Food for thought: old scandals become new again on Facebook Timeline

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Sep 28, 2011 in Advertising, Facebook, Marketing | 1 comment

Are you a brand on Facebook?

Have you had… incidents… in the past that might paint your company in a poor light, even if you’ve changed things up and learned your lessons?

This might be a good time to clean up your Wall and archive/delete older stuff. Why?

Don’t think for a moment that Timeline isn’t coming to your company’s Page. Every old scandal will be new again.

Start cleaning NOW.

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First take on Facebook Timeline, Open Graph, F8

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Sep 23, 2011 in Advertising, Facebook, Marketing | 1 comment

Yesterday I posted my initial thoughts about the new Facebook Timeline after the F8 keynote.

1. Winners: media outlets. Spotify, Hulu, many others. The Open Graph intends to socially enable every possible aspect of your life in as automated a fashion as possible. Who can attract the most eyeballs? The common denominator content providers and big houses.

2. Losers: batch and blast organic marketers. The way marketers are going to get to audiences through Timeline and Open Graph is pretty clearly through Apps. For everything else, you’re going to be using the Ads system. All those Likes and other things? They don’t appear as though they’ll significantly impact this new interface except in the most peripheral of ways.

3. Winners: the popular. Edge Rank has been filtering the real time feed; Open Graph’s new Graph Rank will filter the Timeline and access to eyeballs for apps. Marketing will need to reinforce apps with other channels to ensure their success. If you’re good at marketing, good at building buzz, good at aggregating crowds, you will win.

4. Losers: the entrepreneurs and independents. If you have no budget and/or no capabilities to promote your stuff – whether you’re a content producer, media maker, or developer – you’re pretty much screwed. Everyone else who is a better marketer or has a bigger budget is going to run you over.

5. Winners: the data driven. Over time, you can bet that Timeline and Open Graph data will be made available via API. There’s a huge bounty available for anyone who can crunch massive pools of data and extract insights from it. Imagine being able to do massive data insight gathering from an entire lifetime instead of just a few status updates and likes.

6. Losers: people concerned about privacy. If you thought managing privacy controls now was tough, just wait till you face an entirely new set for Timeline and Open Graph.

Final food for thought: Facebook isn’t doing anything new, data-wise. If you’re creeped out by this, then realize that most of this data is already in their system. They’re simply designing a new way to organize it. Sure, stuff like Timeline and Open Graph will let more parts of your life be socialized, but the vast majority of relevant Timeline data like photos, status, likes, etc. is already in the machine. That said, think carefully about the implications of what this means for what you do online. Here’s Mashable’s take:

Although not as big a deal as the Timeline, this tweak may be one of the more controversial. Previously, apps had to ask every time they shared information about you in your profile. Now, the first time you authorize the app, it will tell you what it’s going to share about you. If you’re cool with that, the app never has to ask you again.

Imagine the first time a politician’s Netflix history is published and we find some entertainment choices that run counter to their professed values.

What are your initial thoughts and takeaways from the Facebook F8 announcements?

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Build your base during the Facebook/Google+ wars

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Sep 22, 2011 in Advertising, Facebook, Google, Marketing, Social media, Social networks | 3 comments

Platforms are changing, evolving, iterating more rapidly than ever. With great change comes great disruption as people move from place to place. Familiar, stable locations suddenly become unstable as mass migrations occur. With that in mind, your home base is now more important than ever. It’s the one thing under your control, the one thing that is as stable and as predictable as possible in turbulent times.

Remember MySpace? So many people, so many companies, sunk thousands of hours and dollars into building out their presence. Companies launched million dollar campaigns to drive traffic to MySpace pages. Bands abandoned their websites in droves to set up MySpace pages. All of that marketing, all of that effort, and today MySpace is a digital foreclosure, with the same weeds and abandoned properties look of the worst neighborhoods.

Right now Facebook and Google+ are battling it out for mindshare and marketshare. Tides of battle will swing back and forth as each network seeks dominance over being the social network of record. This creates turbulence among your customers. Today’s most avid Facebookers might be moving to Google+ or vice versa. The audience you’ve come to rely on today in one network may suddenly be on a different network tomorrow. With this much migration, with this much uncertainty, home base is all you have.

What is home base?

• It’s the website you own and operate.
• It’s the domain name that you bought.
• It’s the content you wrote that is exclusively yours.
• It’s the mailing list that you encourage people to sign up for at every opportunity.
• It’s the discussion forum that you moderate on your site.

