Posted by: Toby Beresford | July 9, 2009

Great Facebook Connect implementations

Facebook Connect, the ability to bring your friends and Facebook details with you to any web site, is growing in popularity. Facebook recently announced that 10,000 web sites have implemented it and the use of the plug in slowly grows on community platforms such as Drupal.

But what is a great Facebook Connect implementation?

In January for Obama’s inauguration, CNN used Facebook Connect so viewers could update their Facebook status so friends also watching at the same time could see how each other felt. Several of my friends mentioned the tears welling up in their eyes. 1 million Facebook updates meant this was the first great example of social tv.

Facebook Connect seems to improve conversions and usage too. Gawker, the popular blogging network, saw login rates increase by 40 percent and Joost noted that Facebook Connect users stayed on site longer to watch 30 percent more videos than non-connect users.

But my current favourite is the awesome Prototype Experience trailer that sucks in your Facebook photos to make this scarily realistic game trailer…

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Posted in emerging trends, facebook platform

Posted by: Toby Beresford | June 4, 2009

Brands marketing with the stream

When 1 in 8 british minutes online are now spent on Facebook (Source: Nielsen ) it’s natural for advertisers to ask why.

The answer lies in the stream, the new real time feed of everything happening amongst my friends in their online time. It’s the virtuous circle of sharing – the more they share, the more I see what they do and then share myself.

At Nudge we’re working on new approaches to let brands harness and engage with users at the streams edge.  It’s not about providing ways to create content, it’s about remixing what’s already there and combining a social filtering approach, to create an awesome branded engagement experience.

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Posted in emerging trends

Posted by: Toby Beresford | May 28, 2009

Google IO – whats next with the web

Vic Gundotra at Google IO keynote yesterday declared that the web had won. It is the dominant programming system. He then went on to introduce a host of new technologies. What does this mean for us in the real world of app development?

  1. Mobile apps will eventually be web apps. (no more developing separately for Symbian, Iphone and Blackberry). Mobile browsers will soon be able to talk to native mobile features like the accelerometer, GPS and calling.
  2. Web apps will be faster (browsers are getting faster through processing javascript quicker, allowing local data storage) and will compete head on with heavier and heavier desktop apps (think Google Photo Editor, Google Project and so on)
  3. Geolocation is coming –  we’ve filtered information now by its popularity (Google / Digg), and by what our friends think (Facebook) and next we’ll filter by its proximity to us (Geolocation).

Obviously I care more about a friend or celebrity popping into a bar in the next road to me than I do about someone on the other side of the planet. Accurate, reliable geolocation services (see Firefox 3.5) are just around the corner for the mass market and will see a new way of filtering information.

For the techies out there here are a few links and notes to get you excited:

  1.  HTML 5 will be in Firefox 3.5 and Chrome soon – looks cool – allows tag and enbaling pixel based layouts (draw a diagonal line). They showed a cool demo of rotating a playing video with a javascript transform.
  2. 3D engine will be in browser natively so you can access with javascript
  3.  Web Elements allows you to drop code snippets (like a comment wall) onto your web page really easily
  4. App engine now supports Java – Manuel Lemos has managed to get PHP running on app engine as well
  5.  Geolocation is going to be in and working in Firefox 3.5

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Posted in emerging trends, understanding the technology

Posted by: Toby Beresford | May 14, 2009

Win Tormented Tickets

Something for the weekend…? Check out Nudge’s latest competition app to win tickets to the exclusive premiere of the movie Tormented! – created in association with BLM Quantum and Pathe.

The competition closes Sunday night so get your entries in – can you catch the leaders?

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Posted in social media breaking news

Posted by: Toby Beresford | April 24, 2009

Warm traffic and extreme social media

Couple of new phrases we’ve been using in Nudge to explain how brands should be using social media.

Firstly social media offers the chance of higher engagement “warm traffic” – users “warm up” on a social app and when taken to another property like a  website are much warmer customers and more likely to convert, i.e. signing up to an online newsletter.  Warm traffic is one of the main benefits of a social network marketing campaign.

Extreme social media is the skittles.com approach where your brand is promoted more by how it is described on social  (what people say about it) and less by what you say about it. It’s a risky approach but if you want to try it – check out http://www.skittlr.com – see what the extreme social media version of my personal Toby Beresford brand might be.

 

Toby B according to extreme social media tool skittlr

Toby B according to extreme social media tool skittlr

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Posted in social media marketing techniques

Posted by: Toby Beresford | April 8, 2009

Clara Shih’s Facebook Era at the Facebook Dev Garage

Clara Shih, ex Salesforce web apps expert, who integrated Salesforce.com with Facebook, makes sense of our collective Facebook obsession in her new book – the Facebook era.

 

Clara Shih at Facebook Developer Garage

Clara Shih at Facebook Developer Garage

 

Clara’s main points at the garage, teasing us to read more…

The decade gone by? That was  the world wide web of information – how droll – now it’s the world wide web of people. 

Facebook changes the web. It brings the first trusted template for deep psychographic user data. Now all user expectations have changed – they don’t want to have to enter all their data in every time they come to a new web site.

Transitive trust explains the phenomenom where if I know who our mutual friends are I am more likely to trust you. The cold call just got slightly warmer.

