to click into place that allows another 700 students to tune in online, Professor Fogg declares that his goal is to help everyone to become a world class expert on the psychology of Facebook.

But this is no one trick pony according to the Professor. "What we learn here isn't just relevant to Facebook. The psychology that drives Facebook relates to other online success stories, including those blockbusters yet to be invented."

"There is something enduring about what we are studying," he declares, "whereas if you are learning how to programme a Facebook application, that then could change in 30 days from now. In fact it probably will; so that knowledge breaks."

Dissects aspect

Each week the class dissects an aspect of Facebook and looks at the way it works, the psychology behind it and what impression users are trying to convey. The gamut runs from examining status updates to news feeds and from poking to writing comments.

Today the focus is on the use of profile pictures, the photograph on the front page of every Facebook entry.

The discussion is led by Psychology Senior Richard Barton, who maintains Facebook's high strike rate in this area has to do with the default picture it puts up if you don't post your own.

"Who wants a question mark in place of their face and what questions does that raise about you? Like, why are you on Facebook? And so basically Facebook sets up an environment where your friends do the persuading to get you to post a picture."

Professor Fogg contends this is at the heart of Facebook's achievements.

"What they're tapping into are some fundamental drivers and it makes it easy to satisfy those drives. Things like the need to be socially accepted and the flip side is to not be rejected."

Class experiment

The other strand to Professor Fogg's persuasion theory has to do with motivation and outcomes, questioning why users post a certain type of picture and why they constantly change them or not.

How does the Facebook 'question mark' persuade users?

To illustrate his point he conducts a class experiment asking people to write out how they want to be regarded based purely on their profile mugshot.

The findings are revealing:

"Fun, outgoing, nature loving."

"I was too lazy to rotate my picture and then I had the idea that if I left it you would think I was cool and good looking." "I'm hot."

"I want to remind my children that I was young once."

"Make people think about peace."

"Web 2.0 revolutionary and world traveller."

Professor Fogg says this random sample proves that behind even the innocent act of posting a profile picture, the psychology of persuasion in managing your image or the impression you give off is at play.

And he stresses that albeit unconsciously, Facebook's unbridled success lies in getting users to to do the work for them with friends persuading friends to post pictures, comments, or upload applications.

"I would say they were lucky and have been responsive to users but I don't think they are persuasion masterminds."

Straightforward tools

While luck might have played its part in turning Facebook into a major force in social networking, the entrepreneurs attending this course are looking for straightforward tools to help their businesses hit the jackpot.

Rob Ross has developed the Footsies application for Facebook and is working on others. For him the course is a portal into how he can make his business more relevant.

He says: "This opens a door that has not been opened before. This is going to change the game."

Student Roman David agrees: "It's beyond dollars and cents. That is part of it but its also where the opportunities are for entrepreneurs and about how the world is changing."

Professor Fogg says while his class is about trying to understand what makes Facebook tick, the people behind the site have a similar task to ensure it remains a dominant player.

"Facebook right now stands out from the crowd. Can they continue? So far with its fifty million plus users they're doing a pretty good job."

The inefficiency of multi-tasking in business is well-known. 

Checking emails, making phone calls in the middle of working on a project is called continual partial attention -

when your mind has something is it constantly tracking and never turns off.

When your business needs to shift gears it takes a while to shift back - as much as 30 minutes each and every time -

for me much more time - and the cost of it can become very high.

I know this from experience;

I have called myself "the multi-tasking Queen", juggling resources and time all of my adult life. 

It took me 10 years of study at the university,

a lost job,

a broken marriage,

the birth of four children,

and 10 years of failure at business to finally learn this one.

This is my greatest AHA this year.

Continuing to multi-task when my experience has taught me that it is extremely inefficient is just downright foolish. 

I have three kids at home and since our recent move, my office in the living room,

so how will I achieve real focus and "flow" in my work and business?

Obviously, I need to make some changes - more changes.

But they are good ones - these changes -

and I start by changing my self-description on my "about us" page on this site.

To Our Mutual Success, Both Online and Offline,

Angela Wickenberg

This weekend, I was flown in from Stockholm to Orlando by StomperNet to participate in the beginner fast track competition as a finalist!  I joined StomperNet in late October 2006 with the intention of gaining knowledge of SEO and other methods of gaining natural traffic. Since I am a non-technie kind of person, the creation of websites and blogs is quite an accomplishment in itself.

