Nudge is a London based social media agency. We produce pages, utilities and games on social networks for brands, clients and digital agencies.
(fake Dave Cameron poster courtesy of AndyBarefoot.com)
Just as brands battle it out for audiences online – now so do political parties. Check out my opinion article (which doesn’t include fake posters I’m afraid) over at New Media Age.
My predictions were:
* Higher turn out
* Local issues increase in importance
* Key place to sway younger voters
What do you think?
I spoke briefly at last night’s London Facebook Developer Garage in the new City University Venue. Thanks to all of you who braved the inclement weather and made the journey.
I especially enjoyed Scot MacVicar’s (rather technical) talk about the Facebook infrastructure. My favorite stat: Facebook serves 1.2 million photos per second. Wow.
Here are the slides from my usual monthly Facebook Platform update:
Facebook is far from perfection, but Nudge has come up with a way to help you identify where the perfection is on the platform. Search For Perfect Facebook application is a social search engine that finds what is perfect on your profile: anything that contains the word perfect or has been tagged with the word perfect appears as the top of the search engine results. Would it be about a drink from Starbucks or a crazy video from a friend, you see what people around you consider as perfect.
Behind the application is Sam Talbot, who launched Search For Perfect with the idea of “highlight the truly awesome, the truly fantastic and in the end perfect!” Matthew Long, Senior Developer at Nudge, details the functioning of the application: “It is recreating the home page in another form by filtering out stories that aren’t “perfect”. Search results are associated with like and comments functionalities within the application itself and are pulling in external blog postings and videos.”
For Toby Beresford, our Commercial Director, this application underlines the promising future of social search but also offers opportunities for brands to use application for contests. Whatever the future holds in store for Search for Perfect (and it sounds quite promising), it helps to know that perfection is now one click away.
Foursquare is the star social media network of 2010. This is a mobile check-in application game based on location: each time you check in at a place (e.g. a bar or a restaurant), you earn points that you will use to compete with your friends. Moreover you can leave notes about the place, get badges based on your activity and even become mayor of a spot if you have the highest number of check-ins.
Foursquare is also useful for small businesses as it offers details on the people checking in at the place but also enable the owners to offer special offers using the platform. As an example the restaurant Hummus Bro offers a 2-4-1 deal to the mayor of the place. At the moment there are 200,000 users on the platform, a check every second and Foursquare is growing so quickly that Yelp is feeling the threat.
Knowing what to measure matters
Simple question, as raised by Business week’s excellent Social Media Snake Oil article. If you run a social campaign with Nudge Social Media then you’ll be marketing direct to consumers (rather than the blogosphere) and we’ll be measuring the following:
Key Performance Indicators is often where the in-flight optimisation happens and this might include:
If you’d like to find out more about how a social media campaign can guarantee ROI results for your brand then do give me a call at Nudge on 0207 096 0146
It’s the age old question isn’t it. This Facebook thing, it’s just a phase hey? There was Friends Reunited and then here was Myspace and now Facebook, next it ‘ll be Twitter…
Er, not! Facebook is not just a trend, a glossy new brand that has somehow attracted 325m users. No, it’s a step change in technology.
Millions of tiny data items, akin to mini, structured emails, are now flying around Facebook at speed and scale (2bn photos uploaded per month, 2bn links shared per week to be precise).
Each has with it (“meta data” to use the technical term) interesting privacy information – we know who wrote what, which friends they want to share it with, when they created it, how they created it. It helps us know more about the relationship between two people, how close they are, what they talk about, what they like doing. That gives Facebook a massive technological advantage when it comes to filtering and providing a valuable start page for exploring the web.
If Facebook knows what and who I really like then why go elsewhere, why search for something else for that matter.
So, the answer to what comes after Facebook is probably more Facebook. Of course it may not be called Facebook, or even run by them, but under the tin it will be Facebook – tiny chunks of data accompanied by social meta data – filtered and processed to bring you the chunks of data you actually care about.
If Facebook is really represents a technical sea change, as I believe it is, then companies ignore integrating Facebook into their long term digital strategy at risk of going dinosaur, a little earlier than they might have expected.
Hey I know how you think – it’s a fragmented media landscape – I’ll save myself a shed load of rework if I tweet once and then republish many times on my Bebo, Myspace, Facebook page and anywhere else I can syndicate this.
How foolish you are. This means either you go down to the lowest common set of tools or you baffle social network friends with jargon that belongs to another social network paradigm.
If the latter then you fill up our Facebook news feeds with the unintelligible RT, hashtag and @username, if the former then you use neither twitter or Facebook to its full potential.
Don’t keep your tweets anodyne and your statuses samey! No change the tune and repurpose your content and publish twice, the increase in fans will reward your rework.
Much better to keep the tweets on twitter and the status updates on Facebook. That way you can really join the twitterverse, at the same time you can do your Facebook friends a favour by including @{their name} and autoposting to their wall.
It’s just a blog article, how can it save my brand? well listen up.
Facebook users don’t want to visit your brand page, they want your brand to visit them, on their home page, their Farm, their profile.
