Archive by Author

Personality ads

12 Sep

Often you don’t need to build a whole new application on Facebook to achieve viral brand awareness. It’s often enough just to switch the application personality – its name, the copy and graphics (what could also be called its skin) – in order to create a whole new app.

The classic case study for this is when the Resident Evil film gave their personality to the already popular Zombie app on Facebook for a campaign. They were expecting 10,000 sign ups to their email mailing list but in the end got 1 million!

The Zombie app - Before

The Zombie app - Before

The Zombie app - After

The Zombie app - After

Nudge has just done something similar for Kinship Networking with the RAF app – “Best Crew By FAR” launched simultaneously on both Facebook and Bebo.  The app takes a basic social feature we added to The Apprentice Board app and then rebuilt for the RAF.

The generic feature is “Top Friends with roles” – on the Apprentice Board this meant your friends became board directors, marketing directors or the tea boy! On Best Crew by FAR your friends can become a Fighter Pilot, Squadron Leader or Medical Officer.

All great fun and very viral as it means each user ends up inviting 8 friends to add the app and join in the fun.

T-shirts, Magazines and Spotted!

11 Sep

Duncan Arbour, from Lbi, gave a great presentation at the London Garage last night. Very much declaring that the emperor has no clothes when it comes to Facebook Apps and Pages as pure virals. Just not enough take up.

“If people wouldn’t wear your brand on a t-shirt, then they aren’t going to stick it on their Facebook profile” said Duncan.  He also said that social media is as “immersive as TV” and we were just in the early days.

I like to think of Facebook Apps as a magazine.  When a client comes to us I tell them to think in terms of “launching a new publication” – get a design which you stick with, structure it (the rules and features of the app), fill it with content (some professional but mostly user-generated) and interweave ads to pay.

I0% of your “readers” will become the journalists and add content while 90% remain “lurkers” – happy to see what their friends have been up to and maybe occasionally comment. The editor is nowhere to be seen except in the rules of the application which structure user generated content into a digestible format for others. This is social media in action.

It’s a far cry from the “brochure” metaphor which is how brands approach web sites and micro-sites. A magazine is obviously more expensive an enterprise than a brochure; requires more long term investment, forces you to consider distribution but the benefits of a committed readership (or user base) will pay off.

Here at Nudge we’ve just launched our new app together with Picasso Pictures - Spotted! – in public beta mode – which seeks to be the online application equivalent of Hello!, Heat or OK magazine.  Only in the Spotted! world the IT girls and high society flyers are your friends who have brushed shoulders with the stars.

We’ve started it with some basic features and sections – we’ve interwoven celebrity adverstising and its only on Facebook for now. If you’ve spotted, chatted to, hugged or kissed a celebrity recently then this is the place to share your spots with your friends. Try it:

http://apps.facebook.com/getspotted

Do I need to create my own social network?

29 Aug
You'll need a compelling reason to cut your social network off from the rest of the social network universe

You'll need a compelling reason to cut yourself from the crowd

Look at this recent quote from Techcrunch’s Mike Arrington “Creating a separate social network makes little sense in the age of MySpace and Facebook”.

He’s highlighted a key change in thinking on how to build your social network platform over the past year. The big social networks have effectively commoditised vast swathes of previously competitive functionality:

  • authentication
  • web user interface standards
  • friend lists
  • groups
  • events
  • email
  • notifications
  • photo sharing
  • discussions

If you’re building a new social network on your own web site you’ll need to build all of the above. Not only that you’ll need to make sure the experience is as good as, if not better than these million dollar competitors. If you’ve got a complex sign up process – forget it – 80 million Facebook users really can’t be wrong.

