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SOPA, PIPA and the end of the world as we know it?

January 26th, 2012

Last week marked an extraordinary milestone in the relationship between the internet and politics. The signs that the internet is changing the way that governments and politics work have been there for a while. Barack Obama was arguably the first US Presidential candidate to harness the power of social media to win his election campaign in 2008. More recently the internet caused governments to topple as activists took to blogs and social networks to influence events happening on the ground in the Arab Spring. Last week, for the first time, web-based activism had a direct and highly visible impact on the US congressional process.

The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), and the Protect IP Act (PIPA) had until very recently had little or no coverage outside of the United States and their passage through Congress seemed all but assured. Support was strong both in the Senate and the House of Representatives judiciary committees. A powerful lobbying triumvirate of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), the US Chamber of Commerce and the Recording Industry Association of America was right behind it. Surely, the passing of these Acts were no-brainers?

Well, no, actually.

The way in which the digital world responded, rose up and rallied against these Acts was unprecedented and thus not even anticipated. It’s estimated that 13 million people were involved in last Wednesday’s online protest, with around 50,000 websites going dark during the day. Online opponents sent an estimated 3 million protest emails to Congress. High profile backers of SOPA pulled out and Congress postponed the debate until a compromise could be reached. Internet users across the world joined together and changed the course of US politics.

So what caused this overwhelmingly negative response to what seems on the face of it to be a good thing? Online piracy and intellectual property theft are both bad, right?

Freedom of information was at the heart of this protest, though I would say that misinformation and scaremongering were both large contributors to the mêlée. How many people saw Wikipedia’s black out and a headline reading ‘SOPA will kill the internet as we know it’ and jumped on the bandwagon without knowing any of the facts? Millions I suspect – this is the nature of the internet… pre-SOPA/PIPA at least!

So what were the facts? SOPA would have allowed for the U.S. Department of Justice to seek court orders requiring Internet Service Providers to cut off access to any foreign websites that were accused of copyright infringement. That would include infringing material posted on a single blog or webpage. It would also require search engines to remove all results pointing those sites, and ad platforms to halt all advertising on them.

At the risk of committing copyright infringement myself, the team over at Mashable have posted a long and detailed blog about ‘Why SOPA is dangerous’, summarising with three main points:

  • SOPA gave the US government the right to unilaterally censor foreign websites
  • SOPA gave copyright holders the right to issue economic takedowns and bring lawsuits against website owners and operators, if those websites have features that make it possible to post infringing content.
  • SOPA made it a felony offense to post a copyrighted song or video.

 

The devil was in the detail (or lack thereof) for this Act. There wasn’t any qualification that the offending site needed to be solely for the purpose of theft, only that it enabled it. Unfortunately the Act didn’t give any allowance for the fact that the internet has made copyright violation absurdly easy. Theoretically it left any site with a comment box or picture upload form at risk of infringment.  As the owner of a site, you would be liable for any copyright infringement committed by your users. So site owners would be left having to check the content of every post or comment against copyright theft – not particularly cost-effective if you are Facebook or YouTube!

SOPA and PIPA were written by politicians who clearly had very little understanding of the nature of the internet in today’s society. The driving force behind the Acts seemed sensible enough – copyright infringement and piracy are both issues that need to be tackled. However, the way they had been written could have created situation where innovation online became stifled as experimentation left pacesetters open to too great a risk.

What we have seen in the last week is the power of the internet as a lobbying tool, the signature collection of the digital age. In this instance it has created an opportunity for US politicians to re-think an Act that had potentially damaging economic and social implications.

Beyond that though, this episode offers some serious connotations for the future of politics and government as we know it. If big corporations can launch an internet campaign to raise mass-awareness of an issue they feel strongly about and change the opinions of our elected representatives – without much explanation of the reasoning behind their stance – where does that leave the mandate of an elected government?

Blog post by Penny Anderson, Consultant at Reform

Google+ – Google’s combination of search and social

January 19th, 2012

Google’s announcement of the uplifting of Google+ (or G+) pages within search results has been eliciting reactions from a number of people in the search industry. Everyone seems to have an opinion about how they feel Google’s new preferences will affect search results, but in the furore that this has raised, businesses have to ask “How will the average searcher react?”

