Add your unique URL (http://www.stik.com/INSERTNAME) to your signature line and encourage the people you interact with to view and add to your recommendations.

The recommendations and reviews you’ve received from your customers will speak volumes to those considering enlisting your service. So make that connection easy for them.

Scroll through these screenshots to see how I did it.

For Microsoft Outlook 2010 users, the steps are easy:

• Click “File” in the top toolbar on the left
• Choose the “Options” on the left
• In that box, click on “Signatures…” box on the right
• Choose to create a new signature by clicking, “New…”
• Enter a name for your new signature, like “standard,” and click OK
• In the next window,  add your desired text with link to your Stik.com profile:
• Highlight text and click on the link icon above the editing box on the right
• Enter your Stik.com profile URL in the Address field and click OK
• Choose what type of email correspondence you’d like to use this signature for (i.e. new messages, replies) and click OK

When you compose a new email, the signature will automatically appear.

Stik to who know!

Nathan Labenz
Stik.com Co-Founder
Visit me at Stik.com

Through a partnership with the networking website Stik.com, Rotary clubs around the world, including the Macomb Rotary Club and Sterling Heights Rotary Club, have started the Pennies for Polio campaign.

Read the full article on Patch.com»

OR

Check out the campaign at www.stik.com/rotary.

As speculation built that Facebook would be launching a major media service, I worried that Facebook might be focusing on the wrong opportunities:

For the economy as a whole, more media means more advertising opportunities. That’s great for Facebook’s short-term bottom line, but not so great for the rest of us. We don’t like the advertising we have. Too often, it’s an annoying shouting match between competing brands: banks and insurance companies, reeling from a loss of consumer trust, trying desperately to win us back.

Facebook’s great potential is in better advertising. Yet, the social network appears to be ignoring some important foundational steps in that direction.

You can read both posts to learn about the projects that I think Facebook should be giving more time and attention.  I’m not suggesting anything too radical — rather, I am mostly encouraging Facebook to open a few game-changing advertising tools that it has previously tested for general public use.

The big announcements are now behind us, and the tech press is swooning over Facebook’s new gadgets, but we’ll have to let the dust settle before we know if the new tools are as suitable to commerce as they are to media.  To Facebook’s credit, they have opened up a whole new set of flexible tools for developers that should make Stik.com and other high-value social sites better in one way or another.

Hat tips to:

• Umair Haque, for leading the “better, not more” school of thought and for noting the post on Twitter
• Jackie Cohen at AllFacebook for accommodating me during the busiest week of the year for her

Add your unique URL (http://www.stik.com/INSERTNAME) to your signature line and encourage the people you interact with to view and add to your recommendations.

The recommendations and reviews you’ve received from your customers will speak volumes to those considering enlisting your service. So make that connection easy for them.

Scroll through these screenshots to see how I did it.

For Gmail users, the steps are easy.

• Go to your “Mail settings” by clicking the options wheel in the upper right hand corner
• Make sure you’re in “General” settings and scroll down to signature box and select the option for signature
• Add your desired text with link to Stik.com profile (highlight any text and click the link symbol, then copy and past your unique Stik.com profile URL in the box)
• Click “Save Changes” and you’re done

When you compose a new email, the signature will automatically appear.

Stik to who know!

Nathan Labenz
Stik.com Co-Founder
Visit me at Stik.com

Add your unique URL (http://www.stik.com/INSERTNAME) to your signature line and encourage the people you interact with to view and add to your recommendations.

The recommendations and reviews you’ve received from your customers will speak volumes to those considering enlisting your service. So make that connection easy for them.

Scroll through these screenshots to see how I did it.

For Yahoo users, the steps are easy:

• Choose “Mail Options from the options tab at the top of the screen
• Click on “Signature” in the left column
• Choose to “Show a signature on all outgoing messages” and make sure you select the “Rich Text” option on the right
• Add your desired text with link to Stik.com profile (highlight text and click on the link symbol, then enter your Stik.com profile URL in the box)
• Click “Save Changes” and you’re done

When you compose a new email, the signature will automatically appear.

Stik to who know!

Nathan Labenz
Stik.com Co-Founder
Visit me at Stik.com

Add your unique URL (http://www.stik.com/INSERTNAME) to your signature line and encourage the people you interact with to view and add to your recommendations.

The recommendations and reviews you’ve received from your customers will speak volumes to those considering enlisting your service. So make that connection easy for them.

Scroll through these screenshots to see how I did it.

For Hotmail users, the steps are easy:

• Choose options from the drop-down tab underneath your name at the top right of the screen
• Click on “Signature” in the left column
• Choose to “Mail” from the left tab to get to your mail options
• Then select “Message Font and Signature”
• In the “Personal signature” box, add your desired text with link to Stik.com profile (highlight text and click on the “add hyperlink” symbol, then enter your Stik.com profile URL)
• Click “Save” and you’re done

When you compose a new email, the signature will automatically appear.

Stik to who know!

Nathan Labenz
Stik.com Co-Founder
Visit me at Stik.com

Add your unique URL (http://www.stik.com/INSERTNAME) to your signature line and encourage the people you interact with to view and add to your recommendations.

The recommendations and reviews you’ve received from your customers will speak volumes to those considering enlisting your service. So make that connection easy for them.

Scroll through these screenshots to see how I did it.

For AOL users, the steps are easy:

• Click “Settings” at the top right of the screen
• Click on “Compose” in the left column
• Choose to “use signature” from the drop-down menu under signature
• In the signature box, add your desired text with link to Stik.com profile (highlight text and click on the “link” symbol, then enter your Stik.com profile URL)
• Click “Save” and you’re done

When you compose a new email, the signature will automatically appear.

Stik to who know!

Nathan Labenz
Stik.com Co-Founder
Visit me at Stik.com

Add your unique URL (http://www.stik.com/INSERTNAME) to your signature line and encourage the people you interact with to view and add to your recommendations.

The recommendations and reviews you’ve received from your customers will speak volumes to those considering enlisting your service. So make that connection easy for them.

Scroll through these screenshots to see how I did it.

For Microsoft Outlook users, the steps are easy:

• Click “Tools” in the top toolbar and select “Options…” from drop-down menu
• Choose the “Mail Format” tab at the top
• In that box, click on “Signatures…” box at the bottom right
• Choose to create a new signature by clicking, “New…”
• Enter a name for your new signature, like “standard,” and click Next
• In the next window, choose “Advanced Edit…”
• In the Word document that opens, add your desired text with link to your Stik.com profile:
  • Highlight text and click insert
  • Select “Hyperlink…” or hit Ctrl+K
  • Enter your Stik.com profile URL in the Address field and click OK
• Click “Save” and go back to Outlook
• Click OK in the “Create Signature” box
• Back in the “Mail Format” of options, be sure to choose whatever you named your new signature as under “Signature for new messages.”

When you compose a new email, the signature will automatically appear.

Stik to who know!

Nathan Labenz
Stik.com Co-Founder
Visit me at Stik.com

Here’s an excerpt:

Take this Google search for Super 8 Motels, for example. On the front page, you’ll see ratings that hotel guests have written about particular Super 8s on TripAdvisor, Yahoo Travel and Yelp. Importantly, the reviews vary widely. When I checked, a New Mexico location was rated 4.5 stars, while a Los Angeles location was at 3.5 stars and one in British Columbia had only 2 stars. Such location-specific information undermines brands’ ability to affect consumers’ purchasing decisions with 30-second TV spots and gives TripAdvisor a powerful position.

TripAdvisor is ahead of other travel sites thanks in part to their use of Facebook-connected recommendations, which help websites make sales by establishing instant trust with visitors. As a potential hotel guest, I am interested in the consensus among previous guests, but I am especially interested in what my friends have said. Reviews can be intensely personal — for example, here’s my TripAdvisor review of a beach resort in Mexico — and if you know the author, it makes a huge difference in how reliable you consider the review.

