This post is very long and there are many pictures and many links, you must have great patience and a little concentration. But then again, there is know-how in the following lines so maybe it could be worthwhile.
In Italy the Social Media is Facebook. Twitter is a mysterious object for insiders or 2.0 conferences, a concise fantastic tool but, until now, has not received support from the Italian user base. People like Facebook. The 17 million members give us an idea of a phenomenon that has changed the way we relate to each other in our country. A change strong enough to penetrate in the customs of every social event.
Today in bars or nightclubs people no longer exchanged phone numbers but their Facebook accounts. Relations are maintained through Facebook, you make new acquaintances, meet old friends, celebrate birthdays, share vacation photos. Until two years ago we would meet and our photo albums would be passed around, this does not happen anymore. Today is all about Facebook. Italy has made its choice.
And so have we.
Traffic & workflow model Ciaopeople Internet company
In November 2009 Ciaopeople acquired governance of Nealab Srl., a group of 10 engineers led by its technical core, Stefano Pochet (co-founder and majority partner) and administered by Fabrizio Barbato (co-founder). Among the engineers we have Francesco Di Muccio and Rosario Leo, both inventive and with great problem solving skills. The average age of the group is under 25 and they have been working on the facebook platform developing applications and experimenting with techniques of viral engagement for over a year. The dating application incontragente has excellent traffic results with about 80k uu / day (eighty thousand unique visitors daily). Ciaopeople had launched fanpage four months prior to this, I recently took stock of the situation in this note: http://bit.ly/fanpage-storia-di-un-progetto-a-6-mesi-dal-lancio
The fanpage project
You can visit the fanpage project at this link: http://www.fanpage.it/
Fanpage is a traditional nanopublishing network (11 vertical magazines) with Google traffic model, based on the creation of original content, optimizing SEO and link building (with either natural or forced matrix). The 50 writers (both external and in-company) working on the content are ably coordinated by Project manager Paolo Scoppa. SEO is one of our core-competence that has been accompanying us on our journey. Our SEO strategist Diego Borrelli spends his days understanding the Google algorithm changes to quickly prepare the necessary changes. Overall, our company now brings about 150k uu / day (one hundred and fifty thousand unique visitors daily) from Google. While facing some very difficult months in 2009, we realize how Facebook is taking over and we began to seriously address the issue of Social Media, the acquisition of Nealab opens the doors to some great new opportunities, the union of these companies results in the following:
We start off with some market testing, nealab devises a system of viral spread which requires publishing to user’s wall. The system is invasive but respects facebook policies. Experience has taught us, however, that when there are such large traffic peaks, alerts are sent to a facebook quality rater. In December, we implement the viral strategy to the incontragente app. We reach a peak of 1,000,000 users in one day. Below is a Google Analytics graph:
1 Million uu
The server infrastructure resides in Amazon U.S. with autoscale, the market testing gives us the opportunity to meet the opportunities of the virtual cloud of the American colossus. Basically, the system automatically generates new instances (thus new servers) in relation to the traffic generated. This allows us to support very large volumes of traffic.
On the afternoon of December 24, we try with the same app translated into English and launch it worldwide. We aim for an inefficiency of the quality team due to the Christmas holidays. But that will not be the case. The traffic is enormous, Amazon opens 150 instances at the same time (the equivalent of 150 servers), we are able to handle 250k (two hundred and fifty thousand) simultaneously connected users. In a few hours we register 3 million subscribers to the app, the traffic will amount to 2 million visitors in one day, the equivalent to the daily traffic of corriere.it and repubblica.it combined. Below is the graph:
2 Million uu
But on Christmas morning, on the morning of December 25, someone in the Palo Alto company goes to work, the app is put in moratorium by Cornelius. Moratorium is a time penalty of Facebook, that is, the functions which allow viral trigger are inhibited for periods of 1, 3, 7, 30 days. The app remains fully visible and usable, it just does not scale. Cornelius is like a signature of a particular quality team, an impersonal way to report the penalty. The Cornelius moratorium, sounds like a joke. The folks at Facebook love a good joke, but we are not kidding:)
A 30-day moratorium decrees the end of the app, it will never go up again. 7 days can cause serious difficulties, 1 or 3 days are recovered with hard work. On Christmas 2009, we got 30 days. We had gone too far. The market test data are very interesting, we begin to understand the logic of facebook’s quality team and we get to work to create a product. Nealab becomes the thirteenth company in the world in number of MAU (Monthly Active Users). There are 12 million active monthly. Ranking higher then us, only Americans.
Nealab is the thirteenth in the worldwide developer leaderboard
In collaboration with Dada, with which we had already created the SEO system http://www.mp3.it/, we created a Dedica una canzone. In short, the app allows users to dedicate a songs to others by posting them on their message board. The viral mechanism is the same as the Christmas market test, the application has great success and with a record of 8 million members in a few days with about 500k uu / day. Below the graph of what is called “boost” or a strong upward thrust:
Boost Dedica una canzone
At this point we decide to open in Spain where Dada already has an office and the means to monetize traffic. Dedica una Cancion is born, great viral effect and 6 million members. The two fan pages associated with the application amount to a total 500k fans.
The entire Ciaopeople network, with its 20 portals, reached 12 million unique users a month. The connections in Italy are 20 Million.
The F8 takes place in April, the annual conference where Facebook announces the changes in the Social Network. On the 21, Mark Zuckerberg launches Opengraph calling it “The biggest change since the birth of Facebook.” In seven days Opengraph is live on incontragente but it is too early, nothing works. The launch is forced to accompany the media event, it will take weeks before we see this innovation on Facebook at work. The Social plug-ins work and spread rapidly, “like” buttons appear near the article titles, the comment box, recommendation boxes, boxes that induce fans to the Facebook pages quickly invade the internet. In two weeks fanpage has improved, related articles as well as comments are handled by the plugin on facebook. Each interaction on the page produces feed on the message board visible to all users on the network.