Although I live in Sweden, I was born and raised in a family from Louisiana that migrated to Los Angeles. I often feel I would like to move back home. My most immediate concern and goal with my business, of course, is to support my family, but I want to become hugely successful, too.   I sold my car and took out loans to go into business last fall, so I think that shows the degree of my commitment.

I am both emotional and passionate, and so I have poetically espressed the trials and tribulations of being the single mother of four children - one at university - with a large house note and of starting up a business from scratch.

A version of my presentation will be divided up in articles, where I may or may not expand concepts, on this blog, as well as the lyrics to the song that I wrote in connection to my application.  Hopefully, I will also successfully record the song and upload it. Earlier attempts weren't very promising. Not being a professional singer, I am self-conscious of uploading an inferior product.  I promised to give freebie info and products to my fellow Stompers and readers; and who better to do this than someone like me who has had to find all the free resources possible in order for my business to survive! I have collected this information over the past few years, and will soon re-organize my blog so that they are uploaded and more easily found and accessed.  More to come on this in the coming weeks.

Prior to the trip, my youngest son caught the flu and all of the others caught bad colds, so life was hectic before leaving. I was lucky to have escaped getting ill myself - just a sore throat.  After the 24 hours of travelling time, including layovers and missed planes, I finally arrived to the seminar, but only a few hours late.  I met a lot of fantastic people whom I admire; John Reese, who had a rare appearance as the Keynote Speaker, Andy Jenkins, Brad Fallon and Ben Mack, whose book I had just started reading, to name a few. It's surprising how gracious and generous these famous marketers are!  My camera was broken, but Sharon Odom Fling in the photos was so kind as to take a few with her camera.  Thanks Sharon!  Here are some of the photos from the seminar. 1st  photo: John Reese. 2nd photo: Andy Jenkins. 3rd photo: Brad Fallon. 4th photo: Ben Mack. Group photo with my new friend Sharon Odom Fling. I am Angela, the lady in red.

I didn't win the competition, Britt Taylor did, as well as the surprise gift of a BMW M5, presented by John Reese, but I had the chance to touch the hearts and minds of many others in my presentation and feel that, in a sense, I am also a winner in this competition and that my relationship to StomperNet is more than a mere passing fling.

Angela Wickenberg

In that spirit, Business 2.0 magazine sent senior writer Paul Kaihla and a team of reporters on a quest to find some of the best "best practices" in business today. The companies they interviewed have stumbled upon their own unique methods for doing everything from running meetings and generating product ideas to troubleshooting M&A deals and keeping board directors on their toes.

Following are 25 ideas that are truly gems, broken down into five categories: finance, HR, management, marketing, and R&D.

They're methods that help keep some of the best-run companies, like Procter & Gamble (Research), Google (Research), Southwest Airlines (Research), Microsoft (Research), Intel (Research), and Coke (Research), at the top of their game. You've probably never heard of most of these practices — but you might want to start implementing them tomorrow. 

HEWLETT-PACKARD CEO Mark Hurd loves numbers–and insists that his managers learn to love them too. Since Hurd came onboard last March, one of the key tools he's used to keep pace with rivals is his extreme form of industry benchmarking. Instead of comparing HP's sales and profits with Dell's or IBM's, the company now tracks itself against rivals by every conceivable measure. "We want to make sure we break down every unit and business function," explains Marius Haas, senior strategy officer at HP, "so we can become best in class in each one."

Here's how it works: Imagine a matrix with various business units running down the side (printing, servers, storage, IT services, etc.) and business functions across the top (finance, HR, marketing, R&D, etc.). Now create benchmarks for each of the 72 resulting cells and you have a good idea of how Hurd is managing the $87 billion company. The benchmarks are the best guess of where HP's rivals are going to be in 2007, based on more than a dozen variables, from real estate cost per square foot to operating expenses as a percentage of gross margin.

Before Hurd took over, HP measured itself primarily against IBM, using one very blunt tool: costs as a percentage of revenues. That ignored IBM's higher gross margins and the fact that it has more gross profit to spread around. Hurd's new benchmarking method formed the basis of HP's reorganization effort announced last July, through which HP has promised to save $3 billion by 2008. Already there is key evidence of success: Operating expenses as a percentage of gross margin dropped 2 percent in 2005, helping to fatten profits by $385 million. — E.S.