For the Super 8 brand, the end game could be scary: as TripAdvisor accumulates more and more trusted reviews, the best-performing Super 8s, all of which are independent franchises, may eventually realize that their business is suffering from their association with lesser motels. At that point, we might see a “brand run,” wherein the best locations leave the chain, lowering the brand’s value and ultimately leading to its collapse.

See the post itself for a few recommendations for brand managers.

I didn’t have space to discuss which sorts of brands are more or less threatened by reviews sites, but it’s worth pointing out that consumer product brands like Coca-Cola, Gillette, and Doritos are safe.  Online review sites don’t make sense for such items, as everybody already knows the taste of Coca-Cola.

Franchise brands like hotel chains and national insurance agent networks (think Farmers, State Farm, Allstate) - will face the biggest challenges as consumers gain access to location- and employee-level reviews.

In short, the prognosticating class failed to recognize two basic facts:

1. As social creatures, people like to establish trust via personal interactions before making important purchases

2. As physical creatures, people prefer to touch even the most basic things before buying.

This history of eCommerce since 1999 has largely been about overcoming these two hurdles. Progress has been slower than expected, but there have been notable successes. Amazon, for example, disrupted books and music sales by making it fun and easy to sample media on their website, and in this domain the old predictions are starting to come true: Borders is closing their doors.

Yet, eCommerce has remained highly impersonal, and the fate of booksellers has been the exception, because websites have never had a good way to promote trust-building interactions. That is, until Facebook began powering 1-click logins for other sites.

Read the full article here.  Hat tip to Lauren at Business Insider for her continued support.

Stik.com has now made it easy to connect with your referral network on Facebook via our new feature, your Stik.com “to-do” list.   Visit your Stik.com to-do list today and take a few easy steps that will help you connect with your network in a professional, authentic way.

Your to-do list will continue to refresh with simple steps to help you get the most from Stik.com.

At Stik.com, we realize professionals are too busy working to spend their entire day sharing, commenting and updating their social media platforms.  As a result, we created a suite of tools to help you gain meaningful exposure on Facebook, Twitter and Google+ in just a few minutes.

Our to-do list prioritizes the most important steps you can take TODAY to build your referral network on Facebook.

This list will constantly refresh and give you new tasks to help build your reputation and referral network. We’ll keep you posted as new tasks pop up starting with a personalized email this week, but come back often and check for yourself!

Visit Stik.com and give all of these professionals you’ve already recommended your +1.

Click image to see full size

Just as with recommendations, this stamp of approval is telling shoppers that this is a professional they can trust. Your +1′s can help friends, contacts, and others on the web find the best service provider when they search.

Links and profiles that have received a +1 from people you know will show that right in the search results on Google (see screenshot below).

Click image to see full size

With searchers relying on Google about 65 percent of the time, it’s still where you want your results showing up more than anywhere else.

While Google and Facebook battle it out for the superior social network status, let Stik.com help hedge your bets and ensure your business and professionals you support are getting the most from both spaces.

“Note: you first must connect your Stik.com profile to your Facebook business page. We covered how to do this in a previous blog post here.”

Here’s how to add your Stik.com recommendations to your Facebook page*:
(click on any of the screenshots to see a full screen version):

1. Visit http://www.facebook.com/stikapp and click on the link in the left hand column that says, “Add to My Page.”

1. Choose the Facebook page to which you’d like to add the Stik App and select “Add to Page”

Once you’ve completed these two steps you will see Stik.com the left column of your page. Visitiors who click on that link will see your Stik.com recommendations on you Facebook page. If you don’t have hours to spend each week curating your Facebook page, you may decide it’s a good idea to make your Stik.com recommendations tab the default tab that new visitors will encounter. Make that switch with two additional steps.

1. From your page, click on the “Edit Page” button in the top right.

1. Under the “Manage Permissions” tab you can select the default landing tab. Simply select Stik.com and you’re set.

What better way to greet potential customers than with the ringing endorsements of those who have already enjoyed your services? Fresh and flattering content will appear with absolutely no more time invested by you. See what it looks like below. (Note: this will be the default tab for Facebook users who have not “Liked” your page. If you visit as an admin, you’ll continue to land on your wall.)

If you have any feedback on this feature, please send us an email at support@stik.com.  This is a new tool, so if you have a good idea we just might add it!

Stik to who you know!

*Unfortunately, you cannot add a tab to your personal Facebook profile, only business Facebook Pages.  Facebook used to allow tabs on personal profiles, but they have since discontinued that feature.  Sorry that we can’t provide a better solution — we would love to support personal profiles, but it doesn’t seem likely to happen in the near future.

Your final result should look like this:

Social review sites like Yelp enable recommendations for a particular business that are not selective; you are depending on the word-of-mouth referrals of a vast number of strangers—people who are generally not in your network.

But, think how much your confidence would be increased if reviews were generated solely from your social circle? Recommendations from those closest to you, friends and other close connections, are the most valuable recommendations, and the ability to comfortably contact those friends to get more information would add another social layer to the experience.

Social recommendation services are in fact a new web trend. Several new businesses are morphing their algorithms to weigh recommendations from one’s social circle greater than general online recommendations. Since Facebook is, right now, with upwards of 500 million users, widely recognized as having THE most powerful social graph, my money is on a Facebook app to win the social recommendation game, and right now it looks like Stik.com is in the lead.

Stik.com enables local businesses to capture recommendations by friends and customers one is connected to online, like on your Facebook businesss page. It also enables you to find professionals through Facebook via friend recommendations, similar to how one might use LinkedIn but specific to your Facebook network. Stik.com recommendations may also have search optimization value. There is also SEO benefit, within and perhaps outside of Facebook. When you are an optometrist or optician with a social network and a significant number of the people who have a relationship with you recommend you within your network, your content, conversations and network recommendations tag you as a thought leader for queries on “optometrist” or “optician” and help enhance your visibility when someone searches for keywords or keyphrases that are relevant to similar queries.

I have been participating on Stik.com for a few months now and building my network. My friends and contacts have been enthusiastic about providing Stik.com recommendations, and every time a recommendation is provided, it shows up on my Facebook wall for all my connections to see, keeping my expertise and services in the forefront of the minds of my significant social network.

Google is also getting into the game, and while I won’t discount the ability of the 800 lb. gorilla to make an impact, they have a dismal history of attempting to participate in the social web. Their +1 button is their attempt at a more efficient way for searchers to recommend content to friends without pointing away from search engine results. The +1 button allows your contacts through Gmail to see what links you like. Each time you search, the results will have a “+1″ button you can click which prompts Google to share that link with your network. It’s kind of a Google “Like” button. I am watching this feature and playing around with it, but I am not sold on it yet.

Connect with me on Facebook and visit my stik.com page and recommend me and I’ll be sure to do the same!

This post originally appeared on VisionMonday.com as part of the CLICK e-newsletter. You can see the original here.

Alan N. Glazier, OD, FAAO is the founder/CEO of Shady Grove Eye and Vision Care in Rockville, Md. A search and social optimization consultant, he is now a regular contributor to CLICK and also writes a regular blog for SightNation.com. Glazier is ataglazier@youreyesite.com and his regular posts can be found via his Twitter handle: @EyeInfo, his blog: eyeinfo.wordpress.comand his website: YourEyeSite.com. Author: Searchial Marketing: How Social Media Drives Search Optimization in Web 3.0.

I hope you noticed our note at the top of the page about adding your recommendations badge to your website or blog. It’s a great way to continue to collect recommendations from people who may not have found you on Stik.com.

