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Comparing Terms of Service and Privacy for Facebook, YouTube and Twitter

12 Nov

Running a campaign on a social media platform requires considerable attention to the legal details. Whether you’re storing email addresses, capturing user data, incentivising an activity or running a promotion you’ll need to check out the small print before you launch.

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:

Facebook
http://developers.facebook.com/policy/
http://www.facebook.com/terms.php
http://www.facebook.com/policy.php
Youtube
http://code.google.com/apis/youtube/terms.html
http://www.youtube.com/t/terms
http://www.youtube.com/t/privacy?gl=GB&hl=en-GB
http://www.youtube.com/t/community_guidelines?gl=GB&hl=en-GB
Twitter
http://twitter.com/tos
http://twitter.com/privacy
http://dev.twitter.com/pages/api_terms
http://dev.twitter.com/pages/display_guidelines
http://dev.twitter.com/pages/geo_dev_guidelines
Well, on just numbers of documents alone, Facebook wins by condensing into three while Twitter’s five seems over the top.
As for the content.. well, ask your questions here!

The Seven Basic Social Commerce Actions

10 Nov

Toby Beresford's Seven Basic Social Commerce Actions

After a bit of thought I’ve come up with my seven basic social commerce actions that can happen outside of a traditional e-commerce web site.

They are:

- Wish List - asking and begging friends to buy you something

- Gift - buying something to give to a friend

- Group Buy – buying something together

- Advise - asking friends for advice on a prospective purchase

- Recommend - suggesting a specific item to a friend

- Share - letting friends know what you just bought

- Review - rating and commenting on a purchase

It’s worth bearing this list in mind when planning your social commerce activity on Facebook – its not enough just to replicate the search and buy (catalogue shopping) process – you need to think about the social context.

Public and private social web

7 Oct

In the private social web, like a walled garden, it matters less what people say about you and your brand

I’d like to add a couple of new words to the ongoing social media lexical debate – public and private social web.

The public social web is all that anyone can read anytime – so this means Myspace, Blogging, Twitter - while the private social web refers to social content that is guarded by privacy walls.  The privacy walls can be either at the individual granular level – Facebook friends or at a community level – Yammer for enterprise, a Jive or Ning community.

For marketers its important to distinguish between the two – for the public social web all the old rules apply – especially around protecting your brand presence and what people are saying – on the private social web it’s less important.

This means you should care more about what people tweet about you (hence the rise is buzz monitoring tools) and less about what they write on their Facebook wall (only seen by a few friends).

12 leading marketing tools for Facebook Fan Pages

19 Jul
A helpful list of some of the more well known third party Social Media Marketing and Monitoring (“SoMeMaMo”) tools available for running marketing campaigns on Facebook:
  1. Awareness -  broad social media marketing tool
  2. Buddy Media - complete package including apps for tabs
  3. Clearspring - container app for brand content
  4. Context Optional –  Complete package including apps for tabs
  5. Conversocial - fan page moderation
  6. Gigya – container app for flash content
  7. Involver - tab apps and amp campaign management hub
  8. Liveworld -  ”discussion forum” moderation tool now offering moderation on Facebook walls
  9. Sendible – publishing platform
  10. SocialTalk - Syncapse’s enterprise publishing tool with tracking
  11. Spredfast - publishing platform
  12. Wildfire - brand promotions app
It’s still too early to point to a runaway winner but I hope this list helps you in your own search for a great tool to run your marketing campaign.
At Nudge we can either integrate your campaign with one of the tools above or  create a bespoke solution. Bespoke solutions, like a dedicated CMS, while more expensive, offer better integration into a companies processes and allow greater campaign  flexibility.
Feel free to suggest further packages  in the comments below.

5 ways to withdraw / pull down / close / end your Facebook application social network campaign

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

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

Social Media Campaign Marketing ROI on Facebook – What to Measure?

7 Jan

Buses and drivers undergo tests

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

What comes after Facebook?

23 Dec

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.

Why tweets aren’t welcome on Facebook

19 Dec

How a retweet looks good on twitter and the user name is linked

But the @ link doesn't quite work on Facebook

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.

How the remix approach saves your brand on Facebook

3 Dec

Tango is portrayed differently on FacebookIt’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…

Warm traffic and extreme social media

24 Apr

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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