Over the last few weeks, I’ve been playing, as we all have, with the new Facebook social plug-ins across the Web, and I’ve come across a problem. It’s an organizational problem, and as some of you know, I have more than mild obsessive compulsive disorder, so the fact that I haven’t been able to find a reasonable explanation for why the Graph was designed like this has really been bothering me.
This now-omnipresent “like” button doesn’t change in appearance from place to place on the Web, but it seems to perform more than one task as it relates to my Facebook profile. The first, and coolest, thing that may result from me “liking” something is that it will show me on the page as “liking” that social object, along with other friends of mine who have done the same. Additionally, it will throw that thing onto my Facebook profile under Movies, Interests, etc.
For example, I “liked” the Peter Sellers movie “Being There” on IMDB (part of the group of test sites for the Open Graph), and this was the result:
But what’s that directly to the left of “Being There – 1979″? It’s The Community Page for the movie “Being There” on Facebook. When you click the Interest that was dynamically inserted from IMDB, it takes you to the IMDB page for “Being There,” but if you already had the movie as a favorite before f8, or added it after, then you will have two movies with the same title in your Movies section, and they will go to different places (one elsewhere on Facebook and one to IMDB).
To me, this is a bad consumer experience; yes, I like the movie, it was already in my Movies section before f8. Now I stumble upon the “like” button on IMDB, and I don’t see myself as “liking” the movie there. Of course, I want my friends to know that it’s a favorite movie of mine, so I hit the “like” button, and now I have duplicate links in my Movies section on my Facebook profile. There has to be a more integrated solution – isn’t that what this whole Open Graph is supposed to provide?
Another place that I hit the “like” button was in foursquare on the page for the Schuylkill River Park; I play basketball there and just in general love the vibe there. Now this same “like” button is performing a third action. It’s just counting how many people “like” that location. It’s not going onto my profile under interests (why not?), it isn’t showing me which people “like” the Schuylkill River Park within the foursquare interface, but it is showing up under my Recent Activity that throws me back to the foursquare page:
This is an OCD nightmare. The “like” button can’t look identical, be used in a sentence identically, but still do several different things to my profile at the same time, including creating Interest duplicates. Am I crazy??
Posted in social networks by .
Yesterday, “Star Wars Day” for those of you not in-the-know (May the 4th Be With You), Twitter announced (thanks SocialTimes) the launch of a brilliant tool, dubbed Blackbird Pie, that allows bloggers and others to snag an html coded version of a single tweet. When you paste in the URL of the original tweet, Blackbird Pie spits a block of code back at you that, when put into your blog or site, looks like this:
@charlieguevara @bill_sebald @joshuaklucas May the 4th Be With You. Happy #StarWars Day
Jed Singer
jedsinger
As you can see, you can go right in and edit the code that it gives you (I’ve removed the nofollows from the links in my tweet, for example) but I didn’t bother correcting the cell padding. Like it says on the site, Blackbird Pie isn’t guaranteed to work on your platform, but will intentionally pick up some of your blog/site’s styling. Additionally, the timestamp isn’t real – it’s showing when I used the Blackbird Pie tool, not when the actual tweet was posted – which may or may not present future problems. Overall, easier than just taking a screenshot? What do you think?
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So a ton of new stuff on the Facebook front, got that. But what’s on the horizon? We definitely haven’t heard the last about these two topics, but the “no-show” items from the f8 Developers Conference Keynote were:
Facebook Credits
Virtual Credits have been touted as one of the biggest opportunities for Facebook in 2010, and with the blossoming of the micro-payment model, it’s surprising that Facebook decided to put it on the back burner. Companies like Playfish and Zynga, maker of the unbelievably popular Farmville game, are reporting huge revenue from getting users to spend small sums of money (as low as one dollar) in exchange for virtual credits or items to be used in games or given to friends. Additionally, apps like Buxter, created by London-based ClickandBuy, allow friends to exchange small amounts of money (no more than roughly $60) to pay each other back for dinner the night before, or what have you, and, of course, charge a small fee on top of each transaction. It would only make sense (cents?) for Facebook to drive these smaller players out of the space and become the Credit standard for their more than 400 million users. But, alas, there was only brief and vague reference to what Facebook was doing with Credits, plus a small, technical “session breakout.”