Just click on the “Get Started Here” link from your profile page (see screenshot right) and we’ll give you the code (below) to add to your website, or the ability to e-mail that code to your webmaster. Succesful Stik.com professionals like Jon Wright and Joe Sopo have already added their badge to their websites and have continued to successfully boost their recommendations totals.

You never know where potential consumers are going to find you and it’s important to connect the dots between the different pages that make up your online presence. It’s easy to connect these two today so check it out.

If you have any feedback on this feature, please send us an email at support@stik.com.  This is a new tool, so if you have a good idea we just might add it!

Visit your profile (you will need to log in) and “Like” your favorite reviews. This will elevate those reviews to the first page on your Stik.com profile.

You can also reply to your reviewers through commenting on what they wrote. It’s a good chance to thank the contacts who gave you valuable reviews. It’s also a simple step to show shoppers that you’re actively engaging with current and former clients. Make it short and sweet.

For example, check out real estate agent Laurie Arnold’s Stik.com profile (screenshot below) where she has interacted with her contacts that have reviewed her a trusted professional.

It’s that easy and is sure to be appreciated by someone who took the time to help you build an online presence and improve your search engine ranking. They’re also likely to be more enthusiastic references when potential customers seek their opinion on your services.

First impressions will be made based on what users see when they arrive at your profile, so take the time now to manage those crucial first impressions.

Now you can thank your recommenders for their support, and keep your business top of mind!

Visit your profile (you will need to log in) and hover over any of your recommenders with your mouse. You’ll see a black “Thank” button popup (see the screenshot to the right). Click it and it automatically opens a private Facebook message where you can write a personal note.

Here’s an example:

Hey John, I want to thank you for taking the time to recommend me as a trusted mortgage professional on Stik.com. It means a lot to me that you took the time to do it. Your recommendation helps me appear in search results on Facebook, Google, and Bing. Please keep me in mind when you or people you know have mortgage-related needs. Thanks again!

It’s that easy and is sure to be appreciated by someone who took the time to help you build an online presence and improve your search engine ranking. They’re also likely to be more enthusiastic references when potential customers seek their opinion on your services.

Making significant purchases such as new homes, insurance policies or even your well-planned retirement investments will require individuals to find professionals they can truly trust. Many unsuspecting consumers may find themselves working with unknown representatives or salespersons who may not always have the buyers best financial interest at heart. Just as unfortunately it can often be confusing to know where to find a trustworthy partner in … Read More

via Digital Brand Marketing Educator

Visit your recommendations page and you will be prompted to create customized text for all future requests. We insert your friend’s individual name, provide some sample text and you write a message that your friends will recognize as uniquely yours. Your friends are more likely to respond when they believe the message came from you.

Here’s an example (see screenshot to the right):

Hi John – I really appreciate when friends are willing to vouch for me. Please visit my Stik profile where you can “Recommend” me as trusted realtor serving Oakland County. Thanks!

You can always go back and edit your customized request by visiting the  messages tab on your account page. There you can edit all of your custom requests (see screenshot below)

As always, the Stik.com team is here to help. Email us at support@stik.com.

Starting today, you can display updates from your Facebook fan page on your Stik.com profile.  If you’re already working hard to create useful content for people on Facebook, it’s a no-brainer to display your posts publicly on your Stik.com profile as well.

Here’s how:

Visit your profile and click on the “Recent Activity” tab. (Don’t worry — this tab won’t appear to others unless you have already connected your Facebookfan page.) Then, click on the link to “Display your Facebook content here” and choose the fan page you’d like to display. It’s as simple as that!

A few quick notes:

• If you receive a message that your fan page cannot be displayed, the problem is that page is not accessible to people who are not logged in to Facebook. To change that, go to your fan page in Facebook and click the “Edit Page” button. At the very top of the “Manage Permissions” tab on the edit menu you will see page visibility options. Make sure that your page is visible to people in all countries and people of all ages. If you have either “Country Restrictions” or “Age Restrictions” set then visitors to your Stik.com profile will not be able to view your fan page.

• Don’t have a Facebook Page but want to create one?  Go here to get started

• Still looking to build up your recommendations and reviews?  Go here to request recommendations or email us if you have questions.

Bernice Ross, CEO of RealEstateCoach.com, shared her own plan for getting the most from social media in a two-part series on Inman News over the past week. Bernice astutely observes that, “The real issue when it comes to social media and real estate sales is that most people have confused the technology platforms with the actual business of providing real estate services.”

Social media isn’t a new way of conducting real estate business; it’s a more efficient means of doing the same business that realtors have been carrying out for years. Building a reputation and relying on referrals has been the status quo for years in real estate.

That’s still the case as evidenced by the 64 percent of sellers who said they chose their agent based on a referral or had used the same agent in the past, according to the most recent National Association of Realtor’s profile of home buyers and sellers. “Buyers also most commonly choose an agent based on a referral from a friend, neighbor or relative, with trustworthiness and reputation being the most important factors,” the report said.

However, what has changed dramatically is how buyers and sellers are finding out who their friends and family have recommended. Fully 89 percent of buyers said they used the Internet to search for a home and 85 percent of those searchers purchased their home through a real estate agent. In the prime home-buying age bracket of 25 to 44 year olds, an astounding 94 percent of homebuyers start their search on the Internet.

These numbers should tell savvy realtors that the real opportunity with social media is to build an online presence and maximize potential referrals by expanding your social networks. In other words,  it’s about replicating the same offline experience that home buyers and sellers have relied on to find someone they can trust help them through this complex process.

Bernice is exactly right when she says, “The way you use social media to expand your sphere of influence (i.e., your friends and followers) is the same way you would make friends with a new neighbor next door.” It’s just become so much easier to reach people than knocking on doors or posting yard signs. But with everyone jumping on the social media bandwagon, it will be the realtors who execute tactful outreach, as Bernice prescribes, that reap the greatest benefits.

In part two of her series, Bernice advises realtors to start Facebook business or fan pages, and participate in video testimonials and two-way exchanges with contacts. These are all great tips that can have real benefits.

However, we built Stik.com as a low-maintenance alternative tool for realtors, and other time-pressed professionals, to tap into the power of social networks without becoming a full-fledged guru on their own. After creating a Stik.com profile in a matter of 60 seconds, professionals can request recommendations from any or all of their Facebook friends and then get back to other work while recommendations – and the SEO juice that comes with them – roll in.

Practicing the etiquette and protocol that Bernice and others suggest is certainly a good idea, but zeroing in on the time investments that will deliver the most business should be the priority.

We’ve designed Stik.com to be a low maintenance tool for sales professionals to engage with consumers who already have a connection with them. However, here is one way to use Twitter to jumpstart the advantages that a Stik.com profile offers:

Tweet your profile. It’s easy and has real benefits.  You can use our Tweet button right from your profile and adjust the auto text as necessary.  Tweeting your profile will:

• Increase the number of visitors to your page, both to recommend you and to check out your services
• Build valuable links in search engines, increasing your search ranking on sites like Google

Google recently started integrating their social results with all other results. So now when your Google contacts search for realtor (see screenshot) they may see your result sooner than they would have pre-social search — but only if you get your Stik.com profile out in the social sphere.

So Tweet it today!

Imagine if every time you searched for a restaurant or a hotel or a yoga studio online you had your friends to walk you through the search engine results, pointing out which places they’d recommend and which they’d skip. This is the power of social search and it’s gaining ground quickly.

Last month Google announced it was elevating search results that were shared publicly by friends you’re connected to through your Google accounts. Formerly, these results were grouped together at the bottom of the results page, but Google is now recognizing that, “…relevance isn’t just about pages—it’s also about relationships.”

That’s good news from the world’s most popular search engine, but Google is still behind the curve.

