May 2010
1 post
4 tags
Digital advertising v social media engagement
Recently I yawned a bit too much when reading a well put together article called “Digital Dreams” in the Sunday Business Post. In general, it attempted to summarise how the Digital Advertising Industry works and how brands should approach engaging with digital.
I was bored primarily because it espouses Google SEO, CPC and display advertising as the key tools of effective digital...
April 2010
4 posts
4 tags
Facebook platform flakiness post F8
The facebook platform is being a bit of a pain at the moment. The wider community is also seeing the damage. Blog piece below from a decent source.
http://lianza.org/blog/2010/04/25/the-facebook-f8-story-that-no-one-seems-to-be-writing/
We have a number of apps going live over the next 2 weeks and we are taking a conservative approach to managing facebook platform risk.
Using Facebook Fans to Drive Campaign Engagement
The recent Hunky Dorys campaign cleverly integrates Facebook fan pages and a micro-site to drive audience engagement. The sexy rugby campaign has been causing quite a stir in the Irish media. There have been objections and compliments coming from all angles.
We don’t want to talk about the merits or not of the content used in the Hunky Dorys campaign, but would prefer to talk about the...
5 tags
Facebook V the internet - F8 Developer Conference
There was a lot of geek talk, poor presentation skills from Mr Zucks and no mention of location based services on the Facebook platform. Yet the announcements from Facebook genuinely have the potential to transform and dominate the web for years to come. The main announcement is that Facebook is going to put “like” buttons all over the web, with an initial focus on publishers (news content...
4 tags
social media communities – organic v paid
Over the past month we have had the pleasure of working on some large facebook campaigns involving rapid scale in conversations / fan growth. Some of this growth was paid for through traditional and social media marketing / advertising. In other cases, the growth was down to competitions and promotions to drive fan growth. (a user couldn’t enter the competition unless they became a fan of...
March 2010
8 posts
2 tags
To like or not to like. Some recent Facebook text...
Facebook recently announced a change to the text description of “fan”. Any call to action / fan buttons will now be “like” instead of “become a fan”.
It’s all a bit confusing. Whilst it sounds straight forward on the face of it, there are numerous connotations for news feed descriptions and comparisons to the native facebook engagement ads.
We welcome any move to increase the popularity of...
Hey! Don't Spam My Wall.
Facebook yesterday announced some welcomed changes to their policies around publishing to users’ walls. We welcome them - but others may not be so all embracing. We consider user wall posts from apps to be the holy grail of user generated social marketing. Their integrity should be protected at all costs.
The policy changes basically state that you can Not post to a user’s wall...
2 tags
Facebook stats for Ireland - March 2010
Recently facebook shared some Irish info and stats with us. Outlined below are some of the highlevel numbers. The gender and sex numbers are 2009, however the usage numbers are from March 10.
The key number that pops out to us is that 847,000 people visit Facebook every day in Ireland. That is a pretty large number and stacks up favorably against the reach of any traditional media medium....
3 tags
Adidas Interactive Campaign - Innovative but off...
The new Adidas interactive campaigns are up and running in the US. Some great concepts and creatives. Nearly all of the outputs are heavy flash-type micro sites, some interactive video (good) and an online game. The weird and funky thing about the game is that in order to play it you need to get your Adidas runner/shoe scanned into the game using augmented reality webcam type stuff. Sounds cool...
3 tags
Interactive creativity and facebook app design
A personal bugbear of mine these days is the lack of good quality creatives from a facebook campaign perspective. This includes creativity in general on digital platforms.Only bad facebook app design is worse. Since the start of the year I’ve participated in many discussions around the lack of digital creativity which has got me thinking about it further. At a recent @digital_lounge event Mark...
1 tag
Betapond Careers - March 2010 →
Full time facebook app developer.
2 tags
Location Aware Facebook Wall Posts and...
According to a recent story in the New York Times Facebook is going to be rolling out location capabilities on the platform next month. It is not yet clear on what the exact functionality will be but we’re pretty excited about the possibilities it will open up. We’ve been using foursquare a bit of late to “check-in” at different locations. But the thoughts of having...
