Viral Strategy panel: Invites, Notifications, & News Feed Optimization (NFO)

I am blogging live - this is one of the best panels of the conference so far

Justin Smith, InsideFacebook (moderator),
Panelists: Jia Shen RockYou, Blake Commagere Mogads / Zombies, Jason Beckerman TeachThePeople.com / Lotto, Tim O’Shaughnessy Hungry Machine

-No control on who sees your news feeds , no stats on impressions or click-thrus.
- Invites earlier open so early App developers grew to millions, no restricted to 20/day 10 at a time. No stats from facebook on who saw invites so developers have to build in metrics each.
- No transparency on what notifications is trapped as spam by facebook.

Blake Commagere (Zombie) - Best Quote of the Day "Nobody should doubt the power of the newsfeed"
- Optimized invites, provided clear incentive to user to checkout App, worth A-B testing.
-Notifications - didn't leverage much. Use it not as viral tool but to keep user engagement.
-Newsfeeds are seen by non-app users too, so accomodate app users and non- app users with messaging.
- Would like to aggregate friend's engagement of app as a single news feed (like profile updates are listed by facebook)

Tim O’Shaughnessy:
- His App requires active choice from user.
- If same event has two codes for same feed based on whether the user has app installed or not it would be nice (lot of discussion about how newsfeed is a blackbox)

Jia Shen

Invites - to grow app virally, tried multi variant analysis to understand target users guys/girls and tuned apps. People who are in relationship accept invites, people who have 20+ wall posts accept invites more readily, that means they are core facebook users and have active friends.
notification and news feeds are to engage user
mini-feeds - changing different graphics that correlate with the feed item increased user-clicks.
What number would you tune in your App: Track number of mini feed events sent, number of user actions base don the mini-feed.
Notifications - we don't use when we launch new apps, or can be blocked as spam quickly.

Jason Beckerman

Was built on daily engagement from start, which mini-feed helps well.
Give bonus ticket for weekly jackspot, different jackspot prize value on min-feeds.
Built out metrics - is it from new users or from core users, trying to find what $prize brought good viral response.

Question by Dave McClure - If facebook turned on feed notification to non app users how will it change for each develope, will they user invites better?

Should Virality be part of the app, what if its a utility app and not naturally viral?

How many users drop off because it requires invites of multiple friends?

Lee Lorenzen Altura Ventures had a VC like question - how would it affect virality if facebook reports the uninstalls of apps? It brought a nice finish to the panel with response from all panelists.
Blake of Vampire has 13% uninstall, but its hasn't affected its use, its not an interesting stats for users. Jia thinks the stats are not for user, it is for industry. He thinks how long a user kept the App before uninstalling would be more interesting stats.