If they don’t like what you say, or you overload them then you’re gone in a single click. You can’t even spam them to ask “are you sure?”. You no longer control the consumer’s data – they do.
Brands are at the mercy of the consumer on Facebook anyway so why not go the whole hog and use the Nudge Social Media remix approach.
So what is the social remix approach?
Well, say your a loo roll manufacturer and your key brand value is “strong” then why not ask Facebook users to discuss strength with their friends – “who’s the strongest man, who has the strongest sense of smell, whose shelves stands the test of time”. We’ve migrated the brand value into its social context – how that brand relates to me and my friends.
Look at the Tango Head Masher or Buzz! The Friend Quiz. In Tango’s case we took the brand message “unknown side effects” to let users mash their friend’s heads in photos and the side effect of an unknown head appears instead (a horse, a cat, a pufferfish or even a slice of ham…). Very funny you cry but important nonetheless.
We’ve not even mentioned the fizzy drink or provided a link to buy one, yet research showed a 37% likelihood to buy as a result of the social remix. This compares favourably with 25% achieved on previous television, radio and billboard campaigns.
Hmm maybe brands should be on Facebook after all, it’s just how you portray yourself in the social world that changes…
Rupert and Wendi Murdoch at a recent film premiere
MySpace, wow it’s a crazy social network that one. Ads galore I feel like I’ve stepped back in time each time I use it. I got a similar feeling last week when I tried out Skyrock, kind of an earlier social web.
Where was the clean, utilitarian, streamlined Facebook I’ve come to love. The platform that gets out of the way as soon as my friends start talking.
But where is MySpace going? If it’s no longer competing head to head with Facebook (recent FT news article) then that means it needs, long term, to integrate with it.
I give MySpace 6 months before they integrate Facebook Connect and maybe 18 months before you can access your MySpace account from within Facebook itself, whatever it looks like then.
Wouldn’t that be wonderful – single sign on, privacy and newsfeed, all handled by Facebook, yet with the liveliness and music activism of Myspace. The only problem for MySpace is can they swallow their pride (and some of their ad revenue).
If they don’t then I wouldn’t be surprised if Facebook based competitor Ilike matures (it already has 50m users) to break out new bands instead.
As the social media marketing snowball grows, it is becoming increasingly important for brands of all shapes and sizes to not only have a Facebook page, but also to ensure that page maximises its fan base in as many ways as possible.
The issue with fan pages is that they can be a double edged sword. If you look after them then they will become an effective and important part of a company’s marketing strategy - not only do they provide a core customer base in which to market, but they can also give invaluable feedback from customers and enable a way for brands to converse with them in an informal, friendly way which is unique to Facebook.
However, if the page is allowed to grow stagnant, this can be detrimental to the brand, as potential customers coming to the page would associate uninteresting, out-of-date content with the rest of the company in question.
So what techniques can we use to give fan pages the best chance of recruiting the largest amount of fans available? Well, here are a few pointers:
Populate with relevant, interesting content
There is absolutely no point in setting up a page and then using it to spam however many fans you may have with boring promotions that will not engage people in the slightest. The only effect this will have is to actually decrease the fan base - no-one wants their newsfeed cluttered up with irrelevant, pushy marketing promotions. Another tactic that brings about the opposite effect to which it originally intended is the automatic news update, such as an RSS feed. Facebook users generally don’t appreciate syndicated feeds - organic, humanly updated content is far more popular.
Instead, brands need to think about what would garner attention and add value for their fans. This could be anything related to their company or the industry in general, information that would be useful, interesting or just funny. Ideally the content would be good enough to encourage people to share with other friends and initiate some virality. The better the content, the more fans you’ll get onto your page.
Update regularly, but don’t overdo it
Brands need to ensure that not only is there decent content on their page, but that the content is frequently added to. The idea is to get fans visiting your page habitually, getting them used to looking at new content and commenting / interacting with it. If this doesn’t happen, interactions will drop fast, fan numbers will grind to a halt and momentum will be lost. It takes a lot to get the ball rolling again, so it is imperative that this practice is kept up.
On the other side of the coin, pages that are updated too often run the risk of annoying fans by clogging up their news feed, even if the content is good enough to be included on the page. In such cases, fans would be tempted to de-fan the page in order to remove this irritation. Therefore a balance needs to be found so that both extremes are avoided.
Take part in the conversation
So, you’ve got a healthy stream of people coming to your page and posting up comments, thoughts and questions. Now what? To take your fan page to another level, respond to them. Facebook users love it when a brand engages with its consumers - communication is what social networking is all about and this method of interaction gives a modern, real and more human face to the brand. It’ll encourage fans to visit the page far more regularly, give them another reason to invite their own friends to became fans of the page and add a feel good factor to the whole experience.
Questions can be answered, criticisms can be responded to and company news can be mentioned - customers will be given the impression (rightly hopefully!), that the brand does care and is listening.
There are many more tips and tricks that can be employed to push a fan page into the stratosphere, but if I carried on I’d be here forever. However these are a few standard methods that should really give your page a helping hand. Get in touch with your thoughts!
