Holy social media, Batman! Video rentals come to Facebook

Posted by JP Mangalindan, Writer-Reporter
March 8, 2011 2:44 PM

Facebook users can now watch The Dark Knight right on the website. It won’t be the last time content providers come to where the users are.

Would you watch movies on Facebook? That’s what Warner Brothers, a division of Time Warner (parent company of Fortune), wants to know by offering up The Dark Knight for viewing on the movie’s Facebook fan page. 3.9 million fans have already “Liked” it and they and other Facebook users can rent it for 48 hours for 30 Facebook Credits, the equivalent of $3. There are some caveats though: it’s only available in the United States, only streams in Standard Definition, and sharing remains limited to posting the activity to the NewsFeed, “Liking,” or Tweeting it. Pretty barebones at this point, considering the wealth of features Facebook currently offers.

But the move is less notable for what it’s lacking and more for what it means for content programming going forward. Recently, Warner Brothers also dabbled with other unorthodox distribution methods, by creating iPad, iPhone, and iPod apps specifically for The Dark Knight and Inception. Not an ideal solution — who wants to download an iOS app for each and every movie? –but it does show that the studio wants to reach as many markets as possible. Its movie apps reach 35 worldwide markets, more than the 23 that iTunes covers. With Facebook, Warner Brothers has the potential to one day reach some 600 million users in more than 200 countries, from Jordan and Senegal to Botswana and Martinique. In doing so, it becomes the first studio to offer movie content within a social network. No outside links or shuttling to third-party web sites.

It might all sound pretty strange at first. Because when users signed up for Facebook, they envisioned using it for connecting with friends and acquaintances, and in some cases, people they’re dying to date. Watching movies probably didn’t register. After all, there are better, dedicated services like Netflix to handle that, right?

But the more you think about it, the more it makes sense. Facebook’s userbase spends an average of 55 minutes a day, 6.5 hours a week, or 1.2 days a month on the site, a significant chunk of time only rivaled by email usage, and one that will grow even further as Facebook matures and introduces more time-sucking features. Rather than force Facebookers to leave the network to some external service or site, a huge barrier of entry in and of itself, content providers are bringing programming to where the users are.

“It’s a great opportunity to bring a shared viewing experience back to folks who have gotten geographically dispersed,” says David Raycroft, VP of Product Strategy for Milyoni, the social commerce platform used for the Dark Knight-Facebook viewing and ecommerce app. Development of such projects can take as little as three days, though in this case, The Dark Knight app took 30 days to develop.

While it’s a solid first step — the user interface is simple and responsive — it also raises several thorny issues. Once the whole trend of Facebook movie streaming takes off, and I firmly believe it will eventually, there’s the issue of fragmentation. Will users be forced to seek out movie fan pages to watch that particular flick? How will they know when a particular new movie becomes available for viewing?

A content streaming hub will become vital as more studios bring content over to the social network, not only to aggregate and highlight content in one central location, but also to update users. Of course, in doing so, it brings Facebook one step closer to being even more integral to your daily life, which, if you’re Mark Zuckerberg, is a good thing.

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Small Business News: Social Media and Networking Lessons

Small Business News: Social Media and Networking Lessons

Small Business News October 22, 2010 By Small Business News
Social media and networking are two things you’ll hear plenty about in small business circles these days. From the way we market to the way we learn more about our customers or industry and our market, social media and networking are often at the heart. Here’s a roundup aimed to seek out that heart and illuminate the world.

Entrepreneurial Frontier

More about new Facebook groups. We’ve blogged before about this new Facebook feature including the positives and negatives (OK, there are some of those), but how simple is it for you to decide whether this is the kind of tool you really want to use for your business and why? We’ve got some basic info for you. TechClump

What can your dog teach you about business? Well, a lot, according to Jackie Parnell. Here are 16 tips she’s come up with after an enlightening e-mail about ”What dogs know about life…” Look through the list and see if you find any information that is useful for your business. Building Businesses Creating Brands

Social Lessons

Lessons in networking. Of course, there are few small business who would tell you that networking doesn’t work. But what is the best way to network for your small business. As it turns out there may be a set of basic best practices that will at least head you in the right direction. Here are ten tips (and a video!) to help your business networking accomplish its target results. Bloggertone

What The Social Network movie can teach every entrepreneur. Yep, not everybody who’s watched the new movie Mark Zuckerberg hated it or necessarily thought it gave the co-founder of Facebook a black. Heck, some people even learned something from watching the flick. Here are five really important lessons about entrepreneurship you might have missed. Abnormal Marketing

Tools & Tips

Social media app provides online newsletter option. Interested in creating an online newsletter for your business, but not yet settled on the best format to use. Read more about the Facebook app from eCircle, ‘Faceook2Subscribe’, and learn more about the tool’s function as a subscriber based newsletter application for small businesses everywhere. B2B Marketing News

Social media is great but don’t forget the rest of SEO. Remember there’s still a vast Web out there crawling with search spiders whose habits for indexing sites are not clearly understood. Facebook and Twitter are awesome for marketing your Website but you’ll also need to know how to be sure the search engines can find it. Search Engine Guide