Read the full post here

Milbank goes on to describe his personal horror story in dealing with Citibank through his refinancing process. Citibank, he says, had been collecting his payments but not paying the insurer. He only found out when his home insurance provider sent him a cancellation notice for non-payment.

In describing the ordeal, Milbank recalls:

Along the way, a simple refi became a months-long odyssey: rates misquoted, interest charged on a phantom account, legal documents issued in wrong names, a mortgage officer who disappeared for days at a time (first it was his birthday, then his laptop was in the shop), a bounced check from Citibank’s own title company, and the freezing of our bank accounts.

The column doesn’t take it easy on Citibank, nor should it, but he spares this absentee mortgage officer by leaving him nameless. But I’m guessing Milbank won’t be recommending this particular mortgage professional to any of his friends. And I doubt he came recommended from someone Milbank surveyed before getting the loan.

There may be better ways for regulators to hold the banks accountable for this kind of performance, as Milbank advocates for in the column, but there will always be “subpar lenders,” as he calls them. But that’s why we shouldn’t just walk into a bank off the street and go with the first guy available.

There are plenty of skilled and responsible lenders out there, and I’d wager there are even some that are connected to Milbank in one way or another. Stik.com is helping consumers find these trusted lenders by searching their Facebook network and allowing them to ask mutual friends about their qualifications.  In doing so, we can confidently say your experience is likely to be much better than Milbank’s.

Getting a mortgage is complex process that carries heavy consequences. For Milbank, he says it amounted to a lot of annoying phone calls to fix, but he goes on to write in other cases, “…these errors – accidental or otherwise – are driving large numbers of people into default and foreclosure when it otherwise would not have happened.”

That’s why it’s important that you start with someone you can trust.

We’re excited that social search continues to gain ground. It will mean more meaningful results for consumers and a present a real opportunity for sales professionals to leverage their social networks.

However, what remains unclear in this announcement from Bing is whether social relevance – number of your friends who have “Liked” a certain link – will affect the order of results returned. If Bing is convinced, as we at Stik.com are, that search results carrying personal recommendations from people we know are better, more trustworthy results then we would encourage them to elevate those results in their search algorithm.

When we search for sushi restaurants or microbreweries, it’d be great to see the places our friends have visited and liked at the top of the results, but more importantly when we search for realtors or mortgage bankers we want to see the people our friends trust on top.

A couple weeks before Christmas, I was searching for a special video camera. I couldn’t find it online. Then four days before Christmas, Amazon sent me an e-mail with a link to the exact camera I was looking for. It was both wonderful and creepy at the same time. I got what I wanted, but I knew Amazon had been watching on me.

To be clear, Stik.com does not do any user tracking via browser cookies with or without users’ consent or knowledge. Today, however, a new ad targeting paradigm is emerging which has the potential to be even more powerful without freaking people out. I am talking about the type of permission marketing that people like David A. Yovanno, CEO of Gigya, Inc, call the future – where consumers knowingly offer personal information to marketers because they appreciate tailored advertising over impersonal and generic pitches.

“Now websites have the opportunity to embrace transparency, to be upfront with people during the registration process about how their data will be used, as well as how it will benefit both parties,” Yovanno wrote recently in a post on Mashable. “We have a new generation comfortable using Facebook and other mobile apps and who, according to recent survey data, are quite willing to share personal information with companies and brands in exchange for value provided.”

That’s why we’ve focused on Facebook in building Stik.com to help connect consumers and sales professionals.The type of data volunteered by consumers themselves offers an authenticity that can’t be replicated through pure data mining, and Facebook is far and away the best provider of authentic online identity.

Imagine the opportunity for realtors to reach out to Facebook users in their network who update their status with, “House hunting with the hubby!”

This is a realistic way to connect with potential clients for realtors, not to mention those in the mortgage and financial services industries, in the near future with a maturing Facebook-savvy generation willing to volunteer data. It’s difficult to predict what will become of surreptitious consumer tracking, but it’s easy to see that the value of user-volunteered information will endure.

In reacting to the same survey we highlighted about consumer confusion in the mortgage process, Alex Stenback of Behind the Mortgage wrote, if getting a mortgage turns into a headache “…you might have just picked the wrong lender (think person, not organization here).”

Stenback mostly harps on getting quality customer service, especially in terms of clear and frequent communication from salesperson to borrower.  That’s definitely important, but a slick salesperson can provide great customer service superficially while still overcharging the borrower.  This is why trust is so important – there is simply no way (except comparison shopping) that the average consumer can evaluate the deal they are receiving from a mortgage lender.

The wrong lender can end up costing consumers a lot of money and – in too many cases recently – their home as well, whether it was after a teaser rate spiked or the borrower just realized they had taken out a loan they never could have afforded. Incentives for lenders are not often designed to encourage them to get their customers in the appropriate-sized loan at the lowest rate possible. The more someone pays in fees or a higher interest rate, the more the salesperson makes, and in some cases a LOT more.  (Note: Congress has taken up legislation to curb these types of incentives but the efficacy of such efforts remains to be seen.)

The problem is it may be easy to determine you picked the wrong lender after the damage is done, but how do you find the right lender before any decisions are made?  If you are like most people, you ask your friends for a personal recommendation. Studies have backed this logical process, showing that people get better deals from people they know or someone with whom they share a connection. So if you don’t know a mortgage lender then you might ask your close friends if they know someone. If they do then great, you’re in business. But the reality is reaching out beyond a few dozen email contacts is a time consuming process, and often yields little results. So a lot of people don’t find that connection and end up walking blind into a bank off the street.

At Stik.com we’ve given consumers the opportunity to reach more trusted sources of recommendations with a lot less effort. We’ve discussed the benefits of this to sales professionals before, but consumers are also a big winner here.

Finding the mortgage banker that is recommended by one or more of their friends, as opposed to opening a dialogue with a stranger, is a great way for consumers to ensure they’re getting started with the right professional.

Given that most of us do not have the time, energy or expertise to wade through complex financial jargon, it’s time we moved passed the web 1.0 paradigm that empowers the individual with increased access to information.  The next generation of the web is built on personal connections, and it is time we recognized the value of trusted service providers and leveraged our new technology to help consumers connect with them for their most important purchasing decisions.

Consider this story the New York Times reported last week that many mortgage sites are trying to dumb down their content for confused consumers.

“We shoot for a ninth-grade reading level for everything we put on the Web,” Arturo Perez, a home loans marketing executive at Bank of America said in the story.

But would you trust a ninth grader to choose between a fixed and floating interest rate? Of course not.

Removing jargon and writing clearly should be applauded, but let’s not pretend we can take an incredibly complex topic and make it easily digestible for a braces clad audience  struggling with multiplication tables.

The same New York Times story reported that:

A poll of more than 1,300 homeowners conducted by Harris Interactive, a market research firm, for LendingTree, and published in December, found that while 96 percent of Americans comparison-shopped for “anything,” only 61 percent said they did so for mortgages. The remaining 39 percent took out home loans based on just one quote — even though 9 in 10 of those buyers said they knew that rates varied among lenders.

Consumers clearly have instincts for comparison shopping, and they don’t dissipate when they start shopping for a mortgage, but they often just don’t know where to look.

This is why we need service providers that we can trust – to decode the complexities of the process and explain it to us with our best interest at heart. At Stik.com we’re helping consumers find multiple mortgage bankers, brokers and realtors who can do that by searching the shopper’s social graph. We encourage consumers to do comparison shopping but to start with people you can trust.

It’s about time someone started championing the service professionals and their value, instead of working to eliminate them with half-baked information-based solutions designed for seasoned practitioners and not everyday people.

I know that “Agent Ratings” is a hot topic in real estate these days (and rightfully so), but “Facebook Liking” is more basic, more fundamental and just flat out EASIER than filling out an online form to rate someone. And if you’re into Facebook (500M and growing, hello!), the act of “Liking” becomes second nature very quickly, doesn’t it?

