Last night it was my pleasure to watch the livestreaming of Mark Zuckerberg’s keynote speech at the f8 conference, courtesy of Sun Startup Essentials.

In truth, the speech wasn’t phenomenally exciting - but then again, Facebook is no longer a novelty. It’s now a technology entrenched in our online lives (latest stats say it’s reached a record 45% share of the social networking market in the UK) and this was more about that technology maturing than wowing the world.

First off, Facebook gets a long-awaited redesign - for too long the design has reconciled the old pre-application Facebook with the slew of innovations and applications since. Gone is the one-page look in favour of a tabbed layout. The primary tab is now about telling a story - combining information generated by a person, with information generated by others about that person, interleaving the two in the timeline. I like this idea - the concept of storytelling works so well - but it will take time to show whether it will generate a story worth telling.

Those stories will get more meat on their bones with the main theme of the event - decentralising Facebook across the web. Spearheading this will be the launch of Facebook Connect, which aims to do for the rest of the web what the applications Platform does for Facebook. In short, it will allow participating sites to use Facebook logins as a means of authentication, and activity on that site will show up on Facebook. If this second party sounds familiar then you’re right - the technology is similar to the highly controversial Facebook Beacon, which did things such as log your purchases from Amazon (and thus allegedly ruining Christmas). Only this time they’ve done what they should have done in the first place - targeting social media sites such as Digg, Six Apart, and Citysearch (all beta testers) and worrying about monetization and e-commerce later.

More details in this press release. In a way it’s combining social media aggregation services such as FriendFeed and MyBlogLog with pervasive ID services such as Disqus or OpenID. Not only is it an attempt to muscle in on those services, but the use of Facebook for authentification rather than email could be Facebook’s attention on usurping email as a tool of communication.

At the heart of it is a good idea - making web experiences more social and coherent - and it will be interesting to see how this pans out when it goes ahead this autumn. Edd, one of our developers who was with me at the event, expressed doubts that people such as himself, who like to keep their online identities across different sites separate, would be willing to tie together their different profiles; I on the other hand, using the same ID across all sites, would probably find it OK (I already import my blog, Twitter and del.icio.us into my Facebook profile). The privacy aspects were touched on but not really expounded (will Connect report what YouTube videos you’ve been watching, or if you log into, say, a dating site? Both could damage rather than enhance one’s social relations) and that’s the biggest obstacle for me - convincing people this data sharing will be benign and helpful, after the Beacon fiasco.

One final thought - there wasn’t much talk about mobile, although there were brief mentions of an iPhone API for Connect coming out as well. From a UK perspective, given the explosion in mobile internet use and cool stuff that’s out like the Facebook application for iPhone, to me that seems an oversight on their part.

An interesting piece in The Guardian this weekend… As US newspapers are ditching reviewers in favour of digital alternatives this article looks at and challenges the role of blogger/critique.  

I for one think there is room for everyone, seasoned pro’s can reference their many experiences for a balanced view but a novice may provide a more personal opinion that will sit more naturally with the man on  the  street…  

Finally - our good friends at Jam have also added in to the debate so now its time to make up your own mind. 

The title says it all, really:

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Via Social PRobiotic

It’s rather punchy message aside, the presentation is also very slickly done and excellent selection of the most relevant and hard-hitting statistics about social media today: 14% of people trust adverts while 78% trust word of mouth. Millennials spend 16 hours a week online. And I especially love the “social > media” slide. Give it a go.

Speaking of presentations, Slideshare is currently featuring “PR 2.0” as its topic of the day, and our congratulations to Paul Fabretti for having his presentation from last week (which talks about some of our work for LG) featured on the front page.

On Tuesday Ronnie, our marketing director, and I headed up to Manchester to present at the Marketing 2.0 seminar. We talked about the work we do for LG, including the LG Blog and the various social media outreach activities we manage for them. We’d been invited by Paul Fabretti of KMP and though the event was pitched as an introduction to the landscape, we found people attending had a variety of skillsets and knowledge which made for some interesting conversations.

KMP chief Bill Daring kicked off proceedings with an introduction to the digital landscape, which while it may be meat and drink to seasoned digital professionals, taking stock of what’s out there - from MySpace to Flickr to Twitter to Wikipedia - you forget how much of it is is out there. To the uninitiated it can be daunting entering the field for the first time and to me it emphasised that taking it gently and step by step

Neville Hobson followed up next and he gave a highly informative talk on the modern web-savvy consumer, how they distrust company-speak, and the problem with press releases and one-way messaging. The full video of his presentation is well worth watching (and you can also check it out on Slideshare) but I would like to highlight particular his “Eight Rules of Engagement” - all of which are spot-on and well worth keeping at the forefront of your mind when planning a social media campaign:

Neville Hobson - The 8 rules of social media engagement from paul Fabretti on Vimeo.

Bill and Neville’s general overviews quite nicely set up the second half of the seminar and two talks about specific case studies. First Ronnie talked about our work with LG, which included not just setting up blogs for LG in several languages, but also updating them with content and engaging with what other bloggers have been talking about. This was supported with events for bloggers to attend and making sure they get included in reviewing LG’s products, such as the LG Viewty. We both then contribute to a Q&A where I talked about getting tone and approach right are essential parts. Both Paul and Neville have posted about our talk and are well worth checking out for an independent analysis of our work.

Finally Paul himself wrapped up the seminar with further case studies of corporate blogging (in which LG Blog got a mention, thanks Paul!) - including Dell’s Direct2Dell and GM’s FastLane, and showed how just blogging isn’t the end, but the start, and can lead to many more exciting and engaging projects.

It was a really interesting day and our thanks go to Paul and everyone else at KMP for inviting us and making the arrangements, as well as Bill and Neville for two very engaging talks. There is a second Marketing 2.0 seminar in London pencilled in for September 30th, which we’ll be at as well, so if this has interested you then do check it out and come along to chat with us.