Big Ideas

Watch your mouth!…or your fingers while tweeting. Hey, things said, tweeted or shared via the revolutionary new social media cannot easily be taken back afterwards. Social media can be great for marketing and PR. But it can also turn into a nightmare with just a few unfortunate keystrokes. Global Reach Copywriting

What Web applications could your small business utilize? You’ve no doubt heard of “the cloud”, the buzz word with a fuzzy description that is just starting to come into focus for some entrepreneurs as a way to share Web apps for a fee rather than buying and licensing them for your business and maybe dozens of workstations. You may, however, be wondering what kind of apps are available. Well, wonder no more. The Inspired Entrepreneur

Innovation

Facebook app proves need for employee driven innovation. Mark Harbeke shares the story of Google engineer Brian Kennish, who built an app to benefit both Facebook and Google as part of the personal project time he is granted by his employer, Google. Do you de3legate a means for employee innovation at your small business? Should you? Winning Workplaces

Social media: It’s not just for engagement anymore. Engagement, engagement, engagement. We’ve heard it parroted a again and again by well-meaning social media gurus who insist this is the best use for the new Internet tool and companies like Comcast, Dell and BestBuy have had success in using it this way. But could social media also be beneficial to small businesses for driving sales? IBM thinks so and is taking a few steps toward development. V3 Integrated Marketing

yes, it’s time to think about Social Media and X-mas

How to Use Social Media in Christmas Marketing
Kevin Gibbons | Oct 20, 2010 |

OK, I realize it’s early to start using the C-word, but it’s almost too late to be planning your festive social strategy.

A new study by lead generation firm LinkShare has found that almost half of all marketers will be using social platforms this winter, with a further 37 percent intending to use online vouchers and special offers.

That means some businesses will be venturing into social marketing for the first time, and at one of the busiest times of year for many consumer-facing companies. If you’re one of them, what do you need to know?

Pick Your Platform

How much of a budget are you planning to dedicate to your Christmas social marketing? If it’s a small, experimental budget, then you’ll need to be reasonable about how much you can expect to achieve.

Perhaps you should begin with a Twitter campaign, or a Facebook campaign, or a blog, or a forum. Don’t try and do all of them only to fail for lack of budget.

Add Value to Christmas Shoppers

Successful social media marketing is about offering value to people. This can be about posting discounts and vouchers, especially at Christmas, when everyone’s budgets are stretched.

However, it’s not just discounts; to be truly social online you need to do more than talk about your products.

So, this is where intelligent and useful blog posts come in; thoughtful and succinct tweets; clever Facebook applications; content that’s worth sharing.

Don’t Spend Hours on Individuals

While it’s lovely to occasionally use your corporate power to make one person very happy, especially at Christmas, don’t waste your social media time.

It’s easy to lose perspective in a social platform and spend hours reconciling one lone customer, or giving far more credence to a complaint just because it was made on Twitter, when actually the complainer has fewer than five followers.

Having said that, targeting individuals can be a good idea. You just need to pick your individual.

So, for example, if you’re a cuddly toy retailer and someone tweets you that their neighbor’s house burned down, presents and all, donating something to the kids can win you some really great publicity.

Just don’t waste hours agonizing over random people online. Resolve their complaints as you would any other customer — quickly and fairly, but not as a particular priority.

Interact With Your Customers

You wouldn’t walk around a Christmas party simply handing out vouchers for your shop and you can’t behave that way online.

Interact with people, start conversations, respond to feedback, engage in debate, promote discussions. This is how you become a personable brand and a social media success.

The clue is in the word “social”!

Can You Attract Viral Attention?

I groan inside when enthusiastic but old school marketers proudly tell me they’ve “gone viral” because they’ve uploaded a video onto YouTube, or launched a competition via Twitter.

But Christmas is a good time to try your luck at achieving viral marketing, because people are much more relaxed, especially at work.

That means they’re happier to share e-mail funnies or spend time on Twitter and Facebook. So it’s a good time to publish your viral attempt.

Viral marketing is very hit and miss, but you’ll almost certainly need to invest considerable cash. Look at previous successful festive campaigns: Elf Yourself, Pimp My Sleigh, and the many successful Christmas-themed mini-games.

All of these were slick and well designed, but they also had a huge amount of paid-for publicity and also a fair bit of luck. If you want to go viral, it’s an investment gamble but you need to do it well if it’s to have any hope of success.

Facebook is Now the Second Largest Video Site in the U.S.

by Frederic Lardinois

Google’s YouTube remains the most popular video sharing site in the U.S., Facebook is now the second most popular place to watch videos online. According to the latest data from comScore, Facebook just took the #2 spot from Yahoo and continues to grow rapidly. While Facebook.com served 166 million viewing sessions in July, this number was up to 243 million in August.

In contrast to Google’s video properties, though, where the average user spent close to 270 minutes in August, Facebook’s users are far less engaged and only watched 21 minutes. Traffic to YouTube continues to grow – though at a relatively slow pace – it’s worth noting that the time the average user spent on the site last month was actually down slightly (282.7 in July vs. 269.5 in August).

The newest entry in comScore’s top 10 last month was the Break Media Network, which is home to sits like Break.com, Screen Junkies and Holy Taco. In total, Break Media reached 42 million viewers last month. The network also featured in comScore’s top 10 for June. Back then, the site only saw 26 million unique viewers for the month. Hulu fell out of comScore’s top 10 this month.