http://www.adweek.com/aw/content_display/news/agency/e3id3d058ba458918f0fc8ec4548c7fbb4b?imw=Y
What’s most interesting in this AdWeek article is to see how slim the point of view is around how to calculate return on the interactions that these fan pages produce. Facebook fan pages are a powerful new extension to the media arsenal. They create “media lift”, creating sustainable conversation out of direct media efforts. For example, a Facebook media placement could target all moms in the US (or those with specific profile attributes) and invite them into a discussion or experience related to a brand on a fan page. Those fans could then be the source of sustained conversation, activity and influence which further engages and promotes the brand awareness efforts. So it’s definitely a powerful media/communications approach.
Continue reading ‘AdWeek – Who’s Doing It Right on Facebook’
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Tags: Social Media Networks Facebook
Branding is by far one of the oldest marketing science. Branding techniques have involved a variety of psychologically relevant approaches, such as plain naming, visual branding, acoustical (think Intel) and video branding (think of the MGM lion roaring) and trademark slogans we all remember. But as we move from push into a social branding era, some interesting challenges have come to life for brands and their designations as they embark into consumer based branding.
The Conversational Monitoring Challenge
As brands embrace online conversation and social media, some will be faced with an interesting challenge while performing discovery tasks and seeking to define a reliable universe of keywords and topics they can track against. Interestingly enough, some of the biggest brands will find that their conversation is quite difficult to find, let alone track. Consider names like “Apple”, “Palm”, “Sun”, “Lee”, “Wrangler”, “New Balance”, “Simple”, “Vans” and many more. Sifting through online mentions of these words leads to a significant amount of noise.
Stating the Obvious: Names that Can Be Found
Social media metrics and conversational listening will have profound impact on the creation and use of brand names. Companies will more heavily rely on names that can be uniquely found and tracked online. And realizing that big brands can’t just change their names, they might rely on a set of “sub-brand” names to keep better tabs on their social mentions.
But Names Aren’t Everything
Solving the naming problems only takes you half of the way. In fact, very often, challenges around a brand’s name(s) or even the vocabulary defining a company’s services cannot easily be dismissed through naming alone. Luckily, conversational monitoring has evolved. Give it up to the real social media pros to perform topical discovery on a variety of tools, and zero in on your brand’s conversation. A few of the tricks…
- Term proximity: Use a tool that can perform proximity based matching. An easy example would be to search for “Wrangler” in proximity of “jeans”, “denim” or “wear/wore”. Most tools only offer inclusion and exclusion filters, which fall short of being useful unless you are able to match by closeness.
- SEO Search Terms: While most sites today do not factor online conversation in their choice of search terms and keywords, those terms can be extremely useful in conversational discovery. Because search terms (if done well) are the most likely way consumers “call out” what they’re looking for, these terms are also most likely to appear in conversation.
- Word Clouds & Heat Maps: Word clouds or heat maps provide a quick visualization of term weight and volume. While the substance of the conversation behind popular words may not seem interesting or actionable, it is important to consider its volume and to follow through the use of certain words in order to uncover the trending topics behind them.
- Blogs & Microblogs are not equal: Keep in mind that while many conversational monitoring tools blend results from blogs and micro-blogs, discovery should preferrably be performed on each independently first. Micro-blogs force condensed conversation, leading to sharper use of key terms vs. “noise” terms. Taking a quick spin at a simple Twitter search looking for brand mentions can give you a better sense of what you’re looking for.
Start Listening!
Whether your brand name is unique or you’re likely to find yourself drowned in chatter, start listening today. Discovery is the process of uncovering conversation, topics, influencers, trends and so much more. It can be challenging, and will only get more daunting as conversation amasses every single instant online. If you’ve gotten passed discovery, congratulations. Now’s the time to define your listening metrics and track agains them. Listen, learn, engage, repeat.
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Social Networking is the groundswell of this decade. With adoption growing faster than grasp, Facebook, Twitter and many more have glued the mobs to their screens and mobiles. Businesses flock to de-mystify the use of social channels for profit or even just brand image. As people talk, share, tweet and post, patterns of use self-organize, experiences mature and something interesting unfolds: the concept of people sharing vivid experiences in time and places requires more than just web and mobile.
The Social Experience is Confined
The Social Networking experience today is confined to the web. With mobile “companion” experiences, the point of contact remains the computer or handheld device. The interactions are rich, and now include location awareness and rich media. But they still heavily rely on users taking on the entire task of self-reporting.
This burden of self-report can greatly dilute expression in time and places. A rich social activity report today consists of a user sharing their location, what they’re doing, who they’re with and including content, such as a photo, at a time very close to the experience itself. Such reports are rare. Instead, more common are detailed “post-experience” or plain “in-experience” reports. The reason is simple. Interrupting experience to take the time to report is unnatural and in fact reduces the experience itself.
