Posts Tagged ‘facebook’

All of the recent updates to Facebook might leave you feeling a bit confused. Allow us to demystify the new Facebook for you. Check out slideshare below:

A couple days ago, Facebook and eBay announced a partnership to marry Facebook’s Open Graph will the e-commerce marketplace. The announcement coincided with the unveil of eBay and PayPal’s new X.commerce platform designed for mobile and social application development. What does this mean? GigaOm published a nice analysis; my own key takeaway is below:

With the new EBay Facebook integration, Facebook will be able to quietly gather data on e-commerce without having actually handle transactions. In doing so, Facebook doesn’t have to announce this as yet another attempt to jump into the e-commerce market; instead, they will work behind the scenes with users who already trust the network and continue pumping information into it.

It’s hard to say how this will affect the typical user, but I’m skeptical that it will improve his experience. Whereas other recent changes arguably create a more streamlined, intuitive experience, this does not. Facebook appears a little too comfortable with its dominance in the social space, acting in spite of its users rather than for them. Author Don Norman has called out Google for turning people into products; I believe the same argument applies here.

Users have fought back against Facebook on many occasions for encroaching on their private lives, but that concerned information gathered from within Facebook’s walled garden. Now, it is coming from without. Eventually, objections by the user base may hit a tipping point. So what happens if Facebook data gets rolled into the larger and more complex system of e-commerce? A mass exodus from Facebook could cause a lot of problems for everyone involved.

But where there is an exodus, there is Diaspora, a Facebook contender hopeful that has recently entered a new phase of development. The question is: is it too little too late? Diaspora provides nearly unlimited options for customization — as far as hosting your own “nodes” — and privacy is handled absolutely by users. Is there hope for Facebook competitors, or is the community already too dependent on a service that takes them for granted?

Facebook: making stalking socially acceptable since 2004. (Or did it?)

“If you build it, they will come” seems to be the motto for Facebook’s latest changes and additions. Earlier, Facebook added new “Subscription” and “Friend Filter” options, hoping to change the way people add and categorize their friends. Today, Facebook rolled out a new News Feed — with more new features (including a new media and music-sharing platform) to come.

On first glance, the new News Feed looks like the love child of Google+ and Tumblr. Good-bye, “Top News” and “Most Recent” updates. Hello, one long, scrolling, “smarter” News Feed that features photos more prominently and adjusts highlighted content according to when the user last logged in. (For more frequent, regular visitors, the News Feed will simply show updates in chronological order, and users have the option to mark or unmark certain items as a “Top Story.”)

“Today’s updates are about not missing important updates in News Feed,” Keith Schacht, Facebook News Feed Product Manager, said to Mashable.

Okay, so that’s all fair and good. I like pictures and I want to stay in touch in my friends, so I appreciate the consolidation of updates. Efficiency is great. But here’s my issue with the new News Feed: all the creepiness is concentrated in the right-hand sidebar.

For convenience, let’s call it the Meta Corner.

Not only does the Meta Corner have Facebook Chat — which is only used by people you don’t want talking to you in the first place (otherwise you would have given them your number, email, or legit screen name) — and “People You May Know” (I’ll tell you who I know, Facebook), but it now features scrolling updates of every single action your Friends have taken in real time.  It is essentially “Most Recent” updates, except now it’s in your face 24/7.

Mashable describes this as a “news ticker.” But it feels more like a “TMI consolidator.” For example:

[Screenshot courtesy of Priya Mathew]

Clicking on any single item allows you to interact with the users, thereby creating “shared experiences with your friends,” Schacht says. (And company pages, I’d like to add.)

Or you can just sit there and passively monitor all your friends’ actions. I believe the proper term for this is “creepin’.”



When it comes to brainstorming new social media ideas, we’re always trying to push the limits of what’s possible. But pinpointing exactly what can be done is a tricky task when the digital landscape is constantly changing. New web standards, APIs, apps, social platforms, popular trends — the palette of possibilities is always expanding. Instead of “what can we do?”, we try to ask “what can we do now?”