Geo-Location
In real estate, location is everything; however, at during the f8 keynote, location was nowhere to be found. Due to all the hype in recent weeks and months about Facebook launching some sort of location-based check-in technology to its platform, we arrive at three possible conclusions. First, that Facebook has abandoned incorporating geo-location: highly unlikely. Second, that Facebook has been so busy building and rolling out its new platform that they haven’t had time to think about geo-location: possible, but unlikely. More than likely, Facebook is waiting for a deal to be structured between Microsoft and foursquare, the front-runner in location-based social networking, and is hoping to incorporate the new Open Graph directly into foursquare once it becomes a Microsoft property, much like they’ve done with Docs.com. We haven’t heard the last of geo-location and Facebook, especially if the deal with Microsoft doesn’t happen (which it probably won’t – foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley still has a bad taste in his mouth from selling his previous startup, Dodgeball, to Google, only to watch them let it wither and die), but it certainly wasn’t discussed at the f8 Conference.
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Apr 10
29
“The Roundtable”
Love a roundtable meeting. They definitely feel like the best way to learn; much better than a presentation. The whole ‘knowing that you could speak at any moment’ thing keeps people on the edge of their seats and paying attention. When you’re being presented to, there are so many opportunities to loll off, I mean, we all have a million things to think about, but we should be absorbing what the speaker has to say. In a group discussion, the back and forth, listen and respond, really keeps everyone’s motors running. The roundtable meeting is interactive, it’s alive, it’s engaging. It’s how our Social Media Group meetings are set up at my office. It’s how I wish more meetings and presentations were set up.
We just had a fantastic Social Media Club Philly meeting at Temple’s Business School roundtable style, and one of our members, Cecily, even tweeted that it was the “best SMC meeting EVER” and because this was only my third SMC meeting, I was, of course, happy to be a part of such a momentous occasion. People get to talk, share what they’re doing with social at work, share their personalities, it’s fantastic. Annie and Gloria do a great job with the SMC; I was taking notes.
Some people are absolute wizards with a slide deck, but for the most part, can we make “powerpoint” a dirty word? More conversation leads to more engagement, leads to more learning. And that’s the point right? What do you think about a roundtable versus a presentation?
Posted in strategy by .
Still giddy from some of the announcements from Facebook’s f8 yesterday.
More to come later today and tomorrow while everything sinks in, but definitely check out the replay of the keynote:
http://apps.facebook.com/feightlive/
My favorite user comments during the presentation:
“hey zuck, maybe invest in some Toastmasters for your next keynote!”
It’s true, he was mad awkward. And…
“biggest announcement from facebook f8…MARK HAS A GF!”
Anyway, also check out Levi’s brand new Friend Store, part of the open graph discussed at f8. You can see jeans that my friends like, upcoming birthdays, etc. This is the future of ecommerce:
Posted in social networks by .
Apr 10
20
Soovle for Search
Just discovered this nifty tool, Soovle, via Search Engine Journal that allows you to search a term and see related queries in up to fifteen major engines including Google, Yahoo, Bing, Amazon, Wikipedia, eBay, and Netflix. After using today’s date as a query, the Soovle Link supplies you with the “best” result, and Wikipedia reminded me of the holiday:
The “Secrets” button has some goodies (including a whitelabel feature), and you can also save searches and see their trending via Google Trends.
Definitely a tool worth playing with if you’re doing a keyword build or content campaign.
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So finally Twitter has decided that it may be a good idea to make some moolah. By now, I’m sure you’ve heard about the new ad platform that will bring Twitter out of the red and start bringing in the green, but if not, here’s the synopsis taken from the Twitter Blog:
What are Promoted Tweets?
“We are launching the first phase of our Promoted Tweets platform with a handful of innovative advertising partners that include Best Buy, Bravo, Red Bull, Sony Pictures, Starbucks, and Virgin America—with more to come. Promoted Tweets are ordinary Tweets that businesses and organizations want to highlight to a wider group of users.”
What’s going to change for the average user?
“You will start to see Tweets promoted by our partner advertisers called out at the top of some Twitter.com search results pages. We strongly believe that Promoted Tweets should be useful to you. We’ll attempt to measure whether the Tweets resonate with users and stop showing Promoted Tweets that don’t resonate.”
This last part insinuates a sort of “resonance” score, which everyone that works with PPC advertising will recognize as a quality score. Brands can bid on terms, their brand’s tweets show up in the search when those terms are used, fairly straight forward.
On the day that this was announced, I went to Twitter.com and something peculiar happened; on the main page (pre-login) there was a term, “Haiti,” autopopulated in the search field. I logged in and was taken to a search results page for “haiti” with a Promoted Tweet at the top for a human rights non-profit that was not on Twitter’s list of first-round big-brand Promoted Tweet companies. Not sure why this happened, and nobody that I talked to about it had experienced the same thing. If you’ve seen the same autopopulating of the Twitter search field on the main page, leave a comment!