There are very few decent reasons for implementing your own social network. These are as follows:

  • you’re dealing with commercially sensitive information that you don’t want Facebook or Myspace to see (think about intranets for banks)
  • your demographic aren’t on one of the big networks and probably never will be (this might legitimise the Saga zone business proposition but I doubt it – the crinklies are coming to Facebook I have no doubt, it’s just a matter of time)
  • your content would be illegal on the platform (you can’t gamble on Facebook so gambling communities need their own poker network etc)

Any other reasons people can think of?

How Facebook improves productivity

19 Aug

Yes, it actually does improve productivity, admittedly in our social lives at present but there’s no reason not to see the same techniques being used at work.

Lets take the classic before and after:

Before

Single inbox / Single telephone line

40 socially related messages a day come into my inbox varying from:

  • party invites
  • group banter
  • suggestions and ideas
  • jokes and funnies
  • photos of newborn babies / wedding snaps

It would be fair to say that I am not equally interested in all these – I am more interested in party invites than jokes and funnies, I like the odd photo of a wedding, especially if I was there, but not the full 600 photographer set.

In the past I had to go through each of these 40 emails in turn to discover if it was socially important or a “nice to have” to be read when I had some spare time.

Now, with Facebook this prioritising of communications (or “triage”) saves me the time and hassle of doing this:

  • party invites are important and I get an email notification
  • group banter I don’t hear about unless I visit the group or it’s related to me (on my wall)
  • suggestions and ideas I might see if I visit my newsfeed and see what others are up to or are posting about but if I don’t have time I don’t get overloaded
  • jokes and funnies – I can choose to install Super Wall (an application) and get notifications – or I can again just pop in to see them on my news feed if I’m in need of cheering up
  • if its a photo of a baby then that can be shared directly with me (if I’m close enough – i.e. an uncle) or shared quietly (I might spot it if I happen to log in). So I only see baby photos of the people whose babies I actually have a chance of meeting.
  • For wedding photos the Facebook tag shows me only the photos that are of me first (vanity checking) and only if I choose to do I surf the rest

So long term the Facebook system is helping me process the flow of digital social communication to increase my social productivity – I can focus on what’s important socially.

Now we just need to see apps that do the same for the flow of business productivity…

Social network hotness

8 Aug

If you’re thinking global you might want to know which Social Network is hot where.

I played with the new Google Insights tool today to uncover the truth and see which social network people are searching for in which country over the past 30 days. This gives an indication of which social networks are hottest where.

One thing I spotted is that Social Networks aren’t just language communities – Facebook is hot in Columbia but Hi5 rules in Peru despite being neighbours and spanish speaking. Similarly the Portuguese seem mad for Hi5 but the Portuguese speaking Brazilians are sticking to Orkut.

Here are the charts so you can discover things for yourselves – like how Turkey is getting on board with Facebook, that Bebo is really for the cool kids in UK and Ireland and that Mixi rules supreme in Japan…

Facebook Hotness

Facebook Hotness

MySpace Hotness

MySpace Hotness

Hi5 Hotness

Hi5 Hotness

Bebo Hotness

Bebo Hotness

 

Orkut Hotness

Orkut Hotness

Friendster hotness

Friendster hotness

Mixi hotness

Mixi hotness

Reading Nudge

5 Aug

I’m just getting stuck into the book Nudge by Richard Thaler. Running a social media consultancy rebranded as Nudge I thought it pretty essential to buy as soon as it came out so it’s been lurking on my shelf for a few months. 

We chose the word “Nudge” for our company name because we felt it helped describe the best way for brands to market themselves on social networks. Advertising on social media is not about forcing a message to users by interrupting them, as  a television advert might do in the middle of an episode of Coronation Street, it’s about making the advertising message available as a choice the user can be interested in and then can take. Being on the social network means being there to be investigated, discussed with friends and eventually chosen.   

As choice architects we help present products and services in the right way on social media. For friends chatting about what presents to get, for example, our wishlist application helps them choose the right product that their friend want. For those wondering where to get the best video news coverage on facebook? Our Sky News Video app puts the breaking news for their chosen channel in their Facebook profile. And there are more fan pages and applications in the pipeline…

While it’s still early days for the nudge approach, it’s already clear that social networks are a place where we do gather information, work out what we’re interested in and discuss interests with our friends. It’s not where we buy (we use Google and the High Street for that) but it is where we build our list of choices.