It’s the places you have under your control, the audiences that you manage, the only stuff that is truly yours.

If you’re not growing home base, you’re leaving yourself to be a casualty of war between the major powers as they battle for social media dominance.

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How to beat social media lock-in

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Jul 7, 2011 in Advertising, Facebook, Marketing, Social media, Social networks, Strategy | 1 comment

Mark Zuckerberg, at yesterday’s Facebook event, announced to the world that the metric that matters to him is sharing, not raw numbers of users. The words coming out of his mouth certainly don’t match the actions of his company. Consider the recent move to block the Facebook Friend Export extension for Google Chrome.

Don’t believe the hype. The social endgame is very much about users and locking them into a platform. Facebook is notoriously difficult to get data out of as an end user; developers have it marginally easier with APIs, but the average mom & pop shop isn’t going to be coding against Facebook’s APIs any time soon.

If the race to lock in users seems familiar, it’s because this is a battleground we’ve visited many times before, from mainframes to desktop operating systems to portal web sites to mobile phones to social media. While in the short term, consumers will benefit from networks competing on features (since price is arguably not a competing point right now), in the long term, the social turf wars will be to consumers’ detriment as every network attempts to lock in users in some fashion. Even Google’s admirable Data Liberation Front won’t have much traction with the average end user because honestly, who wants to go through the hassle of re-uploading all your data to another service?

What should you be doing to ensure maximum flexibility and the most number of options?

1. Diversify. Each network is struggling to replicate features that the others have. Facebook’s “awesome” product launch yesterday was a rehash of features debuted in GMail three years ago. As a result, each network can functionally do most of what its competitors can do.

What I do to make the networks work for me and keep people engaged in multiple spots is to use each network for a different purpose. Twitter is my water cooler and top of funnel engagement point. It’s where I meet the most new people, find the most new people, and introduce myself to them.

On my Facebook fan page, I’m less active but there I share tools, tips, and things I’ve stumbled across. I put stuff there as a corkboard to some degree, just as a way of remembering things that are useful.

On LinkedIn, it’s all about groups and professional connections. I serve as a hub to a network of over 6,700 people to pass along connection requests, job stuff, and help to administer the Marketing Over Coffee group. Some of my Twitter content gets replicated there, but LinkedIn is much more about the connections between people and what I can do for them.

Google+ is rapidly becoming my idea sketchboard. A part of this post started out as a pithy post on G+ yesterday. When I saw a lot of people share and comment it immediately, I knew I had something worth writing about, so G+ has also become something of a focus group for me.

2. Export, export, export. There’s a reason I tweet every week about connecting on LinkedIn and mention it on Facebook and other networks. LinkedIn is one of the few networks that gives you your connections outright in a nice CSV file. Google’s Data Liberation Front is another. I make copies of my network weekly and store them as files on my laptop.

3. Unify through email. Lots of people don’t check social networks like crack addicts looking for their next hit. Most people, myself included, have plenty to do during our days without hitting Refresh on our Facebook wall once a minute. To that end, I try to bring together all my content in my monthly newsletter and weekly #the5 wrapup. Email is still the most reliable push mechanism for reminding people you exist and are worth interacting with if you do it right.

4. Don’t bet the farm. This is the corollary to #1. Don’t bet the farm on any one social network. Plenty of people made this mistake with MySpace. Don’t you let history repeat itself. Yes, Facebook has 750 million users right now. It’s the king of the hill. So was MySpace in the day. Let history guide you – keep your options open, establish a presence on new networks as it makes sense to do so, and don’t assume that Facebook’s current dominance will be any less fleeting than MySpace’s.

I do agree with Zuckerberg when he says that social media has reached an inflection point where questions about its longevity can safely be put to bed. It’s another method of communication that’s here to stay in some form. Just don’t assume, as he implies, that Facebook is the only social media game in town. Diversify, export, and keep your options open.

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Stunning Facebook Pre-filled Form Results

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Jun 30, 2011 in Advertising, Facebook, Marketing, Technology | 5 comments

In the past week, I’ve been testing out Facebook’s pre-filled registration form plugin, which lets users who are logged into Facebook have their data conveniently pre-filled for them. After all, the less people have to type in, the better, right?

Here’s an example of the old signup form and popup:

Pretty bland, but straightforward.

Here’s an example of the Facebook-based one:

Much sexier. The copy is still the same, explaining the benefits, but you get the Facebook look and feel, as well as some social proof and much less to type in. Note that I’ve used the same code in both the site signup form and popup.