I think there are a number of ways in which this could play out for Google and, in turn, the businesses that get traffic from their search results. First I think it’s best to examine exactly how Google came to make this change. The rise of social media has put “the big G” into competition with “the big F”, even though they are in similar, but not the same, markets. For a large part, this decision seems somewhat ego-driven, because Google has confronted Facebook with their foray into Social through G+. So far G+ just hasn’t captured audience share from Facebook that Google hoped it would. So, to keep G+ front of mind, Google wants to increase its importance to searchers, in the hope that companies will flock to G+, bringing their fans with them.

Now those motives are not necessarily pure, it leaves search engine aware businesses with the realisation that Google’s results are no longer pure and neutral. However, for the average searcher, with little to no knowledge of how search engines actually work, will this make a difference? They will see these new details (like the result below), but their reactions are hard to predict.

Searchers seeing G+ or affiliated results, which their circles share, may believe that those pages are more trustworthy because Google and their friends endorse them. They are therefore more inclined to click on them as their level of trust in Google is high, which means that businesses could start to see G+ pages visited instead of their pages when people are searching for generic terms. This could draw greater numbers of businesses to create G+ pages as they believe their competitors’ G+ pages are gaining greater prominence in key search result pages.

Another alternative is that people start to distrust the entirety of Google’s search results because they no longer see them as neutral and unbiased. This is heightened by the fact that it is only G+ elements that are being integrated, not Facebook or any of G+’s other competitors. With this lack of trust, it could mean searchers have to find another trustworthy way to find new sites. This could mean a gap for a new search platform, becoming to Google what it was to Yahoo, or it could mean that Bing has an opportunity to seize market share. However, a new search platform would mean and entirely new problem for businesses to solve, as predicting where people will go is something that no one has completely nailed down yet.

At the end of the day, word of mouth is great when people are searching for a great place to have supper, or the new cool place to buy clothes, but friends and circles don’t know everything. We know that our closest friends don’t all have the same likes and dislikes as us, and that’s not taking into account the drive to acquire as many friends as possible. It’s a phenomenon we’ve seen in Facebook, where people collect friends to try and compete for the biggest number of friends. If people start to do that on G+, then all of those people will impact what search results they see, even if it’s a second cousin twice removed that you emailed out of family duty.

As a business, you obviously won’t know who your potential visitors are connected to, and how populated their search results will be by G+ results. This can cause businesses to potentially overestimate the impact of the new integration on their potential customers and panic. However, what they needed to bear in mind is that Google has been integrating social elements into their search results for a while, but never so overtly. Therefore without downplaying the effect that the change may have, it serves little purpose for businesses to panic that they’ll lose masses of searches overnight. For the moment, businesses need to ensure that their sites are well setup, and that they have a G+ page as well as one on Facebook.

[A potential side effect could be for those businesses with extremely poor customer service or some PR disasters in their cupboard. People are more likely to share information about bad experiences with their circles. This means that even if someone didn’t see a piece that was shared in their circle, future searches for the brand concerned could highlight the negative press. An example of this would be an article about Easyjet discriminating against a disabled businessman, which is likely to be shared in a G+ circle, so that could appear prominently when someone is considering booking a flight with Easyjet. This would make online reputation management even more important, as measuring this would be very difficult]

Blog post by Juliette van Rooyen, Search Consultant at Reform

Re-defining e-commerce sales

December 7th, 2011

What defines an e-commerce sale? This may seem like a question with an easy answer, “sales made online”, right? Not necessarily. A recent article in the Harvard Business Review by Darrell Rigby titled “The Future of Shopping” points out that the influence of e-commerce on sales is not simply about the daily report you receive about yesterday’s on-site sales.

The article asks “is it an e-commerce sale if the customer goes to a store, finds that the product is out of stock, and uses an in-store terminal to have another location ship it to her home? What if the customer is shopping in one store, uses his smartphone to find a lower price at another, and then orders electronically for in-store pickup? How about gifts that are ordered from a website but exchanged at a local store? Experts estimate that digital information already influences about 50% of in-store sales and that number is growing rapidly”.

These scenarios and many others highlight the blurring lines between e-commerce and traditional bricks and mortar shopping, yet this is a topic that many traditional retailers have not begun to understand.