Our job as choice architects for our clients on social media is to nudge them to make great choices. Anyway, time to keep reading…

Quietly loving Parking Wars

1 Aug

 

Toby in action on Parking Wars

Toby in action on Parking Wars

 

 

I had a quiet go on Parking Wars the other day and am now hooked.

So what’s going on?

It’s a social game that obeys some of my great app principles (top secret for now):

 

  • turn based – I can play against friends who are in different time zones
  • quick to move – a move takes  a few clicks and I’m done. I can “get away with” a quick turn just before I pop out for a lunch break
  • uses the network effect – gets better the more friends I have who play, I have more places to park for a start
  • unlockable rewards – I enjoyed explaining its badges system to a colleague
  • can see how I’m doing – yay I’m already a Parking Pro after only a few days.
  • simple simple simple – it really is
  • raid and reward – I can quietly park on non-active users streets and avoid a ticket – thank you Joshua March for not playing today ;o)
Parking Wars has made the headlines in the social media world because it is a great example of a branded app that has been a success on Facebook (160,000 Daily Active Users). It advertises a TV show of the same name.
For those of you who think Facebook is just a work tool you can see Parking Wars’ daily usage charts going back to its launch last December and you’ll find you were right. A dip in active usage every weekend…

Highlights from F8

24 Jul
Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook's annual developer conference F8

Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook's annual developer conference F8

Facebook’s mega developer conference in San Francisco set the scene for the next 12 months of the social web. Mark Zuckerberg and team are setting the pace for how we interact with our friends online.

The main highlights:

  • A mission about giving people the power to share, an ecosystem that will reward apps that help people share
  • A set of ten core values for what an app should do: meaningful (social, useful, expressive, engaging), trustworthy (secure, respectful, transparent), well designed (clean, fast and robust)
  • A verification and awards programme for great apps
  • A way of logging on to existing web sites with your Facebook account so bringing your  details with you (photo, name etc) and seeing what your friends are up to on that web site (Facebook Connect) Read Om Malik on Why it matters and why Facebook will win for more.
  • Lots and lots of excitement – the hype burn off that we’ve seen in London is definitely not here
  • Increasing investment into app companies, especially those creating apps for students (fb fund recipients) as well as the usual suspects of travel apps, wish lists and games networks
  • More improvements to the feed aggregation and story templates, new ways to view the feed – top stories, status updates, photos, posted notes and via the mini-profile. The feed is increasingly becoming central to the Facebook user experience – a bit as I predicted last year.
  • Virtuous circle of sharing - the more people view stuff that people have shared the more likely they are to then share stuff themselves

Of the third parties I liked:

  • Kontagent who have a really good tracking system for measuring cohort activity and A/B testing on Facebook apps.
  • Flixster who have a solid money making business model paid for by the hollywood studios distributing blockbusters – their clients refreshingly were happy that users engaged with the product (viewed movie details, watched a trailer, added to want to see list) all within the platform and weren’t trying to count number of clicks to an external site
  • CourseFeed – who were getting 30%-40% take up of their app within universities – by first signing up the university who then made it available to students. Shows the power of facebook within an enterprise context.

All in all, a useful conference: it was more to get inside the heads of the people building the platform, the sharing systems and how they are designing it. Understanding the thinking is very useful and will help me build better and more effective apps.

I didn’t get to meet Mark Zuckerberg unfortunately, but I did manage to meet his sister.. :o )

Toby Beresford and Randi Zuckerberg at F8

Toby Beresford and Randi Zuckerberg at F8

Facebook is still hot in San Francisco

23 Jul

Apart from a sign at the airport saying “Special Alien Registration” I thought all was ordinary about San Francisco and the home of Facebook. But after a few hours it became clear that there’s a tech excitement in the air that we just don’t get back in London.