In a nutshell, the current social networking experience confines us to trade richness for timeliness. And for the average Social Joe, which does not like to spend too much time providing details of an experience, most social activity consists of reporting things that do not truly carry the essence of people, time and place, such as content (links, videos, photos, thoughts, celebrity gossip, etc.)
What do we need? More natural and spontaneous ways of capturing experiences. Integrating social experiences beyond the web represents a crucial step towards a more natural capture of experiences that reveal the true social nature of people, time and place in engaging ways.
Unleashing: Outdoor and Physical Experiences
We are social in the way we live and share experiences together. These experiences mostly happen in dynamic contexts, such as while visiting a store, dancing in a club, eating at a restaurant. A true capture of these experiences involves technology and a level of automation which allows seamless, unintrusive, engaging and rich auto-reporting all at the same time. A few examples…
Interactive Club/Lounge Tables
Jennie’s out with some friends. They head to their favorite club. The doorman greets the regulars and seats them in the lounge area. As they sit, their table comes to life. The “digital bar” lights up, and engages you to touch through a delicious selection of cocktails, drinks and other lounge treats. Within seconds of amazement the drinks are ordered. But this gets better. The “digital bar” puts Jennie & Friends on screen and prompts them to Tweet or post to Facebook. Within seconds, all smiles are on Jennie’s Facebook page and a tweetpic, location and shout out on Twitter. Now that’s accurate activity feeding… Within minutes, Jennie’s phone buzzes. Dave is on his way.
The Virtual Dress-up
You walk into Abercrombie. The famous giant sized frame at the entrance seems to have more glitter. As you make your way through the entrance, the frame comes to life and you suddenly see yourself on screen, wrapped in the latest A&F outfit. Startled with excitement, you grab your phone, you just have to share this! But wait… the screen calls you up and reads “Show your friends how good you look in A&F. Touch here…”. A few touches later, the word is out, and your moment of dress-up fame is out on your profile page. Abercrombie flavored, of course…
Automated Sharing
Automated sharing basically means providing a user the ability to share rich activity details with minimal effort. Tagging a product in a store lets your friends know where you’re shopping and what you’re digging. Scanning a 2D code at the museum posts a vignette of the art you admired, with picture, a bit of history and the museum hours. During movie previews, snapping and sending a 2D tag shown on screen lets your friends know you’re at the movies and what you’re watching, trailer included.
Opportunity: win-win for users and marketers
Moving social interactions beyond the web shifts control towards the conversation “enabler”. As a user, your ability to easily share is traded for a marketer’s ability to integrate relevant content and brand into your expression. And the trade seems quite fair, since the relevance of your message is also increased. User generated branded conversations, or marketing nirvana. Time to push beyond the web?
Comments please…
Filed under: Out-Of-Home, Social | 5 Comments
The line is blurred. Your boss and best friends together on Facebook. Your rants heard by all on Twitter. Will the medium shape our digital social persona or will our need for channeled communication shape the medium?
Theory #1: We will learn to adopt a digial persona which can appeal to all contexts.
Our experience with digital conversations will create a third privacy dimension. Something between public and private. Between personal and professional. We will take a section of each and it will become who we are within the digital society. This new dimension will slowly but surely become the new notion of “public”. While private will be kept between the walls of direct messages, SMS, and email.
Theory #2: Social networks and microblogs, through increased usage, feel the need for classification, including subnetworks and groups which can accomodate our privacy needs.
In this scenario, we don’t change. Life is business as usual. Our boss does not know what we tell our friends unless we want to. Networks give us the ability, with many possible variations, to “channel up” our streams and create circles of interest around conversations. These can then be used for public and private needs, or simply for topical characterization.
Which will it be? As we speak, the first theory is unfolding. But the pressures of monetization under increasing traffic may very well force the need to segment via features such as classification.
Your thoughts?
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Tags: twitter social networks privacy engagement facebook
Just a quick rundown based on a great article by Josh Bernoff about the mistrust of the corporate blog. I’ve recently discussed how portable social graphs are slighly shifting attention towards email and the address book and how powerful the concept could be.
Beyond corporate blog mistrust, this article delivers a powerful second message loud and clear: email is the most trusted conversational medium. Not a coincidence that it’s also the oldest, most reliable and most flexible.
The above article shows this Forrester chart about people’s trust in information sources (taken straight from the article – disclaimer):
Forrester - information source trust data
What this really means:
From people you know: Email beats social networks 77% to 43%. This just can’t be neglected!
