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Just two days ago, I wrote a post about how some applications were cheating their way to the top of the “most installed” list on Facebook. It seems that they’re already taking action to curb these sorts of abuses, starting with changes to the code (someone with more programming knowledge can probably fill in more here - if you’ve got a sense of what the code changes mean, post a link in the comments). But what I find more interesting is a new feature added today that tracks stats not solely by installs but by engagement. If you look at the application summary page today, you’ll see that instead of total installs, it now shows “Daily Active Users.” This change completely turns the application rankings on their head, and will likely have a major effect on how applications are developed and what gets installed.

So what is a “Daily Active User?” And what’s the percentage? Dave Morin explains on the Facebook Blog:

With a change this foundational to Facebook Platform’s measurement, we want to make sure that you completely understand how we will be measuring engagement. We define engagement as the number of users who touch your application every day (measured from midnight to midnight each day).

These touch points are:
- Canvas Page Views
- Link Clicks in FBML
- Mock-Ajax Form Submission
- Click-to-Play Flash

The number of engaged users is calculated by putting all of these touch points together. We display this as the number of “Daily Active Users.” Next to it we also show what percentage that is of the application’s total number of users.

So you can still figure out the gross reach of an application by taking the daily active users and dividing by the percentage. This leads to some new questions about what’s the most useful gauge of how much real influence an application has.

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In a Web 2.0 world, everyone’s looking for the magic formula to make something go viral. Going viral means hitting that critical mass that makes your petition, news story, video, game or gimmick an internet sensation, the talk of water coolers, instant messages and maybe pop culture. It’s hard to pick just one thing as the embodiment of viral, but my personal favorite metric to compare a viral idea against is the infamous Jib-Jab cartoon of the 2004 election. “This Land” was a video that millions of people forwarded for any number of reasons - I know I received it from a host of friends who said either “Check it out - your guy really does have more waffles than a house of pancakes” or “Yep… they’ve got W down pat.”

Naturally occurring viral anything requires a confluence of events - timing, an empty news cycle, a pre-built audience to get you started, and material that’s easy to share. This perfect storm isn’t easy to achieve, so a cottage industry grew in the form of giving your viral anything a little push to help it on its way. Search engine optimization and marketing, paid online ads, people who will pitch your campaign in social networks and the like decrease the risk associated with spending big on material in the hopes that it will go viral. But there’s still nothing that beats the word of mouth friends telling friends can provide. I can ignore a million ads about how cool something might be, but one roommate recommendation and I’m there, particularly if we share interests.

That’s why the new wave of “viral” Facebook apps has me concerned.

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John Brian has has been blogging quite a bit lately about Facebook. I have my own Facebook account that seems to occupy a lot of my “free” time. But for me, it’s not a mission-driven pursuit; I’m just doing it to learn about the technology and what it can and can’t do

How do you get to the bottom of what it will cost your organization to run an effective social networking campaign?

FrogLoop (powered by Care2) has put together an ROI calculator for organizations thinking about getting involved with social networking (Facebook, MySpace).  Formatted like an online mortgage calculator, you type in information about how you plan on staffing these efforts and what kind of membership you hope to gain, and the calculator gives you the resulting revenues and costs.

I’m sure it’s not perfect, but the kinds of questions it asks you are exactly the sort of questions that need to be asked (and often are not) before jumping in with both feet.

Is It Worth It? An ROI Calculator for Social Network Campaigns

I’ve got a confession to make: I’m having an uncharacteristically productive day. I’ve dinged off everything on my to-do list before lunch, responded to all those emails with the “eventually” flag, caught up on the latest news at TechCrunch and Personal Democracy Forum, and even cleaned my keyboard. Yet despite this, I’m anxious. Because when I logged in this morning, I got a most unsettling message:

Now, to be clear, I’ve got profiles on a lot of networks. Most of them are just to test them out and do research, but Facebook is one of only a couple SocNets I actually use for social purposes. I glance through my mini-feed a few times a day to see what’s going on with my friends, compare movie preferences with co-workers, check out applications for both cool potential for clients and to see what I’d actually use.

And while I’m nowhere near as active a Facebooker as someone still in school who has hundreds of friends, I’m still feeling a sort of strange nervousness to be off the network. And that, of course, makes me a little more nervous. It’s not genuine withdrawal - just a vague feeling of anxiety that I might need to poke someone and be unable to do so (does anyone actually know a poke means?).

And I’m not even a Facebookaholic. There are times when I don’t check it all weekend or when I’m out of town. On busy days at the office I just forget to log in all day. And I won’t check it at home some nights. But to go there and see that I can’t get in - that’s causing anxiety similar to leaving my cell phone at home - I know where it is, I know that I’ll have it when I get home, and I know nothing will happen to it or me while apart, I just feel vaguely unsettled.

