Brands Bring Confidence to Facebook Connect
In early May, Facebook announced a new platform for integrating external sites with the social network. As opposed to the existing developer platform, which allowed content and functionality to be brought into Facebook, this new service would allow the Facebook social graph to travel anywhere across the web. This platform was entitled Facebook Connect.
Facebook Connect gives any site the opportunity to allow Facebook users to log in with their Facebook account, connect with existing friends, and send updates of their activities back to Facebook. You could think of it as OpenID meets a significantly better-managed Beacon.
The platform was initially only open to 24 hand-picked launch partners. These were a select group of marquis brands (RedBull, Disney), media companies (CBS, ABC, CNET) and popular Web 2.0 services (Digg, Evite). But after months of exclusive development rights, only a handful of these ever actually implemented Connect. TechCrunch was left wondering in late October: where are all the partners?
While I can understand why Facebook may have been drawn to selecting a handful of high profile partners to kick off, it’s also easy to see why this approach produced lukewarm results. Sure, it’s easy to criticize with 20/20 hindsight, but there is an important lesson Facebook should take from the evolution of its developer platform.
The model of developer platform was proven not by companies with huge production budgets, but by independent third party developers who had no production budgets whatsoever, and zero media dollars to bolster early adoption. Their apps had to be good, or they would fail. The major force for innovation in the Facebook developer platform has always come from the little guys (and girls).
Yet while it is independent developers who may drive the innovation of Facebook Connect, there is still a crucial role for brands in ultimately validating the platform. With phishing sites like “Faceubook” already popping up, it will take consumer trust in brands to permit Facebook Connect’s long term success.
Brands matter more to Facebook Connect because users are on unfamiliar ground when they interact with this platform. Installing third party apps within Facebook is something most users are comfortable with — according to Facebook itself, 95% of users have installed at least one application. For the majority of users to feel comfortable providing their Facebook login information to a third party site, they’re going to have to trust the brand that serves as the gatekeeper.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt spoke recently about the importance of branding in maintaining safety and trust online:
Brands are the solution, not the problem. Brands are how you sort out the cesspool.
Many of us working in the social networking space have been eagerly awaiting the day when Facebook Connect would be opened up to the public. It was recently announced that that day will be November 30, and Facebook is now accepting applicants to participate. My prediction is that the adoption of Facebook Connect will be dependent on a balance between innovation by small, scrappy third parties and consumer confidence in slower moving big brands. It will be interesting to see if Facebook recognizes the importance of this balance as well.
The Bubble Bursts for Facebook Applications
Since Facebook rolled out their new design over a month ago now, many application developers have seen a disappointing drop-off in user engagement. Despite the latest improvements in the developer platform itself, apps no longer have real estate (for the most part) on the front of their users’ profiles, and many viral actions are no longer allowed to be incentivized. The landscape has changed significantly, and at first glance it seems that apps simply are no longer as relevant to users.
Justin Smith over on Inside Facebook wrote this morning about the surprising recent growth of the “Causes” application in the past 30 days, and it got me thinking about the growing opportunities for strategic partnerships among Facebook applications. In the case of Causes, I would argue that a significant portion of its sustained growth over this period has to do with the relationships it has with other applications. “(Lil) Green Patch,” the largest “environmental” app on Facebook, uses Causes to record donations it makes to The Nature Conservancy. This of course drives traffic to Causes; but in turn, people using Causes can see (Lil) Green Patch as the top donor to The Nature Conservancy, driving more traffic back. This is of course is an unofficial partnership resulting from the relationship established by the use of one app to serve the other, but formal cross-promotion between applications is becoming more popular as well.
Back in early September, when the move to New Facebook was just getting under way, I wrote a white paper about the challenges posed to app developers by the transition. My conclusion was this:
New Facebook has been looming for months, always on the horizon but always an uncertain distance away. Now that the “Y2K” of application development is finally upon us, it’s hard to say where Facebook will be after the … dust finally settles. For sure, there will be a certain amount of perceived injustice and disappointment along the way…. In the long run, however, Facebook users will be left with a potentially higher caliber set of applications to choose from, and ultimately a better set of tools to engage with them.
The bubble has burst on Facebook apps, just as it has on overvalued companies from Wall Street to Silicon Valley. I argue this is a good thing — the Facebook apps that will survive are the ones that provided value all along; the rest, apps that were merely trendy or gimmicky, have become utterly irrelevant.