But Opengraph is something else. The protocol allows, by creating a ghost Application (invisible to users), a traditional web page to become a Facebook page. The interactions on the web page, will have the same effect as those that occur on the social network. So a “like” near an article will, in fact, result in that user becoming a fan of a page managed by us. It is not easy to explain Opengraph it would take more time and a session dedicated exclusively to it. I will just give an example that sums it up. This is an Opengraph page found on Calcio Fanpage:
Opengraph Page on Calcio Fanpage
Whomever clicks on the “like” button on the page not only produces a feed on his facebook wall as with social plug-in, but becomes a fan of a page that is only visible by the administrator :
Phantom fan page
This way we can post (even automatically) on phantom pages and have the content appear on the users’ wall. Put a “like” on Milito? I’ll constantly send you news on Milito. Everything then integrates with the Facebook Search as each opengraph page produces a search result. example:
Opengraph Search Result
With Opengraph Facebook tries to bring the web inside itself and to undermine the Google Search (mission almost impossible). It is still early to draw conclusions, what is certain is that we use this opportunity in all our projects. We realize, however, that the diffusion did not turn out as planned and that something is still missing to give impetus to the greatest innovation of the American Social Network.
In May Ciaopeople begins a trial on fan pages, we decided to build an infrastructure of 50 vertical pages embracing the issues related to our fanpage network. In two months we reach a total of 1,200,000 fans on our pages. But the traffic that we can run on fanpage is very low and does not justify the investment. At that point we realize that to generate traffic it is necessary to trigger a mechanism of content sharing, any content that is shared carries a link with it. We manage this link with bit.ly a url-shortener system that displays statistics in real time and to measure the engagement.
The video found at the link below shows you how the bit.ly statistics system in real time works:
http://bit.ly/Video-dimostrativo-bitly
Each column that you see in the video gives us the representation of clicks tracked by bit.ly in a minute. All in real time. This way we measure and assess the engagement in order to perfect the future contents.
To encourage the sharing of the elements our Art Director Andrea De Luca produces a communication system that we apply to the pages I LOVE FOOTBALL, I LOVE MUSIC, I LOVE CINEMA.
I LOVE, Social Media Project
The system works, sharing sky rockets and in a few weeks I LOVE FOOTBALL reaches 180,000 fans and I LOVE MUSIC 150,000 fans. The bit.ly pour vertical traffic on their individual fanpage magazine. In no time we get traffic numbers that generally require enormous effort and months of work on Google. Here is the analytics of the traffic directed from facebook onto fanpage:
Traffic directed from facebook onto fanpage
While the apps continue creating traffic we realize that we can extrapolate some value from the fan pages. We study the engagement of public status, we learn to understand the language, we develop content for social media. The Editors of the fanpage project, Eleonora D’Amore, Giovanni Carzana and Danilo Massa, quickly learn the new language. A Social Media editorial staff is born and and join those of nanopublishing with SEO oriented content. The new traffic model traffic bring fanpage traffic up to a peak of 200k uu / day, only eight months after the launch and without buying any visits. graph:
174,000 hits new record for fanpage
We decide to go further. We need a tool that gives us an idea of what is shared on Facebook in Italy at any time of day. Nealab developed a crawler that reads the wall (not blocked for privacy reasons) of the entire Italian user base. We crawl Facebook and create the first Facebook Trends. We are aware that somewhere in the world there could be something similar, we are sure. But anyone who did this did not gave it any visibility. Like the rest of us, until today. The Crawler reads all the user’s walls (Millions) every 10 minutes and returns the aggregated data of sharing. In this chart you can easily understand the operation:
Nealab’s Facebook Crawler
The larger picture is here.
Basically, we know what is shared in Italy in real time, we have to take the content, rework it and publish it on our pages. We start with a market test in USA, Spain and Turkey. We use the crawler in their countries to learn about local trends. This, for example, is our Turkish I LOVE FUTBOL page.
In April, we close the contract with Dada for the creation of an international dating application. Dada finances and has a call option on the project. Youlike is born.
Youlike
The site is an alpha version already online at this link: http://apps.facebook.com/youlikepeople/
Soon it will be available in beta and in the following months the internationalization the project will start. All the know-how on Social Media gained in recent years and more than 5 years experience in dating with the brands qbr, Ciaopeople, freebar and Incontra Gente allows us to approach the project with great professionalism and competence.The joint venture with the Italian multinational gives us an opportunity to deal internationalization with the proper support. The project will also benifit from the mobile application developed by Dada. We have been studying Foursquare for some time now, shortly we will see Facebook places already accessible here: http://www.facebook.com/places/, we assume that the geolocation will, again, change the way we relate with others. In Italy there is still a low proliferation of smartphones, but the trend is going to change and we must be ready. Things will go from “what I’m thinking” to “where I am.” It will take time, but we must start now so that we are ready when the time is right.
I conclude with a bracket that has little to do with social media. In July Ciaopeople and Nealab moved to the new 300 square meters office in Via Saint Lucia. 40 work stations in a location overlooking the sea, Castel dell ‘Ovo and the delightful Borgo Marinari.
Ciaopeople headquarters
Castel dell’Ovo
Yes, we are in Naples. A wonderful city, bright and full of surprises. But also a tough and sometimes very complicated city. Doing business here is truly a feat for many reasons. But this makes the adventure even more exciting because we know that every goal achieved is not only our own personal success but also a success for the city.
This is the challenge that thrills us the most…
Thank you for making it this far 
CEO Ciaopeople
