The Social Bazaar

Quiztastic's close down image is a test card from TV days

So it’s been a great advertising campaign, you created a lovely application on Facebook, you got the engagement and results you wanted but now it’s time to tell the users the party is over.

So, what should you do? Our top five tips are worth remembering

1. Migrate the users to a permanent fan page

You might have 10s of thousands of users and potential customers of your next campaign – send them an email to get them to join your fan page

2. Reverse into the app shell

Like “shell companies” on the stock exchange you can use your existing application key to turn it into a new application. This should be a sensible change – users of Nudge Social Value Index may be happy to automatically become users of Nudge Enhanced Social Value Index but not to a random dating app (this practice is what LOL apps got shut down for in 2008)

3. Close the app to external users by pushing it back into Sandbox mode

It may be helpful just to close the app to external users, your own staff and development team may want to continue to refer to it. Rather than deleting entirely why not simply make the app invisible.

4. Just remove the app from the directory and close the viral loop

Less severe than removing from Sandbox you can take the app off the Facebook directory and close the viral loop options (share buttons and feed stories) – this will effectively limit the application to your current user base

5. Put up a “sorry we’re closed” notice

Why not do as Playfish have done with Quiztastic – just say “sorry this service is no longer available”. Nice and clear and friendly – it’s also a nice opportunity to invite your users somewhere else

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

It’s the age old question isn’t it. This Facebook thing, it’s just a phase hey? There was Friends Reunited and then here was Myspace and now Facebook, next it ‘ll be Twitter…

Er, not! Facebook is not just a trend, a glossy new brand that has somehow attracted 325m users. No, it’s a step change in technology.

Millions of tiny data items, akin to mini, structured emails, are now flying around Facebook at speed and scale (2bn photos uploaded per month, 2bn links shared per week to be precise).

Each has with it (“meta data” to use the technical term) interesting privacy information – we know who wrote what, which friends they want to share it with, when they created it, how they created it. It helps us know more about the relationship between two people, how close they are, what they talk about, what they like doing. That gives Facebook a massive technological advantage when it comes to filtering and providing a valuable start page for exploring the web.

If Facebook knows what and who I really like then why go elsewhere, why search for something else for that matter.

So, the answer to what comes after Facebook is probably more Facebook. Of course it may not be called Facebook, or even run by them, but under the tin it will be Facebook – tiny chunks of data accompanied by social meta data – filtered and processed to bring you the chunks of data you actually care about.

If Facebook is really represents a technical sea change, as I believe it is, then companies ignore integrating Facebook into their long term digital strategy at risk of going dinosaur, a little earlier than they might have expected.

Hey I know how you think – it’s a fragmented media landscape – I’ll save myself a shed load of rework if I tweet once and then republish many times on my Bebo, Myspace, Facebook page and anywhere else I can syndicate this.

How foolish you are. This means either you go down to the lowest common set of tools or you baffle social network friends with jargon that belongs to another social network paradigm.

If the latter then you fill up our Facebook news feeds with the unintelligible RT, hashtag and @username, if the former then you use neither twitter or Facebook to its full potential.

Don’t keep your tweets anodyne and your statuses samey! No change the tune and repurpose your content and publish twice, the increase in fans will reward your rework.

Much better to keep the tweets on twitter and the status updates on Facebook. That way you can really join the twitterverse, at the same time you can do your Facebook friends a favour by including @{their name} and autoposting to their wall.

It’s just a blog article, how can it save my brand? well listen up.

Facebook users don’t want to visit your brand page, they want your brand to visit them, on their home page, their Farm, their profile.

If they don’t like what you say, or you overload them then you’re gone in a single click. You can’t even spam them to ask “are you sure?”. You no longer control the consumer’s data – they do.

Brands are at the mercy of the consumer on Facebook anyway so why not go the whole hog and use the Nudge Social Media remix approach.

So what is the social remix approach?

Well, say your a loo roll manufacturer and your key brand value is “strong” then why not ask Facebook users to discuss strength with their friends – “who’s the strongest man, who has the strongest sense of smell, whose shelves stands the test of time”. We’ve migrated the brand value into its social context –  how that brand relates to me and my friends.

Look at the Tango Head Masher or Buzz! The Friend Quiz. In Tango’s case we took the brand message “unknown side effects” to let users mash their friend’s heads in photos and the side effect of an unknown head appears instead (a horse, a cat, a pufferfish or even a slice of ham…). Very funny you cry but important nonetheless.
We’ve not even mentioned the fizzy drink or provided a link to buy one, yet research showed a 37% likelihood to buy as a result of the social remix. This compares favourably with 25% achieved on previous television, radio and billboard campaigns.
Hmm maybe brands should be on Facebook after all, it’s just how you portray yourself in the social world that changes…

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

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.

One of the Nudge social media principles is to format any content for sharing anywhere. That’s why when we release a fan page for a client like Tenpin with an ugly Facebook URL we also create an easy to remember (and hence share) www.becomeafan.com/tenpin URL at the same time.

Sky News.com is one media channel that’s just about got this message. When I appeared on Sky News the other week to discuss the hottest stories on the web for that day my part of the programme was clipped and posted to their website.

The great advantage of this is that I can then talk about the clip on my own blog and post the link on Facebook.

Unfortunately I can’t embed the video player in my WordPress blog because the wordpress.com administrators don’t allow embedded videos from anyone other than Youtube, Google video and Vodpod (a kind of video skimming service). When this blog post gets syndicated on to the Nudge blog maybe we’ll update it so it does.

However, if Sky had not posted the video at all or they’d only posted the full 30 minute show in which I appeared, then I wouldn’t even be writing this post. By cutting my clip down to it’s 2 minutes they’ve formatted the content for easy sharing on social media.

How a social media expert feels when he tries to engage with features on the web that should be on a social network!

As I outlined in this post about the Sky News election map I often find myself wanting more social features from the day to day web.

With the advent of social networks and great features like easy sharing, friend awareness and friend to friend communication, it’s not entirely clear when web site owners can extend their channel onto the new platforms to take advantage of these features.

There are three approaches:

1. Do nothing – “our traffic is still strong, the users will keep coming to us anyway, it’s the only place to get this feature or find this content”
2. Outreach and capture - “lets reach out to the users on the social network and get them to come to our web site”
3. Exist in the new world – “lets make our channel features and content available to users in their preferred social networking environment”

To each web site owner there will be a different answer to this question. For companies house there is almost no advantage in using social networks – businesses have to visit their web site to file returns by law, similarly a bank has little to gain with providing its features (transactions, account balances) on the social network.

On the flip side, for a web site that is strongly social  (film web sites for example) it must get its content (film trailers, movie show times) and features (watch trailer, discover nearest cinema) onto social networks as a matter of urgency. Hence we see Facebook trialling Video Social Ads and Adknowledge’s videotheater app. 

Films compete with each other for viewers budgets. Imagine if a trailer for Film X is shared, discussed and engaged with on a social network and a trailer for Film Y is simply viewed on a website – there are no prizes for guessing which will one the viewers will be more comfortable picking at their next outing to the multi-screen cinema.

So the message for today – create a matrix and break down your features and content one by one and decide “where would it most make sense for my customers to engage with this?” – you may be surprised by the results.