Awesome ideas often get snagged on small technical issues that preclude some essential function. On Facebook, for example, the success of a campaign might be contingent upon interactions appearing in each user’s news feed. In a system as complex as Facebook, a huge amount of PR potential might be unlocked by a simple tweak in site’s code. Brainstorms reach new heights because ”we can do this now!”

So what am I talking about? Yesterday Facebook announced a new feature that allows users to tag Pages in photos. In addition to tagging friends, you can tag brands, musicians, public figures and any other Facebook entity with its own public Page. It may seem like a small change, but this opens up lots of doors for brands to increase their exposure and recognition online. Campaigns can revolve around users tagging products in pictures that will go on to be viewed by hundreds of friends. Brands can form symbiotic relationships by tagging each other’s products and build associations between complementary goods. I predict that we’re going to begin to see some of these things implemented very shortly by a wide variety of Pages. We’re excited to see what creative new applications will come from this little (and big) announcement.

Today’s social beat post focuses on two trending stories that struck us as especially strategic. Prepare to be strategized.

Britney Draws a Crowd

Britney Spears’ label Jive Records teamed up with Crowd Factory to drive sales of her latest album. The campaign linchpin was a tool called Social Offer. Think of it as a reverse Groupon. Instead of giving discounts to every member of a large group, Social Offer gives rewards to select individual who achieve certain “gamified” goals. In this case, the goal was to drive 10 friends (and potential CD buyers) to Britney.com. Upon pre-ordering the CD, users were able to share the pre-order link with friends through a module on the purchase page, which kept track of how many of those friends subsequently clicked the link. If a user met the 10-friend quota, she got a future 20% off the whole Britney catalog. According to Mashable, a whopping 30% of all traffic to the site’s album page came through the Social Offer module.

Toyota Buys into Social Gaming

Toyota formed an agreement with Electronic Arts to advertise its well-known Prius in the increasingly popular Monopoly Millionaires Facebook game, which now boasts over 6 million users. Players can choose the Prius as their game token and build EcoGreenhouses (instead of your standard issue house), which have a Prius parked outside. The beauty of this campaign is the spot-on strategic alignment between product and delivery vehicle (take the traditional silver car token as evidence). A study released by appsavvy claims that brand promotions within apps are 11.4% more effective than your typical banner ad. Put all of these things together, and Toyota has launched a pretty commendable social media campaign.

While reviewing applications to the Ruder Finn Executive Training program recently, my colleague mentioned that we’re in a place in PR where perhaps we shouldn’t consider applicants without Twitter accounts. They are, afterall, applying to work at a pretigious, global NY PR firm heavily focused on social media.

The idea sparked a good old-fashioned watercooler debate yesterday on whether or not certain digital trends are here to stay. One colleague claimed to know enough about Twitter without being on it. That might indeed be enough. As we saw from a Harvard Business School study last week, 90% of tweets come from just 10% of users, and average lifetime number of tweets per user on Twitter is 1. The vast majority of Twitter users, it would seem, are “just looking.”

Maybe “just looking” at social media is enough to cut it in today’s PR world.

We can all survive without the latest tech, sure (he said writing a digital trends blog post on his BlabkBerry on the subway). In many cases, we’re probably better without it – Hulu even advertises that it rots your brain.

But, much like my grandmother who is opposed to getting an answering machine because it’s too newfangled, my colleague might do just fine, thank you very much, but will be missing out on a whole world of possibilities. She’ll be missing out on the virtual watercooler conversations taking place at Ruder Finn on Twitter, missing access to journalists who prefer 140-character pitches, and being behind on what’s going on with Shaq.

Another colleague was considering leaving Facebook, failing to see the point of it all. Her argument was that Facebook replaced prevailing technology that came before it, and something else will be along soon to replace it as well.

Without a doubt, there will be something to replace Facebook, and the question today is, “will I someday look back and wonder how I survived without Facebook?”

Is Facebook like the cellphone – a tool that has become so pervasive in our culture that some people don’t communicate any other way? Is Facebook like email – a tool that many people can’t imagine their work lives without?

Does your business live and breathe social media, or can you do without?