This blurring of the lines creates a host of issues for traditional retailers. How do you market to consumers in the digital age? How do retailers properly track what sources are driving revenue? In terms of marketing to digital age consumers it is apparent that the days of viewing digital channels, in-store marking and traditional advertising in isolation are coming to an end. A focus on creating the easiest and most rewarding shopping experience for the consumer will need to take precedence across retail marketing, creative and advertising agency offices with a focus on coordination of messages.

Marketing efforts will specifically need to increase for mobile and tablet devices as consumers are becoming increasingly savvy at utilising the power of these devices as tools help them shop for the best deals.

The article points out one particularly interesting example of this, citing Tesco’s brand in South Korea called Home plus. In an effort to “bring the store to the consumers at a point in the day when they had time on their hands… Home plus covered the walls of Seoul subway stations with remarkably lifelike backlit images of supermarket shelves containing orange juice fresh vegetables and meat, and hundreds of other items. Consumers wanting to do their food shopping could simply scan each product’s Quick Response code into their smartphones, touch an on-screen button, and thereby assemble a virtual shopping cart. Home plus then delivered the physical goods to the shopper’s home within a few hours”.

In addition to changes in the way retailers market themselves, another aspect of the traditional retail approach must also be addressed. How will various stores, the retailers’ website and marketing channels be credited for sales?  Most retailers still approach sales reporting on a per store basis with the website being counted as one store. As the example above clearly shows this approach is not necessarily relevant in the digital world.

If one store, for example, has a great sales staff but limited stock, it is very possible that consumers could be purchasing online as result of their experience in store. Who gets credit for this? Shouldn’t the great sales staff get some credit? Retailers that think of how to model a reporting system that gives credit where credit is due will likely be ahead of the game in relation to their competitors. They will be in a better position to encourage sales staff to meet all of the consumers’ needs rather than only the needs that can be met within the confines of the walls of the store.

As we can see the definition of an e-commerce sale is changing at a rapid pace and will continue to do so over the coming months and years. Retailers that look ahead and begin to address these changes no are likely to be at big advantage in the years to come.

Blog post by Mike Jennings Director at Reform

Strictly come surfing – at the half way mark

November 28th, 2011

Last year, after an off the cuff comment in a meeting with our PR agency I set about digging around online data sources to see if they could be used to see who would win Strictly Come Dancing. Looking at search and social data in the build up to the show launching last autumn, there was a clear front runner – Kara Tointon. It also happened that she was an excellent dancer, and so as the weeks went on it was very easy to keep chopping the data in a different way and confirm that Kara would win.

This year the stakes have been raised as the challenge of examining the data to see who would go out each week was laid at our door. Manfully we accepted the challenge and have been writing a weekly post for the Guardian’s Media Monkey blog outlining what the data says and what that means for who is going to leave Strictly in any given week.

We found out very early on that predicting the loser each week is much more difficult than predicting the winner of the whole show. Who’d have thought it, hey?! The first issue we encountered was that of collecting clean data for the celebrities. Is there a more generic name out there than Alex Jones? Perhaps John Smith, but after that I’m not so sure! It has taken us until this, the half way point to be entirely happy that the data we’re looking at is actually about the right people as we’ve tweaked our queries each week.

Another issue that we have faced has been in examining the sentiment behind the buzz of celebrities. Our experience told us that volume itself was no sign of popularity, as people love to get on social networks to have a good whinge as much as they use it to declare themselves a fan – if not more! Our in house self-expressed data fiend developed a tool for sentiment analysis (well done Richard!) that does a pretty good job of sorting the positive from the negative, but there is no tool out there that is 100% accurate. In fact, even paid for tools such as Brandwatch and Meltwater aim for 70% accuracy – so we’re always at risk of being wrong. Just as an example one week someone tweeted ‘@bbcstrictly bloody hell that was absolutely fab…u…lous!! Len you are wrong #scd’ – our tool put this firmly in the negative camp, but clearly it’s not!

All that is before anybody has even danced a dance. We found that the volatility in the dancing performance by the celebrities in the bottom half of the table in the first few weeks made it very difficult to judge what would happen. As the couple that leaves is decided by a combination of the judges score for their dance and the phone vote, a novice celebrity doing the pasodoble one week and a waltz the next might be near the middle one week and then rock bottom of the judges score the next. We quickly had to factor this fluctuation into our algorithm, allocating a score for the perceived difficulty of the dance celebrities were undertaking each week.

