Posts Tagged ‘facebook’

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.

The ‘super-injunction phenomenon’ – is your digital reputation under attack?

May 11th, 2011

It can take years for a celebrity to build their reputation, but it can all be undone with one tweet.

Whether that tweet is written by the celebrity or not, the nature of the beast is that this tweet can spread so quickly that it very soon becomes common knowledge and, to all intents and purposes, fact.

So, how can celebrities manage their reputation online? Who is responsible for making sure that the image they are creating for themselves in the public eye is reflected online?

Who is responsible for reputation management?
There are two key people who need to be involved in both creating and managing a reputation – the celebrity themself and their management team. They both need to share a clear strategy on how they are going to build and maintain this reputation both on and offline.

Celebrities are brands and brands are alive 24/7. People don’t stop talking about you on Twitter or Facebook outside of office hours, which means that these kinds if channels need to be monitored 24 hours a day. Just like a celebrity can’t choose whether to be famous or not when they wake up in the morning, they also need to be in ‘celebrity mode’ online, constantly building their brand. If they don’t, they risk undoing all their hard work.

The other party who needs to be involved is the celebrity’s management team. I am constantly terrified at the lack of time and investment that agents, PRs and publicists put into their celebrities’ digital presence. I understand that this is a whole new world with different rules, but online reputation management is not a choice anymore, it is an essential part of their job.

So, to all celebrities and their management teams, my advice is this.

1. Take it seriously
If your brand comes under a cyber attack – a wave of negative publicity – it is very often too late to limit the damage. Tweets are in the public domain forever and it is impossible to ask everyone to remove their posts.

Reputations can evaporate in seconds. The speed in which this gossip spreads is astonishing. It is human nature to gossip and all Twitter does is give people an opportunity to listen and participate in it on a massive scale.

2. Have a plan – the best form of defense is continued preparation
Most of us invest in software and technology to protect the things we love the most – smoke detectors, burglar alarms and virus protection. If you have a brand or reputation that is worth saving then you need to invest in someone to develop a plan on how you might manage an attack on your reputation and to be able to respond intelligently 24/7. They need to live and breathe social media and have a true understanding of what the celebrity is trying to achieve.

3. Start NOW

Blog post by Rosie Sayers, Strategy Director at Reform

Has Facebook killed the birthday card?

April 15th, 2011

Here’s a scenario…

It’s the morning of your birthday. You hear the post arrive through the door and rush out to gather up all the pretty pink, red, blue, green envelopes that are waiting for you on the door mat. Lovely cards picked out by friends and family who have been thoughtful enough to know your birthday is coming up, picked out a card with you in mind, and even found a stamp so it gets to you on the day of your birthday. The birthday card; a little indulgent treat to open while you enjoy your first cup of tea of the day (tea that presumably someone else has made for you, since it’s your birthday!).

But wait. This birthday morning there is but one card – from your mother of course – a utility bill and a bank statement. ‘Where are all my pretty envelopes?’ you cry at the departing postman who doesn’t even flinch as he walks away. He’s seen it all before.

So you chin up, walk it off like a brave soldier and head to work, where surely someone in your team will have remembered and perhaps even bought a cake. You’ve been dropping hints for days, so the odds look good. Turn on your PC, you have 87 new emails. How can that be right? You checked them last night at 9pm and it’s only 9am now! Sort by sender. 80 from Facebook. Facebook? That’s odd, you average about one interaction a day? You log in and see that everyone from your best friend, to your dentist, and of course your mother have posted on your wall ‘Happy birthday’… ‘Have a cracking day’… ‘Hope you have a wonderful birthday’. Ahhh that’s nice. People haven’t forgotten after all. Warm fuzzy feeling. Like.

It was one member of our team’s birthday this week and the day after her big day she recounted her tale, albeit in a slightly less Bridget Jones fashion than the one above, of having received a woeful lack of birthday cards. ‘Facebook has killed the birthday card’ she declared.

This launched us in to a conversation about people no longer feeling the need to remember birthdays as The Book of Dreams does it for them. They no longer feel the need to post a card as they can make a much more public declaration of well wishing on your wall. Where will this end, we wondered, will soon a private message on Facebook count for the same as a phone call? Does liking someone else’s birthday wishes count as having wished someone well yourself?

In short, no. This may seem shallow, and perhaps it is, but our feeling was that it’s all just a little bit too easy to say happy birthday to someone on Facebook. That’s not to say you shouldn’t do it, just that it shouldn’t replace actually thinking about people and planning to do something nice for them. Now, those that remember to send a card gain more brownie points than ever before (well done, mum).

