I’m changing tack! To follow my continued interest in creating better communities, better teams and better ways of working together, I’m leaving the social media ocean, which has met many of the needs of individuals but has struggled to build collaboration and dependable communities.

So  as I head into new waters, I’d like to invite you to join me.  The new waters are:

The Sea of Meetings

We all have meetings and I guess we all feel they could be a bit more efficient.  I’m going to be focusing specifically on the structure of meetings: agendas, minutes and actions – helping people to get the meeting, this fundamental unit of team work, right. How can we use web technology to make meetings altogether better and more productive?

The blog for this is http://www.themeetingminutes.com – a web resource for anyone searching for advice on running great meetings. It features my own posts and also guest posts – so if you have a view of meetings that you’d like to share – ping me a mail (toby@pailz.com) – and I’ll send you a brief.

TheMeetingMinutes.com - meeting advice blog

The Big Game River

Games are everywhere, we play them everyday, we just don’t usually call them out as such. Whether it is ‘levelling up’ at work with a promotion or losing points on your driving licence, the mechanics of gameplay are often used.  Over the next few years, as a new generation of workers join the workplace, those brought up with the benefits of game playing, will expect those same benefits when applied to work. Common game benefits such as transparency of how to win (which points make prizes) and visibility of progress and where you stand versus colleagues (leaderboard) will become standard.

I’m launching a blog to track and analyse this change – called ‘Gamification Of Work‘ – do subscribe and keep track on the Game Layer at the top of the world….

And social?

I’m afraid that means the end of blogging at The Social Bazaar – the social layer is built, it is now widely understood, now on to build the game layer…  join me

Facebook Credits: could they be a new global currency?

Facebook Commerce is coming, haven’t you heard?  Doing business with your customers via Facebook is the next big thing. So, if you’re lagging behind in this space, what should you do to get ready?

1. Build a fan base

Creating a Facebook fan page (or 100 fan pages) creates you a beachhead on the world’s favourite social network and an owned audience channel to engage with your fans for as long as they ‘like’ you.  Companies like Syncapse [Disclosure: where I work] or any of the Facebook Preferred Developer Consultants will help.

2. Integrate social plugins to your website

Take a look at The Huffington Post - note how it uses your Facebook identity to provide you a personalised experience – the news as recommended by your friends. Go and do likewise.

3. Create a Facebook application so you have permission to message your Facebook fans via email.

A Facebook application, whether a competition, a game or utility, will give you access to the social data you’re going to need to be successful – at minimum it’s a way to send a push message to your customers via email.

4. Understand Facebook Credits 

Facebook Credits could be the global currency of the future – but every transaction will cost you 30%? Seems a crazy percentage? Well it’s for real, you’d better look at your your financial model in light of this. Credits are only accepted for virtual goods at present but understanding why they are worth 30% is perhaps your first port of call.

5. Start trialling today

Take one part of your business and start trialling some aspect of Facebook commerce – there are off the shelf tools to try, as you can see from my own Facebook shop.  The only thing is clear, doing nothing and just ‘listening’ as so many companies seem to be doing, is no longer an option.

Not to do so runs the risk of being shut down with only 24 hours warning.

Here’s a list for the big three to get you started:

ChitChat puts Facebook IM on the desktop

Dan Offer emailed me to check out his new ChitChat for Facebook – IM Desktop tool

Basically it works well out of the box.  If you’re a big user of Facebook IM then it might definitely be for you.  On the installation dialog watch to unclick the unneeded browser add-on (why do people include this spamware?) and it doesn’t have one click sign in (via Facebook Connect) but this will come in due course I expect.

Facebook IM remains one of the world’s biggest chat platforms, so dedicated desktop clients are a welcome addition, especially when you consider that Facebook itself only has 2 engineers (it was 1 until very recently) working on a chat platform with 500 million registered users…. how Facebook still manage to scale with so few engineers remains mind boggling.

Toby, Mark, Iskandar and Geoff at the Facebook Garage London

Ever tried to go to a Facebook party and found the tube lines were down? Our entry in the recent Facebook Developer Garage London Hackathon saves you the pain.

The hackathon gave us 5 hours to write a cool Facebook app that used the new Open Graph API Facebook recently unveiled.

TubeWarning (http://www.tubewarning.com) checks your Facebook events and two hours before an event checks the tube lines for you.  If they are down you get a nice email telling you what the problems are. Nice, simple and it just works.

Mark Zuckerberg said to me the next day “I told David Cameron about your app this morning, and he thought it was pretty cool!”.

Cool indeed. Thanks Mark!

Toby presents on stage

Tube Warning in action - thanks to the winning team which consisted of Pankaj Naug, Rafal Wieczorek and Steve Folkes.

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

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 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…