February 2010
6 posts
4 tags
Mobile World Conference 2010 - Betapond ramblings
MWC 2010 was very interesting. The usual industry players were all there as expected from the low level chip designers and network infrastructure guys to the handset manufacturers and operators. I particularly enjoyed the NTT DoCoMo stand - watching the poor guy who had to demo the eye controlled headphones ALL DAY.
For me there were three key themes that I saw recurring again and again. Cloud...
3 tags
Reliability of Facebook Applications
We sometimes receive queries from our clients about issues with Facebook applications. Occasionally you might experience styling issues with Facebook apps or the apps simply fail to load.
These issues are generally down to problems with the Facebook API where background requests fail to process which cause apps to temporarily ‘break’. Often these issues only last for a few minutes.
...
2 tags
Facebook redesign – what it means for brands
What happened? The home page for a user has been completely redesigned, with a focus on news feed content. For those not up to speed on news feed content, news feeds are messages from your friends and brands that you like to follow. It is akin to your morning newspaper, but represents a fairly active snapshot of the life of a typical Facebook user.
The other major adjustment in our view is the...
2 tags
Betapond careers- February 2010
Hi,
We are looking for two people to join our team on a full time basis. We work on exciting projects across Facebook and early stage tech engineering. You will have a central role in the tech delivery of some pretty cool projects.
Please do get in touch.
Email jobs {at} betapond.com or phone 051 306259
BP
Two vacancies.
1. Web developer -working predominantly on facebook...
5 tags
Getting it right with Facebook messaging
While recently upgrading one of the Facebook applications we developed for PaddyPower.com to comply with new Facebook messaging policies, we found ourselves faced with many decisions on how to construct and deliver messages to players’ news feeds. Should we publish to stream, use the feed form, how do we include the brand, what language should we use?
Higher levels of more direct...
4 tags
The advertising battle for social news feed...
Here’s a one page summary of Facebook and its opportunities for brands and agencies.
http://www.betapond.com/why-facebook-betapond-overview.pdf
Crafted in plain English by www.betapond.com. Feb 2010
January 2010
3 posts
3 tags
Facebook Fan Pages - Promotions and Competitions
We have observed with great interest the reaction from Facebook fanpage owners to the recent changes to how you can use Facebook fanpages as a promotion and competition tool. Some of our clients are directly impacted by these changes and others are ahead of the game.
To recap, Facebook have banned all forms of competitions, giveaways, sweepstakes etc from a Facebook fanpage. For the Irish and...
4 tags
Facebook Connect and Bump (mobile) - building...
Bump (electronic business card/file swapping) makes great use of your Facebook friends list to help you get more from your electronic card swap. By using Facebook Connect, it takes that initial business card introduction and leverages it by using Facebook to see who and what you have in common.
What does this mean?
If you meet somebody in person, Bump will tell you the friends or business...
Go away I'm in the middle of a Tomato!
Christmas is often a time for reflection, particulary the lull just after new year, those few days before you have to launch yourself back into work. During this time I was pondering my pesonal working methodology when I came across the pomodoro technique http://www.pomodorotechnique.com/, which I have now started using. I have to say that my that I find it to be a simple and highly effective...
December 2009
4 posts
3 tags
Good use of social media combined with...
Foursquare – is now very relevant for restaurants and related places in all the major cities in the US.
Foursquare is a mobile app and web offering that is good at “building things that make cities easier to navigate and random Thursday nights more interesting”.
Amongst its many features, one of the leading tools is the concept of Mayorism. You can become a “Mayor” of a local deli, pub, shop,...
5 tags
How short can you go?
Just spotted an interesting post on TechCrunch (http://bit.ly/gooDotgl) about Facebook and Google introducing their own URL Shorteners. It will be interesting to see how long bit.ly and tinyurl.com will survive. This will most likely come down to the reporting and tracking functionality that sits on top of the new offerings. It’s not just about shortnering URLs so you can fit them into...
5 tags
Google Chrome OS
We have been watching the development of Google chrome OS with interest. What has been very interesting is the numer of commenters that don’t seem to get it. Predicting it’s failure before even a full release. Here at BetaPond we firmly believe that ChromeOS will be a huge success. Like most people - I suspect - when we first read first read Nicholas Carr’s thought provoking...