In other Twitter news (we can’t get through a Social meeting at work without some game changer being released literally as we speak), both Google and The Library of Congress will be archiving tweets for public consumption. Google’s “Replay” is very fun to play with, and you can search any date range or drill down to an individual minute to see tweets about that topic. This is great for businesses releasing products or news, holding events, or any other imaginable reason you’d want to gather sentiment around a very specific time frame. Taken from the Google Blog:
“Starting today, you can zoom to any point in time and “replay” what people were saying publicly about a topic on Twitter. To try it out, click “Show options” on the search results page, then select “Updates.” The first page will show you the familiar latest and greatest short-form updates from a comprehensive set of sources, but now there’s a new chart at the top. In that chart, you can select the year, month or day, or click any point to view the tweets from that specific time period.”
Also, as I mentioned, Twitter “donated” its tweets to the Library of Congress, who must have felt that they really didn’t have enough spam (alright, only 70% of Twitter, or whatever the amount is) on file. Google Replay is much more interesting and accessible.
Again, if you’ve come across any Promoted Tweets, post ‘em down below in the comments!
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I’m an avid NBA fan, and it’s pretty easy for me to draw a basketball analogy for almost anything – so why not brands in social media? Like your social media strategy, a basketball team can’t be a one-trick pony, it must have a good general, it can’t be soft on defense, it’s got to have a little sizzle, and it’s much better when it’s got an arena full rabid fans and a group of dedicated cheerleaders with at least one t-shirt gun (okay, maybe the t-shirt gun is just basketball). And just like basketball where everyone plays on a 94′x50′ court and a 10′ hoop with a 24″ rim, every brand in social media gets to engage on a level playing field; everyone has access to all the sites, techniques, tools, and so on. Let’s get to the jump ball.
1. Lack of Depth: Your brand can’t be a one-trick pony. Great, you post discounts, that’s key; it’s like having a great post-up center like Dwight Howard. A coupon code is more likely than anything else to end up as a conversion, just like a lay up or dunk by your big-time center. However, a team that only has a great center will never beat a well balanced team. Take the Orlando and Houston teams of the mid ’90s. Orlando featured a young and talented Shaq, while Houston also had a dominant big man in Hakeem Olajuwon, plus a slew of great specialists, like Clyde Drexler, Kenny Smith, Sam Cassell, and Robert Horry. Houston, no surprise, steamrolled Orlando in the 1995 NBA Finals. A social strategy is much better when it features a slew of engaging components.
2. Floor General: Your social strategy has to be, well, strategic, and it must have a leader. Who is your team’s leader? What do they bring to the court? Are they a facilitator for the rest of your social team, like a Jason Kidd or a Steve Nash? Do they lead-by-example, like Tim Duncan, execute everything efficiently, and do anything their team asks of them? Or is your social strategy leader someone who is more concerned with personal branding and is a distraction in the locker room, like a Stephon Marbury?
3. D-FENSE: No social strategy can live purely on offense (just look at how far the Phoenix Suns get every year). If you’re going to be conversing and engaging with your customers, be prepared not only for feedback, but for backlash. You have to be able to play defense without sounding defensive. Solve people’s problems without making them feel like they’re a problem. Respond to as many shots as you can, and be helpful and friendly.
4. The Hot Sizzle: What’s your spark? What separates your brand from everything else your customers see on Facebook and Twitter and YouTube? Is it a zany contest you have once a year? Is it the famous flashmobs that you host in cities around the world? Here’s where you get creative – let’s see that inside-out crossover into the reverse windmill dunk!
5. Passionate Fans: Social media isn’t your pay-per-click, it isn’t your email program, and it’s not your direct marketing campaign. Your social strategy is your All-Star Game; it takes the best of all your other efforts and gives your fans a forum to discuss those efforts. How loud are your fans? Then add in your cheerleaders – your high-level community influencers – give them a t-shirt gun, and see how amp’d up your Facebook fans and Twitter followers get!
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The upcoming Facebook change seems like small potatoes – changing the term Facebook “Fan” to the more vague “Like” – but in reality, it’s a negative switch for 400 million Facebook users, and the only one benefiting is Facebook. This announcement comes (yet again) in the wake of a rival’s innovation announcement: Twitter’s @anywhere explained at this year’s South By Southwest (SXSW). The @anywhere initiative is a very ambitious play to make Twitter more ubiquitous by essentially integrating “tweet this” functionality across all major web properties. The Fan-to-Like initiative is designed to do much the same thing; Facebook wants to be able to have little “Like”s everywhere, which are much more conducive for spontaneous engagement than the heavier commitment-sounding “Become a Fan”. As a matter of fact, studies show that Facebook “Like”s are clicked three times more often than “Become a Fan”s – which seems like it makes perfect sense because the number of things that you can “Become a Fan” of (only a couple thousand brand pages) pales in comparison to the number of things that you can “Like” on Facebook (comments, videos, pictures, almost anything – virtually infinite).