Brand Advocacy in Social Networks
What defines the people who will take your brand’s message and endorse it, even propagate it, through social media? Some folks call these advocates “Brand Fans,” others call them “Fansumers.” It’s easy to get caught up in the details of what a social media influencer is — but what does brand advocacy in the setting of a social network actually look like?
It looks like this. Twice a week, consistently, for over a month since I added the (lil) Green Patch application on Facebook, I’ve received invites from Laura to join her in helping to “fight global warming” through this app.
This is powerful stuff. Not only does Laura endorse this message, but she has actively promoted it; not only has she actively promoted it, she continues to actively promote it, sending invitation after invitation to her network of Facebook friends. She is regularly engaged with the application, which alone is a win for any any app developer, but she also determinedly spreads her passion for the cause.
This is an interesting example, because for the most part the successful “environmental” apps on Facebook toe the line of being complete scams. There’s very little accountability in these applications, and users are made to feel they are making a much more significant “difference” than they verifiably are.
But what if instead of an ambiguous, quasi-deceptive message of environmental action, Laura had an opportunity to engage with, endorse, and propagate a message from a trusted and beloved brand? Internet users are already talking about brands — not just occasionally, but constantly. Given additional points of contact and the tools to promote their favorite brands, social media users instantly become volunteer brand ambassadors.
Are you giving your consumers — the ones who are already talking about your brand, whether you’re listening or not — the tools to turn their brand loyalty into brand advocacy?
MySpace MyAds Revisited
A comment I made on the Social Media Insider blog last week was quoted in MediaPost’s Letters to the Editor section on Friday. Apparently I represent a minority opinion of people who seem to be less than impressed with the platform at this stage. But before I get labeled as a MyAds bully, let me take a moment add a few words in defense of the platform.
Too many others who are critical of the platform have been criticizing it for pointless reasons. It’s been compared to Google Adwords over and over again. That really needs to stop. It’s unfair to compare what really are apples and oranges. It’s just as pointless as criticizing a minivan for lacking the performance and handling of a Ferrari, or complaining that you can’t fit your 2.3 children, dog, and camping gear in the Ferrari — both cars seek to serve completely distinct purposes.
Google AdWords are contextual ads, triggered by content in the page being viewed. If you’re reading a review of a Nokia cell phone, you may see a Google ad for a Blackberry. This has been shown to be a profitable model for Google and advertisers alike.
MyAds, on the other hand, are not contextual ads. They are called up to be displayed to users who have been identified by certain interests and characteristics. If you list an interest in surfing in your MySpace profile, you may see an ad for a Hawaii vacation package regardless of what page you are viewing.
I’m not taking a stand to say that one model is better than another. They both seek to accomplish the task of getting your ads in front of the right consumers. My point is just that they are different, and can’t be compared quite so one-dimensionally.
That said, I stand by my earlier assessment that the MyAds platform is outdone by Facebook’s Social Ads. But at least these two are in the same ballgame.
Maximize Your Facebook Social Ads Campaign
The highly precise demographic targeting available within the Social Ad platform is widely documented as one of its most unique and appealing characteristics, but Social Ads can still be painfully irrelevant to even the “right” consumers without proper consideration. Many creators of Social Ads seem to consider their work to be done once their ads have made their way to a carefully filtered audience; somehow, delivering a compelling message has become an afterthought. The powerful targeting potential and “self-serve” nature of the Social Ad platform has resulted in the ubiquity of ads that fail to consider their actual relevance to the consumers that ultimately view them. Any advertisement, no matter how accurately it may be targeted, may still underperform for a host of reasons as old as advertising itself. Here are five principal features of a successful Social Ad:
- A compelling headline. Pique interest, pose a question, but above all get to the point. The headline will be all most users will read.
- The product or brand name. Users are understandably skeptical of ads that fail to inform them of where they will be taken when they click.
- Advertise a benefit, or reason to try/buy. Why should the user click this ad in the first place?
- Including a relevant graphic. A logo or product shot may serve most brands well. Irrelevant images of celebrities, etc. may not (remember you’re paying for those unqualified clicks).
- Stay in Facebook. Ideally, clicking through your ad should take the user to a Facebook property you have created (such as a Facebook Page or application). Facebook pages have a surprising amount of flexibility in terms of the amount and variety of content that can be presented – from there, you can direct users to visit your site. This has the added effect of helping to validate your product or service once you develop a core base of Fans of your page.
Besides the elements critical to the success of an individual Social Ad, much more is required to effectively manage an entire Social Ad campaign. We’ve been running Social Ad campaigns for our clients since the platform was created, and have garnered a number of lessons from the field. Here are a few of the most important considerations for any Social Ad campaign:
- Diversification. Particularly when launching a new Social Ad campaign, it is extremely valuable to run a variety of ads highlighting different headlines, images, features and benefits – then see what sticks.