New modes of communication like Facebook mean that the cost of staying in touch with weak ties is much lower, social networks we can finally capture the long tail of our social capital. That old primary school friend is your future hire…

Now it’s time to actually read the book…

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Posted in facebook platform, social media breaking news | Tags: , , ,

Posted by: Toby Beresford | April 8, 2009

Playfish at the Facebook Developer Garage London

 

Playfish's Dan Borthwick at the Facebook Developer Garage London

Playfish's Dan Borthwick at the Facebook Developer Garage London

 

 

6 of the top ten Facebook apps, 50 million users, 20 million Monthly Actives, Playfish must be doing something right.

I’m here with Dan Borthwick from Playfish as he shows us what they are creating on the Iphone.  Deep integration with Facebook Connect gives them a way of socialising an iphone app, sharing stories from games, escaping the constraints of the app store  home page to create virality.  This will give their games the edge on mobile.

It’s a cool strategy. Something tells me we’ll all be playing Playfish catch-up for a few years to come.

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Posted in emerging trends

Posted by: Toby Beresford | March 31, 2009

Spotify Etiquette

 

Spotify machine at nudge london

Spotify machine at nudge london

 

 

So we’re using the awesome Spotify music service here in the Nudge office and have come up with a few rules of use which I share here.

1. Only one person active at one time

You can either grab the keyboard of the spotify machine or move the mouse using WinVNC (a remote desktop tool) but only one person at a time.

2. Don’t queue thousands of tracks

Just stick to a couple of albums at a time, while Carpenters might be a nice album break from constant Linkin Park, no-one wants to hear every song they ever wrote – just because you could doesn’t mean you should.

3. Don’t delete the queue

Ok so you’ve got a song you must play – feel free to jump the queue but don’t delete the queue – hey it took me at least 30 seconds to get that play queue set up.

4. Don’t add to a playlist unless you’re sure

We have a few fave shared playlists – like the current Top 40, the Nudge HQ hot list and my own Wake Me Up which I use fairly  often in place or with caffeine. Our rule is keep emlean and clean.

5. Use Spotify Friends to expand your music taste

This neat little website holds some great playlists – why be a DJ when you can enjoy someone else’s taste…

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Posted in My Social Week, social media on the intranet

Posted by: Toby Beresford | March 16, 2009

New Facebook Home Page, Slideshare and Sky News

New Facebook Home Page

Well the new Facebook home page is a definite improvement – a few things I like – filtering the feed by type of friends (see how to set up your friend lists), the right hand side has more stuff on there – feels a bit more like the featured on the Bebo home page.

However I don’t like “What’s on your mind?” – a slightly creepy question – if I say “Cheeseburger” does that mean ads for Macdonalds vouchers are going to start popping up? Still it’s probably better than “What are you doing?” (thanks Dave Nattriss for remembering for me…)

Facebook's new home page

Facebook's new home page

You can filter by app which is interesting though you can’t quite control which apps you filter by – it gives me the chance to filter by movies but not by my friend’s super photos.

Also “updates” have gone from the home page. Great, now I don’t hear any marketing update messages at all from those 50 pages I’m a fan of… good for users – less good for marketers.

Overall, this is about monetising Facebook. With the addition of highlights there is now more home page real estate dedicated to ads. It will be interesting to see how it develops and what the options are for advertisers.

Filtering my home page thorugh the movies application lens

Filtering my home page through the movies application lens

Slideshare

Slideshare is now attracting more of my attention (not least because they put my slides from the social networking world forum last week on their home page). I’ve come across some really great slide shows that save me having to go to all these pesky conferences. For an example of a rule breaking 162 slide presentation (believe me – it’s so good you’ll watch it to then end) check out the brand gap.

Hey I made it to the slideshare home page

Hey I made it to the slideshare home page

Sky News

Check out my most recent appearance on Sky News on my site: http://www.tobyberesford.com - you can catch me again this Wednesday 18th at 7pm UK time. Any comments on how I can improve my style of presentation gladly received!

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Posted in My Social Week, facebook platform | Tags: , , , ,

Posted by: Toby Beresford | March 9, 2009

Profile photo style, best twitter client and skittles fun

Skittles

This week twitter took over the Skittles home page and anytime you wrote a tweet it went straight to the home page – suddenly messages like “Skittles shown to cause cancer” appeared on the home page – it takes a gutsy brand but once the fuss has died down it points to the end of the web and the rise and rise of the social web. The customer is once again king.

 

Skittles changed their web site to go 100% social

Skittles changed their web site to go 100% social

 

 

Twitter Clients

I have been experimenting with various twitter clients such as Twhirl, Twitter mobile and Twitter on Facebook – but it looks like the emerging winner is TweetDeck which sits very nicely on my second monitor. I love the quick URL crunching tool – which makes tweeting that bit easier.

screenhunter_01-mar-09-1052

Tweetdeck is the most usable twitter client

 

Profile waste of time

In the old days we used spend our downtime changing the screen colours on our Windows settings – this has been replaced by the ultimate vanity of changing the profile photos.  Read this enjoyable post from All Facebook to see all the different types of Photo styles people have come up with.

 

Number one of the profile photo styles

Number one of the profile photo styles

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Posted in My Social Week | Tags: , , , , , ,

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