Interestingly, our debate on the death of the birthday card took an unexpected turn the following day. That morning, two days after her birthday, my colleague received a handful of birthday cards through the post, all with the post mark dated on the day of her birthday. Our hypothesis – people saw on Facebook that it was her birthday, and rushed to get a card in the post asap.

So perhaps Facebook is actually the saviour of the birthday card?

Blog post by Penny Anderson, Consultant at Reform

Is Social Media Affecting Our ‘Real’ Lives?

March 25th, 2011

Often people moan a lot about the lack of privacy in our social media communication, particularly since Facebook and Twitter both make regular changes to their privacy settings. However, isn’t there’s another aspect that should be taken into account more often? That is, how those different platforms impact the lives we live away from the internet. As social media platforms have become more and more prevalent, there is almost peer pressure to join each and every one of the social platforms.

That peer pressure feels exactly the same as the one that typically gets us into trouble as children and leads to our mothers to say “If everyone else jumped off a bridge, would you?”. It feels almost as if we’re really disconnected if we’re not connected to the internet and checking in on Facebook, Twitter or Foursquare. The problem with all this connectivity is how vulnerable it leaves us ‘in real life’. We now have to moderate our behaviours on- and off-line to fit in with the image that we’re trying to portray to the world. The problems that this causes centre around the fact that we didn’t previously run the risk of baring ourselves and our lives to so many people at the same level.

Until the advent of social media, we’d have our close group of friends. Those are the friends we can tell almost everything to, the ones who attend our birthdays and console us after a breakup. Then we’d have acquaintances, the people that we go out for drinks with, invite along to house parties and see occasionally. There’s also the ‘work’ group that we socialise with at the pub on Fridays or see at company functions. Since the advent of social media, all these groups become equally privy to what’s going on in your life. Putting up a Facebook status that you’re hung-over after a night with your best friend won’t impress your boss, even if you’re at work that day.

An example is an acquaintance mentioning that no matter how much she wanted to share the photos of recent party she’d held, she couldn’t do it. The reason she held back was that there were friends on Facebook that hadn’t been invited due to one of those crowd dynamic issues that so often strike while planning a party. So in order to share the photos people wanted to see, she had to go through an entire process to only share photos with certain people so that no-one would get upset or offended at not being invited.  The emotional turmoil and feeling of dishonesty was overwhelming for them, and yet it wouldn’t have been present before social media.

Pre-social media, we could simply invite the people we wanted to see, and when photos were available, we’d simply take them with us and show those people who were interested. Now we have to sit and sweat about what we show people because all these different people have access to all of our activities. Facebook has introduced groups into which you can place people, but there is a need for better separation of the different groups into which everyone fits.

The easiest way to separate different groups is to either use different accounts or allocate different platforms to different groups. Typically the following allocation could be recommended:

Twitter: Acquaintances & Friends
Facebook: Close friends only, and potentially family
Linkedin: Anyone work relate, clients and colleagues alike

Horses for courses – or different social media for different sets of people.

Blog post by Juliette van Rooyen, Search Consultant at Reform

Facebook Deals launch in Europe… now there is a time and place!

February 2nd, 2011

So the big news this week – well one of the headlines at least – was the announcement that Facebook has launched a new service in Europe called Facebook Deals. It will enable users to seek out ‘deals’ in their vicinity using an app downloaded to their mobile phones. They can then click on that deal to claim it and show it to the cashier at the appropriate retail outlet, restaurant, bar etc to cash it in.

Don’t think it’s only about small ticket items either – Mazda is one of the first brands to sign up… although I find it hard to credit a scenario where I get off the bus and think “What I really need right now is an MX-5”. I jest of course… that’s exactly when I’d want one.

There have also been a few voices of dissent around the idea that Facebook and its advertising partners will use this information to locate you. This is one possible side effect. Although to be honest the police have been able to do that for years by asking BT nicely for their mobile phone-mast records.  I think this is one concern that will soon become periphery.

What we are seeing then is really the beginning of the growth phase of location based digital marketing. Not just who you are,  but where you are. At that moment in time. One of the last bastions left to conquer when it comes to putting brands into the hands, or at least the handsets, of the consumer.

This really is one for the sales promotions companies and marketing agencies to get their heads around and fast. Point of sale media is here to stay and on the high street it is usually made of cardboard. Online point of sale is already here and growing fast. If you don’t know about it go and talk to eBay and Amazon, who’ll be happy to put you straight.

Now we have ‘proximity to sale’ media, it’s mobile, and it truly bridges the divide. Go get some.

