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 sites).

This concept is not new. For the last couple of years we have had similar offerings from Digg and Delicious to name a couple. I’m a huge fan of Delicious (where you bookmark all your favourite content onto one site and then share your bookmarks with your network / wider community). Betapond uses Delicious to centrally visualise any content that is bookmarked on Delicious with the tag “Betapond”. This content is then pushed to our home page.

The main fall back with Delicious is that there is no method to get access to your existing network of friends. Whilst I might “digg” a piece a news article, there is no way for me to know if my friends also “digg” this content. With this new feature, I will know which of my friends has already read or liked this story. This information will be displayed to me on the publisher’s website (ie the sports / news website that I’m reading). This type of connection is invaluable as it supplements my reading experience with contextual feedback from my friends. Facebook describes these peer to peer connections that enable personalisation as the “social graph”.The impact of social graph based personalisation is already being seen. The Huffington Post already personalises content based on what stories people in your Facebook social graph have read.

The bottom line is this: the Facebook platform is on course to be the CRM platform of the web. As Facebook integrates into the web, the flow of data through its platform is going to grow exponentially. This data is going to be critical in assisting brands in connecting and monetising their social media / web / Facebook activities. 

Declan

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. Granted the reach is highly segmented, but that has both pros and cons. No matter what way you work the numbers there has got to be only one conclusion. A brands facebook strategy has to be top of the shopping list for the remainder of 2010.

Some of the interesting stats are as follows: 

• Active Users - 1.45m 
• 847k active daily users
• 83% of users come back to facebook every week
• 73% penetration of the online population
• 55 / 45    Male  / Female 
• 27% of users are > 35 years of age 
• 35% of users are 25 - 34 years of age

Declan

(consent received from facebook to publish the above stats)

Adidas Interactive Campaign - Innovative but off centre

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 but I’m not convinced of its take up. Try getting away with holding your runner in front of a webcam whilst in the office.

The interactive video content is a video catwalk/catalogue with each scene being used to model one specific garment. Different models for each individual piece and a different scene. Good stuff and it works.

What surprised me was the lack of any decent Facebook integration or social messaging. Adidas has 2.5m Facebook fans. The production spend for this interactive campaign must have been huge. Despite the size of the offering, the user experience is somewhat disappointing due to plugins required and the lack of normal intuitive navigation and usability.

The interactive fashion show could be so much better if you could bring your friends into the experience of browsing the catalogue - garner opinions from your friends on the catalogue; generate natural user-generated conversations; have the group decide on the best new pieces, etc, etc. 

Check it out for yourself.

Adidas 2010 Womens Look here : http://www.adidas.com/originals/nl/#/content/womenslookbook

Adidas on Facebook here http://www.facebook.com/adidasoriginals

Location Aware Facebook Wall Posts and Applications

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 similar functionality through Facebook Applications - has all the monkeys here doing somersaults!

The applications are endless - interactive location based Facebook apps (from treasure hunts to shootem-up games), location dependant wall posts……If you have any ideas for apps - we’d love to build ‘em!

Conor

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.

One such issue is that around the caching of stylesheets (CSS) that are used by applications to apply customised styles. These determine what the app looks like on Facebook (CSS is what is used by any website to apply styles). The problem is related to a known Facebook bug that has been lodged against the Facebook platform.

What surprises us is that the bug was raised back in November and we are still experiencing issues with apps we have under development and with our live apps.

So, please be aware that we know about the issue and we are working with the dev teams in Facebook through their Facebook developer forums to resolve the issue.

Conor & John

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 prominent location of the search box. Facebook are clearly en route to embedding search directly into the heart of a user’s Facebook experience.   If you are a brand that is already on Facebook what is your organic Facebook search result? User generated interaction with Facebook apps are also searchable and rank pretty high.

The final part to the overall restructure were substantial changes to Facebook application messaging rules. All good stuff, purely designed to reduce spam from bad apps and improve cut through from good apps.

Conclusion – We like it.  The newsfeed experience is cleaner. Overall navigation is better.

All good stuff if you are a user. However, if you are a brand attempting to engage with your existing fan base or trying to attract new fans, then your ability to do so has gone from being limited, to very restrictive.