Take the border officer stamping my passport who said “Facebook eh? Yes it used to be for school kids but now it’s commercial” or the Bangalore bound microsoft exec who perked up his ears at the words “social media” to grab my card. Pass by the Apple shop and there’s still an iQueue reaching round half the block at five in the afternoon, many days after the iPhone launch.

Then at the adknowledge drinks party I got to meet the co-founder of MySpace, Brett Brewer, who is putting together a dream team for brands wanting to engage with social media. With the purchase of Dwayne Lafleur’s cubics they have a super market share and with John Cole and team, now their presence in London.

snap of wall street journal article on zynga 23 july 2008

Snap of a Wall Street Journal article featuring Zynga 23 july 200

Then, here in my Wall Street Journal, in the technology section a large article on how Zynga is outstripping the others with its known science on building and optimising Facebook social games.

The message is clear – the technorati here in San Francisco are betting with their wallets that social networks are here to stay, have massive commercial potential and legacy brands (which now includes web 1.0 companies) will lose out if they haven’t defined a strategy and invested in their social media presence.

This is Nudge‘s market place – the bridging point between brands and users – by either creating new applications or piggy backing existing ones through deeply integrated advertising, Nudge can ensure our clients get the commercial edge on their laggard competitors.

Roll on the Facebook conference itself. :o )

Facebook’s new clothes

21 Jul
When applications had a really nice part of the screen real estate

When applications had a really nice part of the screen real estate

 

Facebook rolled out it’s new clothes last night with changes to the user interface.  Due to hit UK users in a few days time here’s a guide to the things to spot in new look Facebook:

 

  • user profiles now have a cleaned up home page with the wall and min feed being the priority – now it’s easier to see what a friend has been up to recently without the clutter of application profile  boxes littered everywhere
  • navigation is rolled up into a single top bar – this lets us imagine a future where I “bring Facebook levels of privacy and my friends with me” as I surf the web
  • when communicating in multi-media with a friend the best way to do this will be on their profile page using the new “publisher” box – want to share a photo, post to their wall or post a video? then this is the place to do it.
Where we find the apps on the new Facebook navigation bar

Where we find the apps on the new Facebook navigation bar

 

Overall these are excellent changes to the user interface for the user –  they clean it up and reduce the stress of loading giant profiles with mega amounts of crazy applications.

However there have been major changes to the way the applications platform will work:

 

  • unloved third party application profile content is relegated from front page to the fourth tab of the profile under the poorly named “boxes”
  • the left menu of applications is gone (see screenshot) and reappears now underneath an “Applications” menu item
  • there is a space for 2 “loved apps” to get their own tab on the profile – this will be competitive profile real estate as apps jockey to get users to add them as a tab
  • on the news feed home page  the only real estate left for applications is the “Bookmarks” section nearly two thirds of the way down on the right on the home page

 

Personally I thought one of the greatest strength of the Facebook platform was the ability to get your application link prominently displayed on every page the Facebook user saw.  ”Wow” I thought – “I can write useful apps that will feel part of Facebook, users can get my features without having to learn my user interface, remember how to log in or remember where to find me”. 

This Wow factor is still there but not as strong as before. It’s becoming harder to get my apps to be part of the Facebook platform and on a level playing field with Facebook’s home grown apps.

By removing the applications menu bar Facebook are risking being perceived as turning their backs on their “we are a platform” promise and returning to their roots as a vertical application. While it’s not a death blow for the applications it’s certainly a worrying trend.

I’m hoping that at the F8 Facebook developer conference on Wednesday in San Francisco I’ll hear some serious announcements that will restore investor confidence in the platform – like a proper mobile applications platform, plans for the payments API and some plug-in APIs for Facebook’s  Groups, Photos and Events apps.

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