Blog post by Alex Marks, Senior Consultant at Reform

The SEO community starts to test social media search optimisation strategies

July 2nd, 2010

When we think of search we think of external search i.e. search engines like Google that act as windows onto the web. From these windows we can find and access news, videos, social media forums, maps – as well as a wealth of branded content and information about businesses, products & services.

But of course people search elsewhere on the web. After email communication search is the primary web behaviour. And there is another kind of search engine: internal or enterprise search. In the US in March of 2010 Facebook’s internal search engine, for example, saw its usage soar by 48% to total 2.7% of all US searches carried out on the Web in that month. OK, so compared to Google’s 64% share of the US search market that might not seem to impressive. Still, that’s a whole lotta searching going on – and mostly for people’s names.

As brands and businesses start to saturate social media properties like Facebook, SEOs are already trying to fathom what the ranking factors are, so that they can lend their services to help brands become more visible in social media search. This article by Marty Weintraub entitled “Facebook SEO Ranking Factors, 2010 Study Results” suggests that criteria such as the Facebook Suggest Box, inserting generic keywords into name fields, population of the Interests field, encouraging as many Fans and “Likes”, might become the focus of SEO test strategies.

However, as Weintraub points out it’s early days in terms of cracking the social media search algorithms. But that won’t stop the more innovative and curious SEOs from having a go!

Blog post by Amanda Davie, Managing Director of Reform

Bing & Wolfram Alpha? Research Based Search Engine Results Could Bring That Personal Touch

November 16th, 2009

You may (or may not) have heard last week about Microsoft’s deal with Wolfram Alpha – which has been in talks for the last few months and now allows Bing’s search engine to integrate Wolfram Alpha’s database results (in the US only for now). It should be noted from the start, that Wolfram Alpha is not a search engine itself, but more an information database.

The results will generally be integrated for certain niches, such as health (like nutritional information) and statistics (population, GDP, history, etc), but with a very unbiased and real time approach (with results you can interact with). And perhaps this is not huge news to some people, but it sort of hit me as big news.

It’s better than news of other recent Bing developments, such as how natural results on Bing offer content snippets and related keywords along with dividing the results across the keyword you entered, videos, local listings and several variations – a souped up version of Google’s “universal” project, or even the fact that the first page of results now includes several keyword variables, that results in 20 natural listings on the first page (which is quite a bit longer, but still shorter than the results page of Naver in Korea), because face it, its not new. Same goes for the Bing “XRank” thing they implemented, where users find out how popular the name of someone they entered is. Nothing new there.

So why is this still good news for Bing in my opinion? Because its about time! It’s about time Bing (previously known as MSN, Live, etc) started looking towards a different direction for providing search results. It had been wasting way too much time and probably too much money trying to be like Google in recent years.

FINALLY, Bing may be thinking “long term”, with this acquisition. Maybe it will use this and its Facebook share to give more of a “person to person” feel in results (even the real time Twitter results could help, if they figure out a way to get past the “junk”). Combining Wolfram Alpha with Wikipedia results (which Bing US already integrates under its own site) might help too.

Maybe even add a bit of new colleague Yahoo and their Yahoo Answers offering? Suddenly, instead of a commerial search engine going against commercial search engine, we’ve got one that is taking potentially taking the more “person to person” and “research based Wiki” approach. The one that looked many steps behind for a while now, is starting to look more modern? Strange, but its starting to hint at that.

Many innovative search engines have come and gone over the years, but the main reason many of these failed were that they simply lacked the budget to get seen, let alone have competitive results. Microsoft’s Bing at least has the budget part checked off.

But how about this Bing, forget about profit for a while. Let Google concentrate more and more on its increasingly aggressive marketing model (by this I mean, behind the scenes and how AdWords teams are concentrating on generating client spend. Not conversions, not traffic. Spend.) Take some more time behind the scenes and develop a more “personal” based search offering. Do it right and become a research based medium – and traffic might come back over (more than the single digit percentage share you have right now).

Then, when you’ve established a new type of user experience, turn up the profitability a little – in order to cover increasing resource and overall company management. This sort of approach worked like a charm for someone else, um, what were they called? Oh well, I guess this isn’t 100% new either.

Anyway, here are some reference points (saved as screenshots for non US users).

1) Wikipedia Content being served under Bing.com URL

2) Screenshot of a long page in Bing’s results for “auto insurance” featuring several keyword variables

Do I think Bing’s improved in the past couple of months? Yeah, but I also think it’s got a long way to go. Still, it’s finally looking in a different direction though, and thats a start.

UPDATE: You can integrate WA results on Google too, but only if you install this Firefox plugin – https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/12006

Blog post by Niall Madden, SEO Director of Reform