So how have we done? We’re currently sitting at about a 50% success rate in predicting who will go out each week – so using the data is certainly more effective than randomly guessing! More than anything I think our experience doing this analysis has shown that data on its own isn’t enough. Without understanding the context and the content of the data we would have been way off the mark every week. By examining the source and taking into account the limitations of our data, we can be much more calculated in the way in which we read it. Data is one thing, but insight is another!

Blog post by Penny Anderson, Consultant at Reform

Retailers: Top tips for maximizing your mobile visibility

November 15th, 2011

As Christmas approaches, retailers must position themselves to maximize their visibility amongst consumers, especially during challenging economic conditions where budgets are tight. In an increasingly wired world, consumers are turning to their mobile devices and tablets for guidance. This is only likely to increase during the Christmas season, as consumers are expected to conduct more searches from their mobile and tablet devices as they shop.  Google has estimated that in the US, 44% of last minute gift searches will be made using a mobile device (though that has been disputed by sites such as Search Engine Land). Google also states that more than 33% of US smartphone and tablet users plan to start their holiday shopping prior to Thanksgiving.

Performics recently released a report showing that mobile devices now account for 14.2% of Google’s total search clicks, also stating that paid search clicks from mobile devices are expected to increase to 17.3% in November and December.  As holiday sales can comprise nearly half of a retailers’ annual sales, being positioned appropriately for mobile and tablet search can mean the difference between a successful or dreadful holiday sale season.  Poorly optimized sites and images, along with sites that have flash and poor navigation and sites which are not mobile friendly, could result in local retailers losing significant business.

According to Google 65% of high-end device users report that they have used their device to find a business and made a purchase at that business in person shortly after.  So, burying details such as store hours and phone numbers, could negatively impact offline sales.   Consumers who are in a rush and need access to that information right away may very well take their business elsewhere, thus causing an impact both online and offline for shoppers.

Here are some tactics you can implement in order to optimize your mobile search campaign this holiday season.  Most e-commerce websites have a mobile version, where the landing pages and URLs are separate from their desktop site. We suggest that you do not copy the landing page from your main website as it probably won’t function properly. Instead, create a landing page that is pertinent to what your mobile users are searching for, but with less add-ons than a full website page might have.

Next, conduct mobile-specific keyword research.  Whereas SEO rankings for terms are similar to some extent whether a mobile or a home user, the PPC landscape is quite different.  Business owners should create a keyword list and set separate campaigns specifically for mobile devices and tablets. Mobile users are generally on the go, therefore their search queries will typically be more generic or location based, so be sure to include the right terms and match types in order to attain more traffic.  Doing this will allow you to set a specific budget and track the campaign’s performance.  If you apply those strategies, you will be able to maximize your visibility amongst mobile device and tablet users this holiday season.

Blog post by Priya Chandra, SEO Consultant at Reform

Google SSL update and its impact on SEO, SEM and more.

November 8th, 2011

At Reform lively debate and conversation is encouraged as we develop our take on the latest developments in the ever-changing world of digital. Digital marketing is far from black or white (no search-related hat pun intended!), and through these debates we believe that we can better relay our thoughts on both sides of the fence to our clients and colleagues.

This week we’ve been discussing the latest Google SSL update, how Google Analytics now reports some SEO traffic as ‘(not provided)’ and the potential user / privacy issues driving the change.

Here are different takes on this development from two members of our team – one positive, about what Google can do as the innovative leader in this field, the other perhaps more pessimistic about what Google has become.

Niall Madden, Director at Reform says…

The big story here is that when a user logged into Google (Gmail for example) does a search, they are being taken through an encrypted query on Google’s https website, stripping out all the tracking parameters in the process, resulting in that traffic showing in Google Analytics as ‘(not provided)’.

This means that Google, and ONLY Google, know not only what keyword was used, but where the listing ranked in the SERPS (the “cd=” parameter correlates with the SEO rank in all occasions).  Why I hear you ask? Apparently this is due to a concern about protecting the privacy of Google users.

Since the change, if you’re logged in and in the US, you can’t even enter a search query with JavaScript turned off any more (UPDATE – NOV 18 – This is no longer the case, as now we can search with JS off, even when logged in, though some interesting features include one where the sub-links are shrunken into the older link only versions). Combine this with the recent announcement about the algorithm tweak emphasising content freshness (affecting around 35% of results) and there’s a lot of buzz within the SEO industry.