People trust consumer product ratings / reviews (60%). The Amazon story... Making the recommendation model social while leveraging Email as a Social Graph and communication medium can lead to some pretty powerful models for the Amazon marketing bottom line. You might soon see “This is Johnny. I just rated the iPhone 8GB 5+ stars. Read what I had to say.” in your in-box.
Email / Mail campaigns could potentially go from 26% to 68% in consumer trust. Take the current 25-28% in trust for direct mail or email from a company and look at the 60-77% ratings for reviews and email from people you know. This is the groundbreaking basis for a new age of digital marketing. Here again, the thought of social graph enabled and meaningful marketing interactions (reviews, recommendations, private sales, “hand me over” coupons, the list is long…) is exhilarating to say the least.
Filed under: Social | 1 Comment
Tags: Amazon, consumer trust, digital marketing, Email, social networks
Yesterday, Derek Stacey, a colleague of mine at Razorfish sent me this article: http://gigaom.com/2008/12/08/yahoo-plans-to-launch-a-mail-app-platform/. We worked together on a nifty project aiming to aggregate and blend both social and email experiences from numerous sources into a seamless and light web interface. The idea did not come as a surprise, but rather as a confirmation of a fact we figured would become mainstream soon: social graphs are everywhere.
Social graphs are born from repeated conversation…Anywhere.
Concepts around what a social graph really is or could be started becoming clear to us as we tried to conceptualize an aggregated address book, with sources such as various social networks and email address books. We ran into a number of challenges, such as the inability to equate profiles across networks with varying information restrictions. This lead to many very interesting spins around how to use social network graphs and aggregate them into a form of “super graph”, which lead us again to believe the following: social graphs are a by-product of sustained conversation using a communications medium.
The idea is pretty well illustrated when we think of our Facebook friends list, our Twitter follows and followers, our email address book, our IM friends list and more. Each of these belongs to a specific communication service (FB, Twitter, Yahoo!, Gmail, GTalk, AOL, etc.) and we build those graphs from sustained and repeated activity.
Email: One heck of a social graph…
Kudos to Yahoo! for a move to leverage the oldest social graph in digital history. Who can think of a communication vehicle stronger and more ubiquitous than email. We can get a bunch of us digitophiles in a room and list out who doesn’t have an Orkut, Hi5 or MySpace profile but I can bet you any amount of money the list of those who don’t have an email address is going to be empty. Everybody has one if not multiple email accounts. We all have an address book, full of contacts, IMs, phone numbers, distribution lists, groups, even calendar entries. The email medium is in fact where you’ll find the richest and most stable social graph.
Beyond FB Connect. More freedom to choose.
While FB Connect and all the other APIs out there, old and new, are a great start for portable social graphs, I see the realization of email as a social graph and vehicle very disruptive. Here is why:
- Email as a communication technology is open and supports old, proven and stable APIs
- Email has unparalleled support for a variety of content types and delivery options
- Email is probably the most widely adopted and used technology in the world
- The barrier of entry for integration is very low: think Yahoo! Social APIs, Google Data APIs (mail, calendar, etc), MSN Live APIs and more.
- Email as a social graphs gives you identifiable leads, not just virtual clients protected by API restrictions
So come to think about it, referring to the great article Shiv, Jessy and others have written about Amazon + iTunes implementing FBConnect (http://www.goingsocialnow.com/2008/12/imagine-if-amazon-integrated-f.html), here’s how one can think of an Amazon decision strategy:
- Analyze their user profiles by email address. Find out what portion of them belong to an “accessible” provider (such as Yahoo!, Gmail, MSN and many others)
- Run some analytics magic to figure out what proportion of Amazon unique users have also been on Facebook. This can apply to other networks as well.
- Make an educated decision… I’m willing to bet going the email route will prove more powerful.
Possibilities are endless…
Now the exciting part. Yahoo! and many others have and will realize that tapping into “human area networks” is easier than ever. Facebook and others have forged the way to raise awareness to the benefits and wonders of graph based communication while creating circles of trust between users, their friends and third party applications.
What’s exciting about using email is the ability to openly integrate messaging and content delivery in a centralized or de-centralized fashion, the sky’s the limit in terms of ways to use email to re-create any kind of social experience. A tiny but perfect example is how you can send a picture via email directly into a Flickr album corresponding to that email address. Does this get you thinking of the limitless capabilities of the integration medium?
What’s even more exciting about using email is the idea of re-inventing permission based email marketing in a much more targeted, social, trusted and efficient way.