It’s obvious that the switch from “Fan” to “Like” is a boon for Facebook engagement both across the Internet and within Facebook itself, but it’s also a benefit for Facebook as far as marketing and advertising. Now they can expect higher traffic from Facebook ads because (again) people are more likely to click a “Like” than a “Become a Fan”. Additionally, Facebook will love to build all kinds of case studies showing how great engagement is now that they’re using a loaded metric. Why? Because it will get more companies building Fan pages and buying Facebook ads. And the beautiful dance continues…
Who is the only party that this change is bad for? Only the 400 million who actually have to use the thing. Facebook has spent the last few years with a “Like” button that has a clear meaning – very simply, that you like something. They have spent roughly the same amount of time defining behavior around the term “Become a Fan” – that is, that you would like to opt into receiving messages (many of them promotional) from a brand and have information about that brand appear in your news feed. By pulling this veritable bait-and-switch, they are going to end up with either a lot of pissed off Facebook users, or a lot of Facebook users who decide to filter out the promotional messages from these brands in their news feeds. Unfortunately for Facebook, neither scenario results, at least in the long run, in more ad sales. By making this opt-in process less distinct, all it will do is create more noise; something we can all do without.
My point is that no major web company of the 21st century – not YouTube, not eBay, not Amazon, not anybody – has ever gotten to the top or flourished there by doing things that benefit only themselves. As Google just found out, based on the backlash from Buzz, when users feel like they’re…well…being used, you’re going to have some ‘splainin’ to do.
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If MillerCoors’ new craft beer, Colorado Native, isn’t extraordinary in taste, it certainly is extraordinary in packaging. Following the strategic footsteps of Blue Moon (another MillerCoors label) which seeded the brand through word-of-mouth and allowed consumers to feel as though they “discovered” the beer themselves – the same feeling that encourages them to talk up the brand to their friends – Colorado Native is banking on sharing and interactivity among local beer geeks.
As reported by AdAge, this new microbrew is the first product to feature SnapTags on its packaging, which allows the brand to interact with their customers directly. Once the customer has opted-in via a mobile picture message of the SnapTag, Colorado Native contacts them with Colorado trivia and questions that enable the brand to sculpt the content and messaging that it sends to that individual consumer. How great is that? I can tell MillerCoors exactly what content I want to consume, be it beer facts, coupon codes, contests, whatever, and they’ll listen! Other brands, like Unilever, have included SnapTags on their ads, but this is a new level of consumer interactivity.
Let’s think of some other products that would be naturals for SnapTag labels and packaging:
1. Trek Bikes – You’re at the bike shop looking for a new mountain bike, you pause in front of an awesome new shiny 9 series, click a picture of the SnapTag, send it to the number on the label, and start receiving questions like “when’s your next major bike trek?” (depending on the answer, you may offer them a promo), “what was the last mountain you conquered?” (send them content about mountains in the area), or “what bikes have you owned in the past? (is this the right bike for you?).
2. Barnes & Noble – You’re walking down the historical-fiction aisle (people still go to bookstores right?), snap a picture of the tag, and send it to the number. Now you’re answering a couple questions about the books you read, the authors you like, and who you’re shopping for, and voila, you’re discovering new books, similar authors, perfect gift ideas, and maybe even a discount a week later.
3. Footlocker – You’re trying on that sweet new pair of Nike Huarache basketball sneaks and send a picture of the SnapTag on the basketball shoe section to the designated number. Footlocker asks if you play mostly indoors or outdoors (for cross-sells), asks if you saw the All-Star game (and sends you some highlights of the dunk contest), sends you a notification when that new Huarache goes on sale, and enters you into the Footlocker sweepstakes for two tickets to the NBA finals.
Any other ideas for cool SnapTag packaging implementation? Let’s hear ‘em!
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TrueAction and GSI Commerce
Jed Singer is a Search Engine Optimization Analyst at TrueAction, an interactive marketing agency owned by GSI Commerce, and the opinions expressed in the Socialight Media Blog are in no way a reflection of the views of TrueAction or GSI Commerce.