Zappos Proves the Model With Facebook Beacon
I made a purchase on Zappos.com this afternoon. Not a big deal — in fact, if you’re friends with me on Facebook, you may already know that.
Zappos was one of the original launch partners with Facebook Beacon. A few people protested this partnership, but having now lived through the Zappos-Beacon experience myself, I’m actually impressed with the way it was executed.
The experiences goes like this: As soon as you complete your purchase, you’re taken to a confirmation screen (pretty standard procedure). There, you’re given the option to share your purchase with your friends in one of several ways. I clicked through too quickly and didn’t get a screenshot of this step, but the options were essentially:
- Share your exact purchase on Zappos.com with your friends
- Share only the brand of your purchase on Zappos.com
- Share only that you found “something cool” on Zappos.com
- Do not share your purchase with your friends
For me, sharing the exact product or even the brand would have been a little much (see this quote for my thoughts on the matter). But I was more than happy to go on the record as a satisfied customer, so I went with Option #3. The fact that I had these three options is outstanding — it allows people to endorse Zappos and their purchase at whatever level they are comfortable with.
Having made my selection I was given another chance to confirm exactly what would be posted to my Facebook wall:
Great use of feedback to make sure I knew that something was happening (for more on why this is critical in any interface, check out Don Norman’s classic The Design of Everyday Things).
After that, I went to my Facebook profile to see the new post. But it wasn’t there. I was a little disappointed, but I would prefer no story to rampant unauthorized posts.
When I went to my Home page on Facebook, I understood why. Beacon was giving me one last chance to approve the Zappos story. This is also a crucial step: if I had decided to share my purchase on Zappos but had unknowingly been logged into Facebook as a different user (perhaps on a shared machine), that user would be able to deny the story before it was posted.
This, ladies and gentlemen, is the model for Facebook Beacon/Connect integration. Great work, Zappos.
Furniture Outlets Get Political
Three jokes in one. Well played, Chicago area furniture store. I like that they didn’t wait around to pull the trigger on this — they just went for it.
(via Fail Blog — who else?)
Facebook vs Friendfeed
Facebook recently announced some broad updates to their developer API. The opening of status messages in particular caught many a tuned-in blogger’s eye. Some have even called this move “the Twitter Killer“. I’ll save that discussion for another post — it’s a heavily debated issue with some interesting arguments on both sides.
But what struck me recently about the direction Facebook is currently headed is its striking similarity to FriendFeed, not Twitter. At this point I’d wager that most Facebook users have yet to sync all of their other social media outposts with their Facebook mini-feed, but nonetheless the opportunity to do so exists today. Between Facebook’s Import function and the rising number of sites (such as Yelp) that have been fully Facebook Connect-ed, the overlap rapidly becomes clear.
Just look at the following two screenshots. The first is of Facebook, the other is of FriendFeed. You’ll notice that because I have different platforms synced with each, the feeds carry different content. But they could easily be identical.
My Facebook feed:
My FriendFeed:
As Adam Ostrow on Mashable pointed out on Monday, Facebook recently added “Like” functionality to stories in the news feed, a minor feature attributed to FriendFeed. Twitter remains the target most armchair social media analysts predict to be in Facebook’s sights, but I’ll be curious to see if Facebook ever makes an overt move on Friendfeed, given the clear redundancy in functionality.
The Worst Ad of 2009 (so far)
Shame on you, eMusic. I saw your ad yesterday on my way to work, and a little part of my enthusiasm for the magic and delight of the internet died on the spot. Not only did you have to go and take a perfectly good organic social phenomenon (if you haven’t heard of Sleeveface before now, well… now you have) and shamelessly piggyback off of it, but you missed the entire point of the joke by a mile. Taking a stock photo of some businesspeople on a subway and pasting famous album covers over their heads does not a successful Sleeveface image make.
What were you thinking? You couldn’t even round up five interns to at the very least stand behind some real sleeves in such a way as to give the slightest hint of continuity between the cover art and the scene behind? Nope, you could only be bothered to spend 15 minutes strolling through iStockPhoto and Amazon and ultimately slap together this.
But hey, don’t stop there. Why give any sort of nod to the source of this idea when you can try to co-opt it entirely? Did you learn nothing from 3M? If the Vegas.com represents the absolute pinnacle of integrity in advertising, you have set the new lower bound.
I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.
(Photo via Ask A Copywriter)
Measure Twice, Cut Once
I like to think I’ve learned a lot of things from my dad (probably not as many as I should — but I’ll save that discussion for my memoirs). Amidst these many life lessons, one in particular — heralding from the field of carpentry — comes to mind often: “measure twice, cut once.” This expression is most commonly invoked in the vicinity of 2×4s and tables saws, but the philosophy can be applied to many different disciplines.
Take for instance, the discipline of creating branded microsites (incidentally, my current favorite is that for the Pomegranate Phone). If I had to break the process of building a microsite down into three steps, they would be:
- Pick a clever, relevant, unregistered .com domain.
- Build your microsite.
- There is no Step 3.
Of course there is a great deal more that goes into Step 2, which is no doubt why Step 1 is such an underrated part of the process. Nevertheless, there is no excuse for the following travesty of branded microsite creation:
http://www.thefirstworldwidewebsitewerenothinghappens.com/
Let it load. Explore it as much as you desire. Then look more closely at the domain. And the “contact” email address at the bottom. And then ask yourself… how could this site possibly have launched with the word “where” spelled wrong in three places on the site (including the domain)?
I considered suggesting that this domain had been purchased by some intern at Kit Kat’s (or more likely, Hershey’s) digital agency of record, but that would be an outrageous insult to interns everywhere. What’s even more funny/tragic is that the correctly-spelled domain is being squatted.
I’m flummoxed. Anyone care to provide any insight into this perplexing situation?
Measuring Groundhog Impressions Not So Scientific After All
It was announced this morning that Punxsutawney Phil, America’s (and therefore the world’s) most famous groundhog, caught a glimpse of his shadow, thus predicting another six weeks of winter ahead.
Regardless of the fact that Phil’s prediction seems to be wrong more often than it is right, I take issue with this entire methodology. First of all, who on earth is qualified to tabulate shadow “impressions” among groundhogs, even if he or she only needs to count one? And even if that were possible, what’s the value of a single impression, anyway? I for one would like to see some sort of deeper engagement with said shadow before I could even begin to formulate a reasonable prediction of the remaining weeks of winter ahead.
In these modern times, when even groundhogs are on Twitter, I strongly believe we must request — nay, demand — more meaningful metrics from our groundhog analysts.
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