Yet while we can see why a lighter touch solution is sensible from the reviewer perspective, McClure elucidates the value to the consumer looking for a trusted resource:

So, if we fast forward a little bit, how many of us are going to just go look for the “most-Liked” restaurant, the “most-Liked movie, the “most-Liked” house…and the “most-Liked” Realtor?

In our minds, this is the real value of the Facebook “Like” as a rating mechanism.  Combining implicit relationships (via the Facebook social graph) with explicit recommendations (“I recommend Andrew Agent as a trusted service provider”) provides consumers all the information and social proof they’ll ever need to make a decision.

Few people care if I thought the duck confit was over-tenderized for the price point or that the couple at the table next to me was wearing sweatpants – more people want to know if I would recommend the restaurant to my friends.  Most 2,500 word reviews on Yelp! can be summed up in one click of the “Like” or “Recommend” button.

We can (will) highlight the technical upside to a Facebook “like” vs. a homegrown rating system, but will save the details for another post.  The key takeaway is that Facebook has provided consumers with a lightweight, socially connected tool for making important purchasing decisions.  It is time the professional class took advantage of this unique platform to build their reputations and grow their referral business on Facebook. Stik.com is here to help.

The difference today is it’s much easier for that reputation to spread far and wide thanks to the review websites and social media. This scares some sales people because a bad review can stick with you. More information is generally thought to favor the consumer, but there’s also a huge upside for sales people not to be ignored.

That’s why we’ve built Stik.com to make that experience easier for consumers and sales professionals. We agree with people like Dave Fleet, vice-president of digital at Edleman, who writes in his “20 Social Media Trends for Business in 2011” that social impact will drive reputation. Sites like Service Alley are giving consumers the option to browse reviews from their Facebook friends for home service providers from carpenters to electricians to painters.

The sales professionals in any industry that recognize this and seize the opportunity have a lot more to gain than fear from the social media impact.

The institutions that Americans closely associate with the financial crisis still have not regained the public’s confidence, and may not for quite some time. But building that confidence in the institution may not be essential to building back the business.

What’s more important is building trust between consumers and the sales professionals they interact with on a day-to-day business. In other words, consumers don’t necessarily need to believe in Citibank, but they need to trust Tom the mortgage banker who is making the loan. In turn, the confidence he instills in consumers can inspire greater trust in the company he represents.

At Stik.com we think that familiarity is a prerequisite for trust. So we help link up consumers with mortgage bankers, realtors, financial advisors etc., whom they share social connections with on Facebook. If Tom is not only a mortgage banker at Citibank, but also our high school buddy’s college classmate, there is a level of trust developing and easily deepened with referrals and recommendations.

We’re certainly not the only ones who think this way. Business News Daily’s Brian Anthony Hernandez writes in his 2011 social media predictions that: “Now more than ever, customers and clients expect businesses to interact with them, and businesses’ reputations can hinge on how they respond to comments criticizing their products or services on social media.”

Banks, like all consumer-driven businesses after a public relations disaster, will seek to restore their public image, but they’d be smart to invest more time in building consumer trust in their front-line sales staff.

In the top image Tech Savvy Agent received 10 Likes and 12 Comments which led to 4,892 Impressions of the status update.

In the bottom image we received 472 Likes and 44 Comments which led to 22,466 Impressions of the status update.

To any regular Facebook user, this should come as no surprise – articles, comments, pages and people that are “liked” show up more frequently in the Facebook ecosystem than “uncurated” content that has not elicited any interaction from other users.

It is worth remembering, however, that “likes/recommendations,” comments and reviews are permanent links that drive exposure over the lifetime of a page.  The ever-changing news feed is just one of many channels that rely on Facebook interactions (likes, comments etc.) to surface content to users. Facebook search, Bing and other high-traffic channels also increasingly rely on Facebook interaction data to determine the most relevant search results for social users.

Stik.com is built around aggregating Facebook recommendations (“likes”) and Facebook reviews for our professionals, increasing their exposure throughout the Facebook ecosystem, both in the news feed and as a social search result.  It is the easiest way to build a durable professional reputation online and stay top of mind in your personal network.

Of course, this depends on your definition of “best”. If you are looking for a portfolio of strategies that will help you get every possible bit of value from social media, stop reading this and return to your social media guru of choice. On the other hand, if you seek simple social strategies that will help build your business with minimal time investment, this one rule is for you.

Why focus on Facebook?

• Almost everyone who uses the internet is on Facebook. In the US, that’s ~150 million people, compared with 40 million for LinkedIn and 25 million for Twitter. That means there are about 100 million people who are ONLY using Facebook. Since these people have fewer online connections, they are more likely to deal with people in their immediate networks. This means less time wasted with clients who are interviewing a bunch of different professionals.

• Facebook is about long-lasting real-life relationships. For trust-based industries such as real estate and mortgage, in which professionals do a small number of deals each year, it’s crucial to protect your core customer base of family, friends and friends-of-friends. As Redfin’s numbers show, it’s very hard to win business from clients who have a pre-existing relationship with another agent or broker.

• Facebook users are addicted to the site. A full 25% of all internet page-views are now on Facebook, dwarfing the other social outlets. Neither Twitter nor LinkedIn, for example, surpass a half percent of page views. This means that your friends are pretty likely to actually see and read your posts. Stik users, for example, have had great luck requesting recommendations from their Facebook friends.

• At Stik.com, we believe that clients will soon view sales professionals who lack a well-developed Facebook presence as “having something to hide.” Eventually, we’ll laugh at the days when privacy concerns trumped professional opportunities.

And why are Twitter and LinkedIn so much less useful?

• On Twitter, competition is fierce, so you really need to go big or go home. Unless you are regularly hilarious in just 140 characters — which is hard and time-consuming — your few humble tweets will be forgotten just as quickly as they are pushed down the page by top-tweeters Lady Gaga, Ashton Kutcher, Barack Obama, or (heaven forbid) any of these robo-tweeters.

• LinkedIn is about expertise and hiring, and LinkedIn’s business centers around getting corporate recruiters to pay for access to talent. Did you know that it costs $10 to send an “InMail” to a professional outside your network? How many clients do you think will do that? It’s still worth filling out your LinkedIn profile just in case, but don’t expect it to be a lifeline.

We’ve built Stik.com on the Facebook Platform to help sales professionals capture business from family, friends and friends-of-friends, with a lot less upkeep than most social media gurus proscribe. When clients search for a professional on Stik, they’ll find people that their friends know and they’ll read personalized recommendations that stand the test of time. We’re often asked if we plan to integrate Stik with other social networks, and we do in some limited ways, but we’re focusing on Facebook because Facebook is the home of the most real, trusting relationships, and you should too.

Meanwhile, individual Facebook users aren’t having any problems.  Facebook is reportedly on track to become the first with a billion users in 2011, and seemingly all of Austin, Texas is following the 365 Things To Do In Austin, Texas page.What’s going on here?  Rick Grant offers a handful of explanations in this recent HousingWire article, and I agree with his overall assessment.  While it’s easy for banks to cite “lack of clarity regarding financial services regulations” as a reason to stay on the Facebook sidelines, the explanation rings hollow given their reputation for exploiting every regulatory loophole they can find.

The bigger problem seems to be, in Rick’s words, that financial companies “don’t know all that much about forging real relationships with their customers”.