November 2009
7 posts
4 tags
Create Long Conversations NOT Short Term...
Just a short note on proper use of solutions. When adopting new social media tools to engage with your audience it is important to realise that you should be creating an environment that fosters long term communication, as opposed to short term promotion.
You must engage with the audience in two way conversations. If you do not have the time to invest in these communications, then you are...
5 tags
Partnering, freemuim services and help
Interesting trend emerging of on line ventures that are retreating back to core activities and specialities. Last.fm no longer supports its official Facebook app, because they cant keep up with the pace of innovation from the external community.
In fairness, it’s a pretty good question to be asking. - what is my core offering on web? Tough question. For last.fm, its music discovery. For a...
Betapond Netvibes Page →
We have recently put up our public Netvibes page. This is a snapshot of the blogs and other web stuff that we like to keep an eye on.
These will evolve over the coming months by category and whether or not we get bored with them or they of us.
Website of the month - www.huhcorp.com →
creativity, design, concept, insights, awareness, brand positioning.
Hats off.
October 2009
8 posts
3 tags
Tee shirts and the digital music industry
It’s a pretty sad day for the digital music industry when one of its most innovative streaming services has to resort to selling tee-shirts to cover the cost base. http://bit.ly/4tigaf.
8-tracks is a playlist streaming website that has nailed its specific niche. – ie playlist driven online radio discovery. Its user experience is best in class and navigation is second to none. Its discovery...
WatchNY Startup scene. - not quite as advanced as the Irish scene, but getting there
Delicious links - week ended 21st Oct
Crowd in the Cloud to Program Radio | Epicenter | Wired.com
crowdsourcing takes off for US radio. Triton guys are normally close enough to the action
Google to blend search, music in One Box | Media Maverick - CNET News
that big guys take a look at the music industry. packaged search, linked out to partner affiliates. Discovery is the name of the game, but seach aint that far behind
Build vs...
Death of Ad Supported Music Offerings
I have never really bought into the idea of “watch these ads and I’ll give you something for free”. Sure, in the TV world that’s exactly how it works - but it is not sold to you on this basis - its a little more subtle than that. In fact, in most TV cases you have to pay for an underlying service subscription e.g. Sky, to get access to the ads in the first place! Music is...
Listener Led - Discovery Driven Radio
There has been a lot of debate of late about allowing listeners to choose all the music played on their favourite radio stations. Some radio stations continue to invest heavily in antiquated music testing where they cram people into a room, play music and ask them what they like most. The more experimental stations sign up some third party sites and get people to listen to 30 second previews and...
Delicious Links week ending 9th October
Madmen Facebook marketing case study
http://bit.ly/2UFuyk
Old TV brand getting the hang of Facebook and social media. All about using content distribution as indirect advertising. Cross platform.
Tweetminster: Livewire - Users
Good use of a simple Twitter skin and filtering to view and manage your political news tastes etc. Simple technology so it’s all about the branding and brand...
1 tag
Delicious links - week ending 2nd October
Vodofone 360 Platform launch, expert and independent view
Great piece on the Vodofone 360 platform. Looks like there is a genuine competitor now in place for the app market. We in BP love the VF 360 vision and platform and are proud to be involved.
Songkick integrates Twitter to go realtime and preserve your gig tweets
Good concept on “freezing” Twitter searches for music...
September 2009
3 posts
Social Media & Traditional Websites
Over the past two years we have seen a decent increase in the standard of modern day websites. In particular, there has been a move towards interactive functionality and user generated content.
Most website stakeholders are proud of their site and keen to invest in the functionality and vision that is available on the site, no matter what the objective is.
However, the winners in the web space...
BetaPond is Born...
Here we are fresh from our exploits into music, radio, facebook apps, mobile apps and other crazy stuff that we did in our partner company Catch.
BetaPond is a place for us to further expand our ideas and solutions across all forms of new media, the more social, the better.
We like building innovative yet simple new media offerings for all online platforms. We are passionate about design and...