But the big issue is Google Analytics, a free service that’s been great for SEO practitioners over the past few years. Many users started seeing a few SEO visits listed as ‘(not provided)’ in the keyword list, and even a few days ago shrugged it off as overhyped news – since they only saw it affect 1-2% of traffic, people weren’t concerned, life went on.

Then, by last Friday, that 1-2% hit as much as10% on a couple of sites, and people started getting concerned.

There is potentially another layer to this story.

Google recently launched Google Analytics Premier, which it is aggressively pushing to larger scale clients. The introductory price of $150,000 per year provides a service which, according to the brochure will enable you to ‘track more than ever’, ‘own your customer data’ and ‘analyse ALL of your data’.

To me this sounds like music to the ears of clients worried about losing keyword data for 10-20% of SEO traffic to their site, and it has caused many to think that Google might be using this data exclusively like many third party ad providers do theirs.

However, this statement has not been accepted by Google, and their reps and other parties have informed us that this is not currently the case, (so conspiracy theorists can rest, for now). Still, it seems like the logical next step if Google is going to be selling their product, and many people have said that the answers they receive from Google on this subject are vague at best.

Face it, Google has changed. The data is valuable, and they need to generate revenue beyond AdWords. Hey, call me a cynic, but it just seems like the path that Google is taking, regardless of what Google tells me. I mean, really, who’s going to pay $150k when 10-20% of the keyword data is missing!?

And as for user privacy, consumers tend to complain more about targeted advertising, like remarketing perhaps, not SEO results. Ironically for PPC – “If you choose to click on an ad appearing on our search results page, your browser will continue to send the relevant query over the network to enable advertisers to measure the effectiveness of their campaigns and to improve the ads and offers they present to you.”

So where’s that valued privacy now?

Richard Fergie, Consultant at Reform says…

Yes, you are a cynic. As far as I know, it’s all speculation and conspiracy theory at best.

Firstly, I think it is important to be clear that Google *could* do everything that Niall is talking about; there is no technical barrier to them operating an exclusive web analytics service in this way. My argument is not that Google can’t, but that Google won’t.

What will Google gain from this? If this change increases uptake of their premium analytics product so that it grows to twice the size of Omniture it will increase Google’s revenues by only 2% (based on 2010 figures).

Not the type of return shareholders are looking for.

2% at Google’s scale is still a lot of money but I think this reward is not worth the anti-trust risk for Google. Google are already walking a fine line in the anti-trust courts; I say that using their dominance in search to help them dominate the premium web analytics space will put them so far on the wrong side of the line that the US Government will have to take action.

So what is the real reason why Google have made this change? I genuinely believe that they are doing it to protect user data. Not because they care about user privacy but because user data is being used to compete with Google in the online advertising space.

Google Remarketing is an excellent retargeting solution but it is nowhere near being the best in the space. Giving these ad networks additional data in the form of the user’s search query makes their targeting even more efficient and harder to compete with. Google can reduce the effectiveness of their competition and gain brownie points with organisations who care about user privacy – win/win.

So who is right?

Only time will tell (though at this moment Google have claimed that the data will currently NOT be added to Google Analytics Premium). In the mean time, this surely provides an opportunity for innovation and development within the SEO industry.

Every business in every industry suffers setbacks at some point, and from an SEO practitioner point of view, this certainly feels like a step backwards for SEOs that analyse keyword data as a key sign of the overall project’s value.

However, workarounds will be developed, new KPIs will emerge, and the industry will continue to grow. This isn’t the first time data has been closed off, and presumably it won’t be the last.

Blog post by Niall Madden, SEO Director of Reform

To App Or Not To App? The rise and rise of mobile

October 31st, 2011

Where is your mobile right now? Are you using it to read this blog? Are you looking at an app? Are you browsing a web page? Are you on a call? Are you texting? Is it on the table next to you?  Has your five year old got their hands on it? When did you last let your mobile out of your site for more than two minutes? How many of us take our mobiles to the bathroom with us? How many of us will actually happily let another person use our mobile and not check it upon its return? Wherever your mobile is right now it can’t be denied that we have become entirely dependent upon the device. And yet brand and businesses have yet to capitalise on this.