If there is such a thing as conventional wisdom in social media, it seems to be that conversations are the key to social media.  As Rick puts it, companies need to be “proactive in starting and then participating in conversations about issues that are important to consumers”.  This advice is echoed by social media consultants of all stripes, and Facebook has supported this paradigm with a variety of analytical tools that help companies measure and track conversations.  While I certainly recognize that conversations can be valuable, there are big problems with the conversation paradigm that are rarely addressed:

1. For most people, content creation is hard, time-consuming work.  Social media gurus are like infomercial body-builders — they make it look easy, but their regimens aren’t easy for the rest of us to adopt.
2. People tend not to trust financial institutions and therefore don’t value “conversations” with these companies.  Rather, people value conversations with other people.  Allstate and Citibank seem to recognize this on some level — they have each replaced the Facebook Page Wall (the home of conversations) with a custom landing tab.

With these problems in mind, my view is that — for many financial services companies, at least — conversations are neither the most important nor the highest-ROI use of social media.  Rather, the low-hanging fruit for financial companies is the opportunity to permanently position themselves as a trusted resource and their sales teams as trusted professionals.  On Stik.com, this means accumulating Facebook Recommendations and Reviews for each sales professional.  Stik profiles are less dynamic than Facebook Pages, but that’s by design.  They are a permanent, public reflection of each employee’s track record, designed to answer the core question on every customer’s mind: Can I trust this person?

The Stik approach may make some branding and compliance experts uncomfortable, as it requires empowering individual employees to solicit recommendations from friends and past clients, but guess what?  Sales and customer service teams are the core of financial companies’ relationships with customers, and Facebook is making a deliberate push to get more users to share professional information.  We estimate that a full 50% of Facebook users will have professional information online within months.  For commissioned sales teams, the rate could be much higher.  The brand-risk ship has sailed, and the most that corporate offices can hope to do is steer it.

If you want to learn more about social strategies that don’t require hourly tweets, sign up for Stik.com or send us an email at info@stik.com.

Leena notes that she wouldn’t trust all of her friends’ recommendations of their friends and would generally “email our mutual connection to see if the [professional] is legitimate” before starting a transaction.  I agree, and indeed we’ve made it extremely easy to contact mutual friends via Facebook message directly from the Stik.com search results.

A couple of commenters also worry that business deals gone wrong could cause problems between friends.  While there’s some risk here, most folks will happily accept a small amount of friendship risk in order to minimize the risk of a bad experience with an unknown mortgage broker or another high-stakes purchase.  People ask friends for recommendations offline all the time, and increasingly I see it happening on Facebook.  For examples, just search the public stream for posts from people who need insurance agents and mortgage brokers.  (Note: you’ll need to be logged in to Facebook to visit these pages.)

Overall, both Leena and the commenters point to the next step for Stik: a rich layer of recommendations and written reviews.  We are already building this content, but currently it’s spread relatively thin over a large number of professionals.  We’ve got some important new features coming to address this issue and we’ll write more about them soon.

I think this is a great way to think about startups. Can you fit into an ecosystem and make it work better, without picking any fights with existing organizations? If so, you may have a winning formula. If not, you may end up like the peer-to-peer lending industry.

As Melody at Transcapitalist has chronicled, the SEC has repeatedly forced these companies to spend millions on “compliance” just to get started. It’s been so bad that a new regulatory body – something that would send shivers down the spine of any just about any lender – was actually welcomed by the P2P players.

Jay and I have been committed to developing a business with no natural predators since before we were Stik.com. We explored many more radical versions of our business, including an online-only mortgage brokerage staffed by a network of graduate students who would provide something closer to ‘customer service’ than ‘sales’, but we ultimately decided against it. Not only are capital requirements prohibitive for first-time entrepreneurs, but I have watched Redfin long enough to imagine what nasty things would have been said about that company.

Instead, we decided to focus on identifying people whose interests are naturally aligned and connecting them in a comfortable medium. We empower both the companies and the consumers we deal with, we threaten nobody, and at least for now there is no Federal Bureau of Introductions.

I’m neither a movie reviewer, nor a Facebook historian, but I loved the movie and couldn’t resist posting a few thoughts:

In Charlie Kaufman’s Adaptation, one of my all-time favorite movies, an aspiring screen-writer attends a screen-writing workshop and comes away with a lesson that captures my frustration with most movies: “We must find originality within that genre. Did you know that there hasn’t been a new genre since Fellini invented the mockumentary…? My genre’s thriller, what’s yours?”

The Social Network works without a genre safety net. Can you think of another movie that has dared to tell a story with such an obvious ending, all without romance or violence? Somehow, the story captivated me for two solid hours; in fact, as I left the theater, I could only recall two slow moments, one of which was the opening credits.

Since I was in Mark Zuckerberg’s house (Kirkland House) at Harvard, a number of people have asked me if The Social Network is “true.” My take is that it gets a lot of the little details right, but is less accurate in it’s treatment of the characters.

The following low-level facts are true:

• Mark did build a site called FaceMash for which he was disciplined by Harvard college.
• Mark did email a modest number of friends when he first launched thefacebook.com, and those friends forwarded the site on to others. I received one of those early emails, in which a friend of Mark’s said: “This will definitely be in The Crimson”, referring to the college newspaper.
• The college newspaper article in the movie was real. You can read the original here: http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2004/2/9/hundreds-register-for-new-facebook-website/
• The phrase “Facebook me” did catch on amazingly quickly, within weeks, if I remember correctly.
• Mark really did have business cards that said “I’m the CEO, bitch”.

However, at the same time, Mark is depicted somewhat unfairly. He was known as a brash and cocky guy, but he was certainly not without friends. I am personally good friends with a number of people who were close to Mark before Facebook. Moreover, he’s had the same girlfriend for years. To depict him as a loner is a stretch, at best.

I also find it hard to believe that Eduardo Saverin contributed as little as it appears in the movie. He was one of the smartest and most effective guys I met at Harvard – he taught my Calculus 3 class freshman year and came to class organized and prepared every single day. There wasn’t a question he couldn’t answer. Also, a little known fact: at one point, Eduardo held the world record for biggest upset in chess history. In any case, as a Facebook billionaire, Eduardo’s not much of a victim, so I’m glad to see that he’s taken the high road since the movie was released.

I am looking forward to the sequel and the march to 500 million users!

• Bing is a new “Instant Personalization” partner. When a logged-in Facebook user visits Bing.com, Bing will immediately know (1) who the user is, (2) who the user’s friends are, and (3) what the user and his/her friends have LIKEd on Facebook and around the internet.
• Bing is now featuring Facebook profiles in searches for names. These profiles include mutual friends and the ability to open a message window, both directly from the Bing.com search results page.
• Bing will also feature Facebook “open graph objects” that a user’s friends have LIKEd in search results. An open graph object is similar to a Facebook page, but they can be created by other websites. For example, OpenTable creates objects for restaurants, IMDB creates objects for movies, and ESPN.com creates objects for sports teams. These results are featured in their own section of the results, which can be anywhere on the page (or skipped altogether), depending on Bing’s assessment of their relevance.

(Bing says this will take a few weeks to roll out to everyone. If you are not seeing the social features in your Bing results, you can check out pictures on the Bing blog.)

This is clearly an important step forward for the social / semantic web, but what are the near-term practical consequences for Stik and the internet in general? We see several important changes on the horizon.