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Tags: Amazon, Email, Facebook Connect, portable social graphs, social graphs, Yahoo
We’ve been noticing a lot of press, internal and external buzz around FacebookConnect. Surely because of the latest marketing push Facebook has been attempting. I will cite one ofthe many articles recently published, painting the picture of Facebook’s attempts to find “distributed” ways to monetize. It is interesting that Facebook has waited so long to publicly engage third parties in leveraging the Facebook social graphs in order to increase site stickyness. FacebookConnect incorrectly seems like the groundbreaking new and unique opportunity everybody’s been waiting for. I’d like to say that we, our clients and Facebook, justifiably have just been passive about weaving Facebook (or other social networks) into websites. While it’s great that such announcements have captured the interest of the masses, it’s important to know all the options that are and have been on the table.
Facebook (and other) third party integration has been around for long…
I can find technical posts that date back as much as May 2006 that answer questions around the integration of the FB REST API. This API, at the time, already supported authentication, friends lists, profile information, photos and more.
Beyond Facebook, let’s not forget the fact that sites like LinkedIn and many others offered the ability to find friends using your address book. While some services resorted to scraping, address book APIs have been around for a long time from providers such as MSN, Yahoo! and Google. What people ignored is that these same services also had distributed authentication schemes such as OAuth, OpenID, Live (Passport). The ability to make sites more social and to avoid having users register 1000 times (haven’t we all) on 1000 sites has been around for a long long time.
As for MySpace, a similar picture can be painted. While Facebook was in fact the first to release this type of integration capabiltiies, MySpace closely followed. MySpace has, for over a year now, implemented the OpenSocial container and supports REST services around much of it’s social functionality and data, with permissioning, authentication, etc., etc.
The real question: Why should a site give up on their profiles?
The real question to be asked an answered in order to shed some light on the shift that seems to be occuring is the following. “Why should marketers and service providers give up on their user base and switch to one owned and operated by Facebook?”
This is in fact a tough question to answer. And marketers, with digital programs that heavily focused on lead generation, email, user profile, behavior tracking and personalization, had very little time to entertain the option of letting go of their data in exchange for a very controlled third party set of profiles.
But the game is changing. Marketers are starting to believe in the accuracy, relevancy and scale of interactions within social graphs. Suddenly, every marketing touchpoint can become viral. The marketer’s voice can be carried on by users within their own realms. After all, who knows people best than the acquaintances they’ve “allowed” to interact with them. The concept is almost unbelievable. The reach is brutally powerful. The opportunities abound. This is just the beginning…
Needless to say, the question is no longer whether marketers “should” replace their user base, but “how” they should replace their user base. And in that field, some have been agressive (CBS) and others remain cautious, rightfully so.
Why Facebook should pay close attention: there are other options out there.
While Facebook has always been the first to make the right moves (much respect!), this is a critical time for them to understand the value of openness. Facebook figured out they couldn’t monetize solely by driving traffic and advertising on the facebook.com property. A distributed interactions platform is now the way they want to monetize. And they are right on to think so. But what will make or break them is the perception integrators and marketers have of the platform’s openness. Here’s why…
Anyone who’s played around with FB Connect or API based integration can testify to the fact that these platforms were carefully crafted with control in mind. Fear of losing their audience, of providing the tools for people to build alternative, even better experiences outside of Facebook. For example, authentication is a semi-complex process which takes a user to Facebook, to return to the site they were on. A site implementing FB Connect cannot obtain an email address from a profile and is limited in the numbers of notifications they can send users. This is the whole Beacon story, which has really never been appropriately solved.
While marketers are excited to embrace FB Connect, the next “reality checkpoint” will be about the plethora of options available out there as alternative social graph platforms. Google, MSN and Yahoo! all have very rich social APIs. I am sure that represents nearly 95% of the entire target population. As a marketer, I would not only rely on FB to connect my users, but on the ability to let users connect via the mechanism they feel would be most efficient (i.e. via Google, MSN, Yahoo, etc.). For this very reason, Facebook will have to implement a status of openness comparable to these platforms in order to keep competing.
The money factor: How the heck will Facebook setup revenue share?
Distributed, interaction based marketing. How does Facebook monetize? Do marketers engage in “affiliate-marketing-like” contracts with Facebook? For example, if Amazon were to implement Facebook connect, to they pay commision for purchases that were measurably influenced by social graph conversations? Is so, how? Now that’s a tough nut to crack… It’s too soon to tell.
Final point: If users are now marketers, why don’t they get paid?
Leaving you with something to think about… If users are empowered to market on behalf of businesses, why don’t they get paid? What do I mean? Simple… Let’s create a digital marketing platform that creates or aggregates social graphs. The platform can enable interactions on any sites, much like FB Connect. However this time, the user’s influence of purchases and conversions is analyzed and remunerated. Wouldn’t that be swell? Finally, I get paid for convincing those 10-15 friends to buy an iPhone.
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