The core objective of any brand’s Facebook presence has got to be getting content into a user’s news feed.  In the world of traditional advertising, most marketers solve this problem through some form of media spend  - ie figure out the message and then purchase a package of banner adds /  tv ads, etc. etc.   The only problem with this type of approach is that a brand cannot just purchase access to a user’s news feed. A brand cannot buy their way into a user’s Facebook life.  A brand must win the respect and trust of the user by providing relevant content and engagement.  Simple.

Content generation typically comes from brands communicating through the Facebook fan page, which hopefully generates some form of interaction and comments from your fans. Fan pages are the Holy Grail for any brands on Facebook.   Creative and strategic planning for a brand’s Facebook presence seems to be a alien concept for a lot of people and brands. In order to build a long term relationship with users, a brand needs to plan the content generation for the long term.  What is this content? What applications are needed to power this content? What is the tone, style and frequency of content generation.  How does your traditional spend sync sit alongside your Facebook presence?

We will put pen to paper over the coming weeks to articulate some of our thoughts on medium term Facebook strategic planning, bearing in mind the goal of relevant news feed relationships.

Declan

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 permissions are now required from application users to allow you to write to the news feed on their wall. While restructuring the app to handle this we began to question our message content - which looked like it had been auto generated by a machine.

Thus, we decided to de-formalise it and make it sound more like the user had said it, rather than a robot. We also included a question in the posts to help stimulate commenting and conversation. This then prompted us to upgrade the type of Facebook messaging we were using to allow us to include the brand logo, links to the app etc. in the post. Thus placing the brand in the middle of the news feed and all conversations it generates.

We also managed to implement the new Facebook policies without impacting on usability - but then again that’s why we are supposed to be the experts :-) To be honest it took us a couple of attempts to get it right!

So what? Well, there are a few important points to note:

1. Remember it’s social media not machine media - post messages like a person not a computer

2. No point in doing any of this from an app unless you position the brand in the midst of it all

3. Make sure your language and communication is consistent with that used by the brand

It all seems obvious now - but not at the time!

Conor & John

The advertising battle for social news feed influence

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

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 UK Facebook market, this is a big deal. A Facebook fanpage will be the most important place for a lot of consumer brands going forward. User engagement and interaction on a Facebook fanpage is THE metric of success and brand engagement. To date, most brands have driven this type of promotion by posting competitions to their fanpages.  Typically, these promotions / user interaction tools have taken the form of something along the lines of: “the 1000th fan to tag themselves in this photo” or “what are you looking forward to most this xmas”  or “the person who gets the most likes on a photo that they tagged themselves in”, etc.

Facebook fanpage owners cannot run such promos anymore unless the promotions are put through a dedicated application. In turn, this application needs to be approved by Facebook.

The new state of play means that a Facebook fanpage can promote competitions and promotions on its page, but it cannot administer the promo or competition from its page. It must administer the promo or competition through  a dedicated app and users / fans are only allowed to enter the competition directly in the app.

This is happening because of the huge increase in spam from some fanpages/applications. So, in order to fix this problem, Facebook have essentially decided to regulate the whole area of promos. The key output of a promo is normally some form of messaging, posting to users news feeds or fan page wall update. If the source of the output is spam, then this spam gets a lot of impact.

Yet, the key attractions for brands to have a substantial presence on Facebook is to leverage this messaging/ news feed capability.  Therefore, if you have something genuine and relevant for fans, then a brand is fully entitled to tap into the news feed platform. The only change is that you need to get sign off in advance. This is a good thing.  By filtering out spam and putting the focus on quality engagement, then the cut through value of Facebook messaging increases dramatically for quality brands with a quality Facebook strategy.

It is Betapond’s view that bespoke applications actually give better news feed, wall updates and notification choice and impact, once the application actually offers something of value to the user.

Whilst the normal promos are nice to have and show good results, the world of brand engagement on Facebook has more to offer.

The Facebook fanpage is the number one public face of a brand.  How do you interact with your fans in the real / traditional world? Can that interaction by mapped to Facebook? Don’t restrict your creative thinking. There are no restrictions on what can achieved through Facebook from a digital interaction perspective. Do not treat it as a micro site. This is part of your core social media presence for the foreseeable future.

Think big; think long term.  In the USA a brand’s Facebook fanpage is now the most strategic marketing challenge for the next two years. You can’t build long term relationships by just offering the normal suite of tag this, comment on that. That’s baby steps. With Proctor and Gamble leading the charge into more meaningful relationships on Facebook, 2010 should be a interesting year.

Declan