• Social search will give rise to an explosion in social commerce. Social commerce has stumbled out of the gate due to a lack of discovery mechanisms. Facebook has done a great job of cataloging what people like, but has not (until now) provided many good ways to engage people when they are looking to buy. This is why Facebook ads remain relatively cheap on a PPC basis – since almost nobody on Facebook is looking to buy, direct response ads are ineffective. We’ve played around with a bunch of different ads at Stik.com, and the results are generally pretty poor — in fact, we would bet that the majority of clicks on our Facebook ads are accidental. Searchers, on the other hand, are looking for something specific. When a person searches for “new car” on Bing, it’s a good bet that he or she is or will soon be in the market for a car. And if he/she clicks on an ad, it’s an especially good bet. As LIKEs begin to influence which pages appear in search results, they will begin to attract high-intent traffic and drive real commerce.
• Traditional SEO was like Chess; Social SEO will be like Go. Chess and traditional SEO each have a single objective: in chess, to capture the king, and in SEO, to earn the highest possible ranking for particular keywords of interest. All strategy and effort must be considered in relation to these goals. Unfortunately, traditional SEO has reached something like a stalemate. In most big-ticket verticals, a few companies dominate the most valuable keywords and reap out-sized rewards, while niche players are marginalized. Social SEO, on the other hand, will be like Go, in which players deploy static pieces in an effort to control the board as a whole. In this game, each section of the board is valuable, and often different players control different areas. Here’s the key point: Facebook LIKEs (and perhaps Google Likes, if Google ever gets around to releasing its social layer) will be the Go stones of social SEO. Every potential customer who searches for a product online will receive personalized results, and the value of SEO efforts will scale roughly linearly with the number of searchers reached. Small companies will have a chance to claim valuable territory if they act quickly and place their stones wisely.
• Facebook LIKEs will be increasingly valuable and expensive. Facebook LIKEs now have several valuable functions – not only do they appear in Bing search results, but they can be used for ad targeting and direct-to-user communications. With early reports of a Facebook content network recently surfacing, we expect that LIKEs will appreciate in value. This will mean more advertising dollars chasing LIKEs and eventually some LIKE fatigue among users. Thus, it will be harder for most businesses to gather big numbers of LIKEs in the future than it is today.

If you are a sales professional or work at a company in the mortgage, insurance, or financial planning space, contact us to learn how your business can get a jump start on the new era of SEO.

We’ve been too busy redesigning the site and building business relationships to write as often as we’d like, but we break our silence today to comment on Facebook’s latest important step forward. The new Facebook Groups feature is both an important usability improvement for users and a sign of great things to come for developers.

First, in case you forgot: the purpose of Stik.com is to help people find trusted professionals in high-stakes industries, including mortgage, insurance, financial planning, and real estate. Instead of calling a bunch of friends to see if any of them have a friend in these industries, you can use Stik.com to search all of your friends’ networks at once.

Most people love this idea immediately, but a minority (including Malcolm Gladwell, who recently argued that social media ties are too weak to push real social change), asks a tough question:  What if Stik finds a person that my friend doesn’t really trust?

Clearly, all Facebook friends are not created equal. I’ve got Facebook friends that I haven’t seen since before Facebook, and while these friendships mean something, there’s no doubt that some bonds are stronger than others.  Unfortunately, before the new Groups, there was no great way for developers to tell the difference.

At Stik, we’ve developed strategies that use the number of friends two users share to estimate the strength of their relationship. This is better than nothing, but as Mark Zuckerberg said yesterday, it’s very easy for algorithms to guess wrong.

The new Groups product does several important things to solve this problem:

First, since groups are created and maintained by users, they provide a no-guesswork reflection of who really cares about whom.  I’ve already created two groups, one for my family (group of 5) and one for my college roommates (group of 7), two groups of people that I trust completely.  While not all groups will reflect such tight bonds, it should be easy to tell the difference.  For example, groups of 400 clearly reflect weaker ties than groups of 40, which are still weaker than groups of 4.  There’s no reason to create a group of 4 unless the ties are strong.

Second, Facebook allows users to add friends to Groups without requiring confirmation.  This means that power Facebook users will quickly help Groups become ubiquitous.

Third, developers can see groups details — including the group name, member list, and stream of posts — via the “user_groups” permission.  Previously, this permission wasn’t worth much, but now it promises great insights into which connections really matter.

And so, the Facebook platform takes another important step to help high-value applications.

“Judging the value of any band against the ephemeral tastes of the hyperpresent always misinterprets its actual significance.  Moreover, any act lauded as “especially relevant” (and any critic preoccupied with hunting whomever that’s supposed to be) is almost guaranteed to have a limited career, simply because so much of their value is tied to an ephemeral modernity they only embody by chance.  The reason [AC/DC] will leave a larger, deeper footprint than virtually all of their competition is because they’ve never been relevant or irrelevant; they make music outside of those parameters.  This quality is rare.”

The essay is a broader tribute to ABBA and their genius (and to a lesser extent, AC/DC).  The gist is that these bands were able to create a lasting and unique product (songs / sounds / images / identities) in part because they successfully insulated themselves from the destructive fad-driven demands of popular culture (the very same forces that make a band like Limp Bizkit insanely popular and subsequently erase them completely from the public record a few short years later).

It’s impossible not to see the parallels in Silicon Valley.  Here, start-ups are the rock bands, and TechCrunch is Rolling Stone (“the critic”, with a notably shorter news cycle).  Isn’t “real-time” just an expression of Klosterman’s “ephemeral tastes of the hyperpresent”?  If so, what “actual significance” are we misinterpreting?   In short, in Silicon Valley, who is ABBA? And who is Ace of Base?

I have been spending most of my time the last few weeks talking directly to customers (via the Inman Connect RE Conference and sales meetings) and the ABBA’s are fairly obvious:

Google. And mobile phones.  And Facebook (albeit still somewhat of a mystery to many).

And here I don’t mean “Search”, “Mobile” and “Social”.  I literally mean www.google.com, www.facebook.com, and email, SMS and voice all rolled into a mobile unit (with just maybe a little bit of web-browsing, if it happens to be an iPhone).  No one has heard of foursquare.  Or TweetDeck.  They don’t care.

Facebook, Google and mobile phones are the platforms of the real world, both for the present and the foreseeable future.  These will last as long as the massive over-synthesized hooks of “Dancing Queen.”  Everything else is a fad or a feature.  If you’re a fad, at best you’re destined for an episode of “I <3 the ‘00’s” on VH1 a decade into the future, firmly situated between AOL Instant Messenger and the Kindle.  If you are lucky enough to be a feature, you’re either +1 click or dead.

Google pioneered the +1 click online ecosystem and the vast majority of the internet has built itself around it.  Mobile started out as literally a +1 (followed by 10 numbers), which the iPhone has reinvented with its +1-touch app platform, appropriately replacing the literal “click” in the process.

But what about Facebook the platform? Facebook +1 is in its infancy. Is it Google (+1 Search / +1 Ads) or is it the iPhone (+1 apps)? Can it be both?

As a Connect partner with serious ambitions for the ad platform, at Stik.com we are betting the farm on either (or both).  The real bet is that Facebook is the next ABBA on the technology block, and that the soundtrack is going to sound a lot more like “Money Money Money” than “Waterloo.”  Much of what else is going on is just noise — catchy reincarnations of Ace of Base.  (Seen on TC today, a start-up billed as “Yelp-meets-Groupon-For-Health” – naturally.)  Applauding Facebook makes for fairly boring copy (particularly every 20 minutes), much for the same reason that Rolling Stone doesn’t do a monthly feature on how Sgt. Pepper’s is a killer album.  In the spirit of Klosterman, Facebook is probably too relevant to be deemed “relevant” by critics in a real-time world, but it is well on it’s way to becoming the defining platform of the next decade.  So before going batshit for the next “Farmville meets Twitter for pets”, open up your eyes and see the Sign.

As an entrepreneur, I generally pay attention to such for-whom-the-bell-tolls moments, but in this case, it hit especially close to home.  My parents, both health nuts, had befriended the owner and learned that he will soon lose his house, which he had mortgaged to open the business.

Fellow Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, let this be a reminder: While there are many flaws in our world of angel investors and venture capitalists, we are very fortunate overall.

On Main Street, even seasoned professionals must sign deals with the devil to get six-figure loans.  When their ventures fail, banks unflinchingly extract their pound of flesh from the founders.  On Sand Hill road, we have somehow come to see cliffs in founders’ vesting schedules as atrocities.