- Constant adjustment based on results. This is the complement to #1: let consumers identify for themselves which ads are most effective – they do this simply by clicking on ads they find more compelling. The nature of the Social Ad platform makes it extremely cost effective to make performance-based adjustments on the fly.
- Only one feature or benefit per ad. Social Ads are constrained to extremely short copy. It is usually advantageous to run separate ads for different features or benefits; this has the added benefit of attracting unique groups who might be attracted to the same product for different reasons.
The bottom line: executing a successful Social Ad campaign requires careful planning, constant adjustment, and, above all, a well-crafted and impactful message.
A Marketer’s Look at the New Facebook Lexicon
If you haven’t used it before, Lexicon is a tool provided by Facebook to measure the frequency of keywords appearing on the walls of profiles, groups, and events over time. You can plot statistics for multiple words or phrases against each other in the same graph. The thing to know about Lexicon is that it is currently the only way to peek into the conversations happening on Facebook — any other tool you might be already be using is locked out of Facebook due to the “members only” nature of the community. As such, marketers should be taking it a little more seriously. But first, it has to take itself a little more seriously — fortunately, the latest version of the tool is a big step in the right direction.
In its current incarnation, the tool is extremely limited in that it only conveys the relative frequency of search terms — the Y-axis is even not labeled. This example demonstrates a predictable spike in conversations about “Santa” leading up to the holidays, with very little mention over the course of the rest of the year:
Clearly, the current tool is a little more than a toy, providing some amusement but very little practical application. Facebook recently unveiled a far more feature-rich version of Lexicon, sporting graphs and visualizations of keyword associations and sentiment in addition to demographic data. At present, the New Lexicon is limited to a set of predefined queries, but already shows significant progress towards becoming a more serious conversation measurement and analytics tool.
A fairly predictable cycle of the frequency of the word "football" week to week.
The basic frequency graph finally gets a quantified Y-axis, as well as basic age and gender breakdowns. Hovering over individual data points reveals the associated date and value. These upgrades address the biggest fundamental shortcomings in the original Lexicon.
Associations: more than just colorful bubbles
The new Associations tool provides a fascinating look at the prevalence of words and phrases associated with the search term. It can be a tricky picture to interpret at first, but looking at a couple of outliers helps to clear up the picture. For instance, in this example one finds that mention of “our homecoming” in close proximity to “football” is made predominantly by a younger, mostly female user; in the opposite corner, it’s not surprising that “fantasy” (as in “fantasy football”) skews to a slightly older, almost entirely male population. Finally, the size of each bubble represents the volume of its mention in wall posts.
At first this may seem like just another “toy” feature from Lexicon, but the implications for marketers should not be glossed over so quickly. This tool has the potential to tell you, at a glance, what’s being said about your brand and by whom. It’s not Radian6, but I might go so far as to call it Brand Tags on steroids.
Facebook users: disenfranchised with politics in general?
Next up is the Sentiment tool, which claims to track not just frequency, but positive and negative sentiment associated with given keywords. I chose a political example only because it had more interesting data than football vs baseball. This tool, despite its intrigue, still gets labeled as a toy until Facebook provides greater detail on the methodology used to assess sentiment. It’s easy to see how a basic sentiment crawler could look at a sentence like “I don’t think the new Lexicon is worthless, in fact it has some real potential” and only pick up “new Lexicon is worthless,” thus counting the comment as negative sentiment. I’m not saying this tool might not be generally accurate, but I wouldn’t set your social media strategy by it.
Finally, there’s the Maps tool. This is also just another toy, but it’s interesting to play around with for those who are curious. Like all of these tools, it will be come much more interesting once users can specify their own query terms.
I skipped over the new Pulse tool, because frankly it’s nothing more than a clunky Facebook version of Twitter trend terms, and not of much use when you can consider the same data over time using the Frequency graph.
All in all, several of the tools provided by the New Facebook Lexicon have real potential for marketers, but just as many of them never make it out of the realm of novelty entertainment. It will be interesting to see if and how marketers apply these tools to their Facebook strategy once full custom queries become available.
Marketers: are you considering using Facebook Lexicon in the future?
MySpace MyAds: Bands Welcome, Brands Beware
Promote your... what exactly?
MySpace recently launched their MyAds advertising platform, set to compete with Facebook’s Social Ads. The platform seeks to replicate the self-serve nature of Social Ads, while extending additional options in terms of design and customization (graphically speaking).