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Gmail has a bunch of lesser-known feature that can end up being very useful once you get to know them. The product manager at Gmail put together last year a list of his top 10 favorite features that you may or may not be familiar with.   Here's his list, which was very helpful to me in becoming more productive with Gmail and learning to use it's many features.

10. Custom "from" Most people end up managing more than one email account — some are personal, others might be for work or school. When I graduated from college, I wanted to keep my .edu address for alumni-related things, but made Gmail my primary personal address. My university made it easy to forward my .edu mail to my Gmail address, so I could read all my mail from my within my Gmail account. I was happy to find out that Gmail would actually let me send mail "as" my .edu address, so I could continue to keep that identity, while managing all my email from one place. Here's how to set that up.

9. Open attachments in Google Docs & Spreadsheets, or view as slideshow If you are sending a Word document or Excel file as an attachment, Gmail lets you easily open it in Google Docs & Spreadsheets. (In case you're not familiar with Google Docs & Spreadsheets, it's our online word processor and spreadsheet application, which lets you store and access documents online and collaborate on them with anyone.) Since other people are working on many of the docs I receive as attachments collaboratively, it's really easy to just open them in Docs & Spreadsheets and create a single document to work from, rather than constantly sending versions of documents back and forth. If the attachment is a PowerPoint presentation, Gmail will recognize this and give you a link to"View as a slideshow." This will open a window with a Flash preview of the slides. This is great for quickly reviewing slides in the browser.

8. Gmail gadget for iGoogle I use iGoogle to bring together a lot of the information I care about on the web (feeds, my Google Calendar, YouTube videos, etc). I use it as a dashboard at the start of my day to get an overview of what's going on in the world. I've added the Gmail gadget to my page to get a preview of my Inbox, which is great because it's one of the first things I'm interested in seeing.

7. Reply by chat Most people know that you can chat with your contacts in Gmail if they're using Gmail too. But there are some subtle features that make chat particularly useful in the context of using your email, like replying by chat. If you've received an email and notice that the sender is online (by seeing the little green dot next to his or her name in the conversation), you can click the button "reply by chat." What's particularly convenient about this is that the chat will be archived as part of the email thread to which you replied. I like this most because it means when I search for anything related to that thread, I find the chat transcript alongside all the relevant email messages.

6. Gmail for mobile application It wasn't that long ago that my cellphone could barely handle sending text messages. I didn't used to think of it as being an efficient place to access my email. That's changed — big time. Email has become one of my primary forms of communication when on the go. Unfortunately, on a lot of phones, dealing with email can still be a pretty annoying experience, especially if you're not using a device like a PDA. Enter Gmail for mobile. It's fast, it syncs with your online account, and it gives you virtually all of the same Gmail functionality like search, filters, and access to your whole archive of mail.

Two other little known features to get greater control over your inbox:

Here are some little-known ways to use your Gmail address that can give you greater control over your inbox and save you some time and headache. When you choose a Gmail address, you actually get more than just "yourusername@gmail.com." Here are two different ways you can modify your Gmail address and still get your mail:

• Append a plus ("+") sign and any combination of words or numbers after your email address. For example, if your name was hikingfan@gmail.com, you could send mail to hikingfan+friends@gmail.com or hikingfan+mailinglists@gmail.com.

• Insert one or several dots (".") anywhere in your email address. Gmail doesn't recognize periods as characters in addresses — we just ignore them. For example, you could tell people your address was hikingfan@gmail.com, hiking.fan@gmail.com or hi.kin.g.fan@gmail.com. (We understand that there has been some confusion about this in the past, but to settle it once and for all, you can indeed receive mail at all the variations with dots.)

For me, the real value in being able to manipulate your email address is that it makes it really easy to filter on those variants. For example you could use hikingfan+bank@gmail.com when you sign up for online banking and then set up a filter to automatically star, archive or label emails addressed to hikingfan+bank. You can also use this when you register for a service and think they might share your information. For example, I added "+donation" when I gave money to a political organization once, and now when I see emails from other groups to that address, I know how they got it. Solution: filtered to auto-delete. ive it)."

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