Is it safe to say mobile apps are currently the way to go or should businesses and brands spend extra building an efficient optimized mobile site? Are we going to see mobile web take over apps down the line? Probably, yes, however apps seem to be where the hearts of the purse holders are right now.

So what do the numbers look like? Nielsen published data showing that 36% of US mobile consumers have smartphones, and ComScore research shows that the average mobile in the US has 34 apps with an average of only four used daily. App downloaders with Apple iOS and Android OS smartphones have more applications on their mobile phones than those with other kinds of smartphones, with an average of 48 apps on iPhones and 35 apps on Android phones.

There are positives for both apps and mobile websites. The latter offer a wider customer reach as they aren’t as phone model specific, and the barriers to use are lower as customers aren’t required to download anything. A mobile-optimised site also often allows more search functionality and more scope for being unrestrained in terms of design. It is also arguably easier to make relevant changes and updates whenever you like on a mobile website.

The advantages of having an app are bedded in the fact that the iPhone and smartphones are dominating the mobile internet space currently. An app is more appealing to iPhone and smartphone owners, and with the location based services available these apps provide fantastic visibility for the brand. Apps can redefine usability and interaction on mobile phones; act as a container for traditional content such as videos or games; provide an economical avenue for additional marketing exposure; and be a direct connection to festival goers (for example), keeping them informed and up-to-date with schedules, announcements, and alerts.

With the mobile industry heading towards mobile web and with generic top level domains (GTLDs) fast approaching surely it is going to change the way we discover and experience brands via our mobile.  The app v mobile website argument will continue to rumble on. What’s important is to look closely at your customers before making any decisions. Which is more appealing to them? At Reform we can advise your business on which option is the best for you. We don’t just tell you to build one but prove to you with research which is best for your business or brand.

Blog post by Anthony Dobson, Business Development Executive at Reform

The untapped potential of online video

October 21st, 2011

Recently I had the privilege of jumping across the pond to attend the online media, marketing and advertising expo, OMMA. Not only was it two inspiring days of serious talks and discussions with all the most up-to-date news, information and ideas in the world of online marketing but plenty speculation on the future of digital.

My focus for the two days was to understand more about online video. The statistics, courtesy of comScore tell an interesting story:

In the US alone there are 108 million people watching online video with 1.3 billion videos been watched daily. Video has seen a 1,290% growth since January 2006. An amazing stat, and yet this fast growing internet segment is increasingly under-monetized. In 2010 the US spent $1,440 million on advertising and had 441 billion videos viewed as opposed to a $324 million ad spend and 63 billion videos viewed in 2006. So a 334% increase in spend but an astonishing 600% increase in videos watched. In August 2011 there were 185 million online videos viewed, 162 million of those were on YouTube alone. That is an average of 228 videos per person per month. For the average person that is, 17 hours a month.

When looking for examples of countries getting video right one needs to look at Canada, the US and China. China and the US both manage to get over 150 million unique views per month. Canada and the US both have over 180 videos viewed a month per viewer with the majority of the videos viewed are homemade and funny. However we can learn something from that. People like to be entertained and want funny content.

The heaviest consumers of online video are 18-34 year olds, with 49.7% being female users and 50.3% male. Men watch 1.7 times as many videos online as women, a ratio that has remained constant for the past two years.

Between 2009 – 2010, the growth among long-term TV programming sites of videos viewed increased 104%. So why then are advertisers not jumping in and making the most out of online video? Is it because we are still wary of the unfamiliar content, unsure of the true effectiveness, trying to put video into the TV model of storytelling?

I’m particularly excited to see the next stages of online video and how brands rise to the challenge to harness its potential. It’s already a big opportunity and growing by the day.

Blog post by Anthony Dobson, Business Development Executive at Reform

Real time serendipity and a frictionless Facebook experience

October 14th, 2011

Mark Zuckerberg used the words ‘real time serendipity’ and ‘frictionless engagement’ throughout the F8 conference last month.  A rough translation reads, ‘more engagement and less spam’.

Much of the conference focused on the new “this is your life” time-lines and the new class of open graph apps, which no longer require authorisation for every story published.