The first thing to know about MyAds is that they are banners. These are not text ads like Google AdWords or Social Ads, these are full-on, old-school, Web 1.0 banners. You have two banner sizes available to you when you go to create a new MyAd, 728 x 90 or 300 x 250. Once you choose which banner size you’d prefer to create, you have the option of uploading your own pre-made media or creating a new banner using the platforms DIY banner tool. However, it’s hard to avoid noticing that every single banner template is geared towards bands, not brands — the template copy confirms this with references like “Artist Name Here,” “Buy New Album,” and “Live in Concert.”
MyAds Banner Template Gallery
Just for the sake of argument, I went ahead and created a branded example using the banner editor (disclosure: Huggies is NOT a client, just a random example). It’s clear to see these banner templates don’t conform well to the branding of most consumer products (excluding perhaps Guitar Hero).
Is this how you intend to reach new moms online?
After your ad is built, your next task is to establish your targeting criteria. Facebook Social Ads made headlines because they could be targeted by detailed information provided by users voluntarily through their profiles; MyAds take the same approach, but with much less to work with. For one thing, the categories just don’t provide enough granularity, and once again most of the options are more suited for promoting bands. Not all of the weakness of the targeting criteria can be blamed on the MyAds platform, however — MySpace profiles simply don’t collect as much data from users as in Facebook. In any case, the process is simple but the results are disappointing, as my only options for attempting to target new parents on behalf of Huggies was through an expressed interest in “children’s movies,” and “Disney” specifically.
MyAds targeting criteria are all hype and no substance.
Once you’ve got your ad set up, getting it out in front of MySpace users’ eyeballs is relatively straightforward, and very similar to other self-serve ad platforms. Set your daily budget, your CPC bid, and the term of your campaign, and you’re off.
Setting your budget and choosing your CPC bid is simple enough
Ultimately, the MyAds platform is a day late and a buck short. Compared to Social Ads, MyAds don’t provide nearly the granularity of targeting. But my biggest gripe is that fundamentally, they’re still just banners — injected into pages where they will cause the most disturbance, without the benefit of any sort of passive network endorsement the way Social Ads are supplemented by Social Actions. In the current economic environment, when brands are looking more closely than ever at their advertising budgets, MyAds only make sense if you’re looking to drive traffic to pages within MySpace — if you’re trying to promote a site outside of the realm of MySpace, there are better options out there and I would not spend a cent on MySpace MyAds.
Is the Great Facebook Sell-off Upon Us?
About a month ago, Facebook completed the transition to “New Facebook.” A week after migrating all users to the new platform, they formally burned the ships and removed the “Go back to Old Facebook” link from their header. A veritable legion of aggravated users formed groups in protest – some over a million strong.
I chose to make a different statement, one that failed to receive nearly as much press coverage (read: received zero press coverage), but that represents the unspoken majority view of Facebook users: OK, “New Facebook” is a little different, but it’s not that hard to get used to, it might even be better… and I’m gonna go right on using it just like before.
In this time of financial crisis and stock market collapse, it’s easy to conjure up fanciful analogies of a Great Facebook Sell-off. After all, many argue the site is tremendously overvalued, and undeniably has not yet settled on a great way to monetize. With this forced transition to a “New” platform, will Facebook suffer a massive hemorrhage of users to services like Twitter (or even good old MySpace), and collapse?
I wouldn’t bet on it. First of all, where would they go? Twitter, and even MySpace, are not competitive services, despite appearances to the contrary. The things users love about Facebook (squeaky clean profiles, robust privacy settings, the now-beloved News Feed) are not to be found all in one place on either platform. Not to mention the biggest asset of all: Facebook users already have established their network there, and they can’t take it with them. The average Facebook user has 150 friends; many of us have hundreds more. Facebook is our neighborhood, and we can’t move to a new one without severing ties to all of our neighbors.
Facebook isn’t dying, it’s just going through adolescence. It’s growing in all kinds of new and exciting ways. International growth is accelerating at a ridiculous pace, and Facebook has recently rolled out their Translations platform to keep up. Facebook app developers have had to go through a rocky transition, but the outcome is a better service for everyone. The first Facebook Connect-driven sites have begun to pop up, with the platform soon to open its doors to all sites.
Hardly sounds like the death knell of the old ‘Book to me. Facebook may have gone through a metamorphosis recently, but this change is only the beginning of good things to come.
Facebook is dead. Long live Facebook.
Do you agree? Please share your comments.
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