Is this a symptom of the new superconnectedness of the 21^st century internet? That we become psychologically connected to the hive mind and are unsettled when we can’t make that connection? And it only gets worse as you get more connected - look at Blackberry users on the Metro where they can’t get a connection - or are nearing the dreaded dead battery. Look at how quickly everyone powers up their cell phones after a long flight lands - some of them are calling friends and family to let them know they’ve arrived, but some are just powering them up to get back on the grid.

Well, time to get back to work. I think I’ll just change my Twitter to let folks know I’ve posted something new…

Uh oh.

Since I last blogged about Facebook Causes, they’ve continued their meteoric rise as one of the most popular Facebook applications available. Causes currently boasts 1.7 million users, making it the 18^th most popular application available (though sadly still lagging behind the ubiquitous albeit less socially conscious Fortune Cookie application). That’s more than 154% of the user count at the time of my last blog post a few weeks ago, and eight and a half times as many people as used Causes when I first blogged about it. This growth is partially attributable to the growth Facebook continues to experience and partially due to Facebook’s uber-viral effect that make the best applications grow the fastest (By the way, as a side note, all app statistics in this post come from the handy appaholic.com, which measures user counts on all Facebook apps and lets you compare them against each other).

But two new players have recently entered into the Facebook App for non-profits space, both of which are connected to larger mothership sites and make use of those sites capacities to offer additional features. More on them after the jump…
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When I last posted about Facebook Causes, just under 200,000 people had signed up for the Causes app. Just three weeks later, over 1.1 million people have Causes on their Facebook - and it’s still growing (to give you some context, there are about 24 million Facebook users today). Some individual causes have been showing similar logarithmic growth - Save Darfur is up to almost 220,000 members and $17,000 raised, The ONE Campaign is at almost 40,000 members and $4,500, and Support Breast Cancer Research, a cause that wasn’t even on the radar three weeks ago, is at nearly 400,000 members and $10,000 donated. So there’s clearly potential for groups to build a network and raise money, at very little cost of funds. But what’s next?

Well, for one thing, Project Agape founder Joe Green has hinted that new features are coming later this month or in early July. What’s going to be included in these new features? They’re not saying yet (there are some hints at interviews he’s done for Personal Democracy Forum and MyDD - read the tea leaves however you’d like), but I thought I’d write up my own personal wish list here:
 
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(Note: many of the links in this post go to pages that require a facebook login to view. If you don’t have one, you should get one here)

With the announcement of their new open platform, Facebook has turned the social networking world on its head. Instead of banning third-party widgets, they’ve opened the doors to innovation. We’ve already seen new modules for sharing movie favorites, supporting your favorite presidential candidate and playing music (mercifully, iLike has no autoplay-on-load option).

And more relevantly for non-profits, we’re seeing applications like Project Agape’s Facebook Causes that let you build a community and raise money using one of the 800 lb gorillas of social networking. Facebook boasts over 24 million members as of this writing, a disproportionately high number of them in college or college educated - prime future small donor material. Facebook Causes lets you build your own cause by choosing an organization to support, writing a short brief on why they deserve your support, and picking a category.

Next comes the tricky part - promoting your cause to your network. Some of the most popular causes, like the ONE campaign and Save Darfur, have grown exponentially, with 9,203 and 44,506 members respectively. Others, like Net Neutrality is Bogus and Simplify our Citations (number one position: “Bibliographies are hard”) have garnered only 13 and 18 members so far respectively. There are 150 causes tagged as public advocacy (one of nine categories), ranging from presidential candidates to political issues both mainstream and obscure, so you can get an idea of the volume of causes to support in total.

So how do you make your organization stand out from the masses of causes, yearning to raise funds? Start by mobilizing the assets you already have. Post a page on your web site, encouraging users to add your cause to their profile. Send out an email to your house file. Create an official profile for your organization so you can start collecting friends of your own. And when you create your cause in Facebook, make sure you pick the right one for the donations to go to! The list of available causes is pulled from Guidestar, so most large C3’s will be on there, and Project Agape has hinted that political campaigns could be coming soon.

One hitch with the Facebook Causes is that you’ll get donors’ money, but not their contact information. Facebook is known for being very careful with users’ privacy (as a matter of fact, it’s the prime directive in their FAQ), so don’t expect this to change much, which means that if you want to solicit your Facebook donors, you’ll need to do it on Facebook. On the other hand, for political campaigns, there will need to be reporting for FEC filings, so we’ll hopefully see some middle ground that lets users click an opt-in that says “Please let <organization that I must think is cool or I wouldn’t be giving them my money so I certainly would love to get the occasional email from them> contact me.” Let’s hope for this in the future.

In the meantime, start thinking about ways to integrate Facebook into your portfolio of online outreach. We’re bound to see more of this sort of thing with the new platform, and a vibrant Facebook community could be a valuable asset to reach new donors.