I predicted significantly more conversion from the Facebook-based form and popup for my newsletter. After all, it has social proof, it has convenience, it has a nicer look and feel. Let’s see side by side how the pop-up and regular form did on a week over week basis.

Well then. For my site, for my audience, for this period of time, Facebook’s pre-filled registration form and popup performed 21 times more poorly than a regular, boring, plain popup and form. This stunned me. Even though the past week had double the site visitors and more attention than most weeks on the blog, this result is fairly shocking.

Is it because it feels invasive? Is it because Facebook didn’t respond in a timely manner to a Javascript API call? I’m not sure. I tested the form mechanism repeatedly when I set it up and the system accepted the data and passed it all the way through to my CRM, so I know it wasn’t a technical glitch on my part. Without additional testing, I probably won’t know why this failed so badly, but I’m not going to test any more for right now, as these results are fairly conclusive for me. Farewell, Facebook-based popup and newsletter signup form.

The moral of the story? Always be testing. Just because it’s on the front page of Mashable or Techcrunch doesn’t mean it’ll do you a bit of good, no matter what your social media expert friends say.

As an aside, this is one of the reasons why you should encourage your employees to maintain personal sites, blogs, social media accounts, etc. If I had done this on Blue Sky Factory’s corporate website and reduced inbound lead generation by 2,100% in a week, I’d be looking for a new job. Instead, I just have fewer subscribers on my personal list, and with luck, they’ll come back when I write another useful blog post and I’ll catch them then, and the company incurs no substantial harm.

How has Facebook pre-filled registration form stuff been working for you? Similar results? Dissimilar results?

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How to Set Up Facebook Insights For Your Website

Posted by Christopher S Penn on May 5, 2011 in Advertising, Facebook, Marketing, Social media, Social networks, Strategy, Technology | 13 comments

Facebook announced not too long ago that its Insights analytics would be available for regular websites in addition to its very popular Pages. That day has come (actually, it came a little while ago), but it’s one of those features that tend to get glossed over since it’s neither sexy nor interesting to implement. Technically, it’s one of those features that requires little more than copy/paste skill to implement, so it’s something that your average social media guru can’t charge for, thus it gets very little love.

Well, here’s the love. Let’s walk through how to turn this simple feature on and see what it can do for us. First, go to the Facebook Insights dashboard.

1. There’s a fairly obvious green button in the upper right. Click it.
2. Choose the root domain you want Insights for, like your blog or your company’s website.
3. If you want more than just you to have access to the data, link it to a Facebook Page. All of the admins of that page will then get access to the Insights For Your Website feature.
4. This is the least obvious part and it’s poorly labeled. Copy the meta tag that appears at the bottom to your clipboard or a text file.

Don’t hit the Get Insights button yet!

Next, go over to your website. Open it up in an HTML editor or in your CMS dashboard. For example, in WordPress, use the built in editor or your theme’s control panel. Find the header file or your theme’s options for integration.

Paste the meta tag just above the closing tag. Hit Save or do whatever your website requires you to do in order to get something committed.

Now, go back to Facebook and hit the Get Insights button. If all goes well, you’ll see your website at the top of the Insights dashboard.

So what do you get for all this trouble? Well, assuming you have a Facebook Like button on your website, assuming that people are sharing your content (blog posts, etc.), you’ll be able to see how your site’s content interacts with Facebook. For example:

There are a lot of different metrics to look at, and perhaps another time or in a webinar we can examine them in more detail, but for now, pay attention most to the top line.

72 sharing actions of some kind took place in the last 30 days. That had a multiplier effect of 225x and turned into 16,228 impressions on Facebook – that is, my content was seen on Facebook 16,228 times. In turn, those impressions generated 104 clicks back to my website.

Why is this important? Facebook is showing me something that no one else has yet – the social feedback loop. I create content, it’s shared, it’s seen on Facebook, and then that additional exposure loops back to create more traffic for my website. That’s a huge, huge deal. It tells me how influential my content is – 225x – not me or my network per se, but how influential the information is itself, because the more influential it is, the bigger that feedback loop will be.

Now, what should I do? Encourage more Likes and Shares of my content. Take note of that wording carefully. I’m not encouraging likes of me, I’m encouraging likes of my content, because that’s what powers the feedback loop. The more I can seed the initial part of that feedback loop – the Site Actions – the more it’ll create everything else. I’ve made some modifications on the site to hopefully help with this, including setting up a sharing link that will work even in RSS readers and email newsletters, so please, if this article was useful, share it:

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