Stik.com is young, and I fully expect to publish some critiques of the venture industry as we accumulate more experience, but I vow, now and publicly, to remember: while VCs sometimes use tough terms to juice returns, I have never heard of a VC-backed founder who lost his home on the way to the deadpool.

I’ve always had a soft spot for ideas that can change the world.  For the seriousness with which I discus anti-aging therapies, the dangers of artificial intelligence, the promise of futarchy, private currencies, and psychoactive anti-depressants, I have been called a dreamer, a contrarian, and worse.

Nevertheless, I enjoy imagining how things might be better, and I don’t understand people who accept or – gasp – defend the status quo.

While I may never understand why anti-aging research is considered creepy and futarchy is dismissed as silly, I have learned one very important lesson: Humans are quick to adapt to foreign circumstances when forced, but human institutions have evolved to last.

Entrepreneurship can be many things, but in the consumer web space (for someone interested in ideas, especially in the age of protective licensing), I define entrepreneurship as the endeavor to identify domains in which the world both needs and is capable of change, and then to build the technology and consensus necessary to bring that change about.

Hit websites and apps are a dime a dozen, but ideas that improve human affairs are rare.  I knew when I started out as an entrepreneur that I’d need to daydream about a better future to keep myself motivated over the long haul, which is why we spent 4 months developing the idea for Stik before writing a single line of code.

Happily, the vision for Stik – better deals and experiences from known and trusted contacts – remains as robust as when we started.  (More detail on the evolution of this idea soon!)  I continue to relish the challenge of creating and introducing a better way to do things, and I look forward to proving our concept in 2010.  We’re well on our way to our first 1,000 users — join us today at Stik.com.

“More Brokers Flee Big Firms, Taking Investors With Them”

http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB126256739671014281-lMyQjAxMTIwNjAyMzUwNjM3Wj.html#articleTabs%3Darticle

The gist:

“The ranks of brokers at major Wall Street firms have been shrinking, along with those firms’ share of the retail-investing market. At the same time, independent advisers are growing in number and market share.”

Nothing revolutionary or surprising here – banks reputations have taking a beating over the past year (a stock broker at the artist formerly known as Lehman Brothers doesn’t hold much gravitas).   Save yourself 90 seconds and skip the article,  yet note the the important theme that Nathan and I have been championing with Stik.com over the past year – the seismic transition from BRAND EQUITY to SOCIAL CAPITAL is upon us (I use “social capital” here liberally because its snappier – what I really mean is the shifting importance from “corporate brands” like Citigroup and State Farm to “personal brands” like Tom Smith, the financial planner who coaches your kid’s tee ball team and manages your 401k.)

We have already seen this shift in the media, aided by the blogosphere and technologies like Google Reader.  I follow David Brooks religiously but don’t spend much time at all with the rest of the NYT.  David Brooks personal brand means much more to me than the NYT.

Nathan and I see this same shift happening in consumer finance – as the credibility of “too big to fail” financial institutions has crumbled, consumers will (and should!) begin to rely more heavily on PEOPLE (and personal connections) for their financial advice.  Citigroup has become a  faceless institution half-way across the world that may go under at any minute -it no longer feels particularly safe or permanent.  My local financial planner in the community has a house down the street and two kids at my neighborhood elementary school.  In a business built on trust, which one of these seems more attractive?

We have built Stik.com to help facilitate this shift from corporate brands to personal brands and encourage both consumers and service providers to explore the human side of consumer finance.  As today’s article highlights, real change is upon us.

“Machines can help us find what is good. But with the help of machines, our friends and trusted sources can and will do that even better.”

http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/12/why-social-beats-search.html

I (and Stik.com, obviously) love Fred’s perspective on this issue – we could use that quote on top of our webpage.  But I don’t think it’s that social BEATS search (or search BEATS social for that matter) – it’s that social PLUS search beats everything.   From a high level, the internet is two things – 1. an indexed catalogue of the world’s information (Google) 2.  infrastructure for personal connection (Facebook, eBay, gmail etc.).   In the ven-diagram that sits between these two paradigms sits  “social search” (cataloging information across your personal network) and “social content” (content distribution through your personal network) (and many other things, but you get the idea).

The high level unification of these concepts requires very little explanation – search becomes more useful in a social/networked context, and shared content is a powerful means of connection.   Where I think that Arrington, Wilson et al are giving this idea short shrift however (understandably so, as bloggers themselves) is that “media content” is only a small portion of the value proposition of the internet as “catalogue of the world’s information” and “infrastructure for personal connection.”  This discussion always centers around news:  stories about  “the death of the NYTimes” and “the power of Twitter and real-time search.”  Yes, Fred and Michael – the facebook wall is killing online news channels, just as online news channels killed newspapers.  We get it.  “News” may be the highest frequency use of the internet, but the internet’s value as an information repository,  marketplace and connection mechanism goes far far beyond a mere news portal.

The point?  Social will dominate search – and marketplaces – and personal connection tools – and just about everything for which the internet is currently used (again, not as a replacement, but as a steroid).  Perhaps even more interesting (and powerful), the combination of social and all of these internet tools will likely bring things ONTO the internet that still for the most part reside in the physical world (like mortgage sales on Stik.com).

http://www.stik.com/streamsurvey.html

And while I mostly agree with the wisdom of Casanocha, Chris Yeh and Paul Graham (maybe does actually mean “no” in the VC world), I couldn’t help but be disappointed by the general negativity of these well respected thought leaders.

To summarize some of the major themes:  Raising money is terrible, VC’s are terrible (and are sub-human), and deep down you really are terrible too, VC’s just aren’t properly incentivized to say it to your face.

To these again, I mostly agree. But businesses need capital to grow and develop, and venture capital firms are in the business of distributing this capital.  As are angel investors as well to a lesser extent, though they seem to be as omnipresent and accessible as real angels (at this point I expect that the miracle of the angel round brings the stigmata). And anyone who has read TechCrunch knows that horrible ideas are funded by these very same VC’s with millions of dollars every single day.  So the problem is perhaps not raising money unto itself, or even that venture capital firms are the guys behind the checks.  It’s that there is some magic to getting your name on the check.

So my challenge to Ben, Chris and Paul remains:  Don’t tell me I’m not that horrible company getting funded, tell me how to BECOME that horrible company getting funded.  Because I don’t buy that “not telling a VC your interested in VC money”, or “not telling them how much you are raising or who else you are talking with” is the secret to money in the bank.

http://www.allfacebook.com/2009/12/facebook-connect-now-with-60-million-monthly-users/

Some statistics:

“60 million users use Facebook Connect each month, and more than 80,000 websites have implemented the service since it first launched to all developers one year ago. It’s an impressive stat for a service which is essentially one year old.”

And a hint of reality:

“As Connect is implemented on other sites, I’m sure the user engagement metrics will continue to grow.”

Despite enormous market “penetration”, most people don’t seem to know what Facebook Connect is, let alone what it might do or how it could affect (enhance!?!?) their web engagement.  I would be curious to see where the data behind the 60MM number of “monthly users”.  60MM Facebook Connect monthly uniques sounds awfully high.  What are the top sites (beyond Huffington Post)?  Who is using the service?

For our company Stik, one of the greatest challenges we face in initial adoption is getting users to understand what it means to “Connect with Facebook” and to bring your Facebook data with you as you use our website.  It’s great to see the Connect platform is growing on the content side , but it is up to us (and similar services/applications) to make it simple, intuitive and relevant and to users.   It’s taken a whole year to seed the content side of the market (and apparently get some user traction) – how long will it take for “Connect” be the accepted standard for log in? if ever? What site, service or idea will ignite user adoption?