Facebook wants us to think of our interactions with apps as ‘self expression’, reading, listening, watching and importantly making serendipitous discoveries about our friends, their interests and activities.  ‘Graph Rank’ has been introduced to keep app developers in check.  It is an artificial intelligence that manages discovery based on feedback to cut out spam.

Have the recent changes to Facebook impacted strategies for building fans and optimising fan page engagement?

The abiding principles of managing a successful Facebook page remain the same. It’s vital that page managers have a thorough understanding of Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithm when planning strategies. Publishing timely, relevant updates tailored to the fan base and target audience, with the goal of optimising engagement and as a result, increasing reach.

The introduction of the hybrid news feed, featuring ‘top stories’ above ‘recent stories’, reinforces the value of knowing as much as possible about what makes your existing fans and your target market ‘tick’.

The ticker, a sidebar news stream where every story created now passes through in real-time is designed to create this ‘frictionless’ experience. The idea is to keep stories that are lightweight away from the main news stream so we never feel annoyed by a friend’s online activity. No more having to hide friends due to their obsession with Cityville.

As data comes in it will be interesting to see how this shift in lightweight stories over to the ticker impacts secondary reach for page posts.

Have you had any ‘serendipitous discoveries’ through the ticker yet or did you minimise it as soon as you found out how!?

The only change rolled out so far for Facebook pages, since this year’s F8, are improved page insights.  Facebook has made it easier for a fan page to measure how well they are faring against the competition as well as giving page owners a better understanding of ROI by introducing a few new juicy metrics.

We are now able to measure each post to a Facebook page in terms of reach (unique impressions), engaged users (Clicks), talking about this (stories) and virality (previously feedback).  The reach metric is also broken down to show organic, paid and viral reach.  We can now begin to measure the impact that sponsored stories have on viral reach and organic reach. Great news if you are managing a Facebook ad budget!

I’m particularly excited about the ‘people talking about this’ figure.   Every story or interaction created about a page, including Page likes, likes, comments, event RSVP and answers to polls are transformed into one account-able figure. This figure is not only available to track in insights but displayed publicly on your page.

Simply divide fans by ‘people talking about this’ and you get a figure you can use to measure the engagement of your page over time or the engagement of one page against another.

This public display of engagement is an excellent method to quickly monitor the health of a page and more importantly the brand that owns the page.

Guest blogger Hilary Pullen, Freelance Digital Marketing and Blogger

Gamification strategies are now a key part of UX and customer engagement – ignore this and your brand will suffer

September 30th, 2011

Social media is a game. Some people (like me) don’t get that at first. Or maybe in the early days social platforms relied very much on early adopters who were happy just making friends (and maybe making out with them) via social. In the last twelve months however, engagement, challenges, rewards badges you can virtually gift etc, have tuned me into the fun. I find myself immersed in a world of fans, followers, circles, news feeds and apps, and all that alongside my Klout perks, beta test invitations and the micro affiliate cash I can get for simply recommending a product or service to my followers. The power that rewards can leverage to an online brand strategy is awesome. See the overnight success of Badgeville, and the adoption of behaviour analytics as a basket of key metrics in the measurement of a brand’s power to engage customer loyalty meaningfully.

Simply organising your social media life, identifying and connecting with the people that matter to you emotionally brings immeasurable pleasure. As does listening and advocating those that you find thought-provoking and that you can learn stuff from, dipping into the musings of others you know it’s good to keep tabs on, and finding those people you perhaps knew long time ago when you had a different set of priorities that now keep you connected to a shared past. This emotional payback through connectivity is an intrinsic motivational driver to the key engagement piece, and is why I argue that, although I can see a world when Facebook is the suburbs with new and innovative social urban conurbations emerging, social experience utilising technologies is here to stay.

Games for Brands, a conference on gamification, is being held in London on the 27th of October and will be the first mover in what is set to become the new social media. A quick skim read of the list of keynote speakers sees representatives of the UK’s major broadcasters, agencies, and games developer communities, as well as the academics and social entrepreneurs. Harnessing the power of gamification and utilising it is going to be exciting and will be another step-changing crossroads in the incredible journey that digital is affording the marcomms sector. Bring it on!

If you would like to discuss your social strategy and the implications and opportunities that gamification represents, please contact Reform.

Blog post by Mary Keane-Dawson, non-executive director at Reform.

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