The Social Bazaar

Kids can soon update Facebook credits at Coinstar machines thanks to Rixty

Facebook Credits, the virtual cash associated with your Facebook account, has that frightening 3 m’s mix we see in the biggest technology hits:

1. momentum, it’s hardly even out of R&D (still available only to beta partners) but companies like Rixty are building it into Coinstar machines for kids to gain virtual credit with real pocket money.
2. monopoly, you can’t compete with it – it’s an easy extension of Facebook’s 500 million user near monopoly of the social graph.  No other payment platform could build that many users so quickly.
3. meliority, it’s better than the rest. The smooth payment system (a few clicks) contrasts sharply with the “leave the shop, pay at the bank, return to the shop” payment experience we’ve come to expect. Some early adopters like Crowdstar have seen an ARPU jump of 50% despite the 30% transaction fee Facebook charge.

So what should we do to be ready you cry? Well you might want to start by requesting a copy of Nudge’s white paper on “the next online payment revolution – how Facebook credits will affect your business and how you can be prepared”.

Now the only place you can direct new fans to is Wall or Info instead of any tab as before

I noted a round robin email from Rasmus in Copenhagen this morning, complaining that “landing tabs” – the feature that lets you decide what tab non-fans arrive at, seems to have disappeared from Facebook pages.  There’s been quite a bit of industry on the blogs such as all facebook and mashable explaining how to make landing tabs and its something we at Nudge have made quite a few of.

But as of today they are gone… perhaps never to return?

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:

• Sales - if you’ve an online fulfilment system like Photobox you’ll have seen  direct sales from an app like Super Photos
• Sales Results By Qualitative Assessment – Britvic saw 37% of users of our Tango Head Masher app say they went on to buy a can of the famous drink, that’s against a benchmark of 25% for similar types of campaigns.
• Engagement Time – any Brand owner knows that the more time a customer spends in your world (and they enjoy it) the more opportunities you have to message them. We measure visit time – and we saw users spending 3 minutes on average whilst playing the Tango Head Masher.
• Daily and Monthly Active Users – the follow up to Engagement time is to get users returning day after day, we can measure this too
• Key Performance Indicators – on a per campaign basis you might have specific indicators which we track using our n-stats tool

Key Performance Indicators is often where the in-flight optimisation happens and this might include:

• organic ratio (how many users have arrived via the viral loop as opposed to media spend),
• campaign link traffic (to other properties such as a web site),
• demographic stats (anonymised age, gender and location information),
• Facebook integration point use (bookmarks, tabs added and so on)
• campaign actions (mashing a photo, uploading an image, making a comment)

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

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…

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’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…

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

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 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

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!

Screenshot of CNN the forum showing Facebook Connect results

I wrote recently about how I wanted to see politics on the web through a friend lens on Sky News and now it’s great to see it in action on CNN.

CNN’s the forum integrates Facebook Connnect so I can engage with CNN news, US political debate and see what my friends are voting.  It came sixth in Mashable’s recent survey of 10 great implementations of Facebook Connect.

In the illustration you can see my political badge (not that relevant as I am in the UK) and that of Dave Morin who has been heading up Facebook Connect since its announcement in May.

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 - 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.