Showing posts with label facebook connect. Show all posts
Showing posts with label facebook connect. Show all posts

Wednesday, 17 November 2010

Staging a "Facebook Intervention"

Social media allows people to reinvent themselves, so it's no surprise it's a breeding ground for superficial behaviour.   Although everyone kind of knows that Facebook is all about presenting an ideal view of your world to genuine friends and assorted Facebook acquaintances, some people can go way too far.  The professional head shot, posing in an array of glamourous locations or clinically untagging embarrassing pictures.  


Continuing its 'Real' campaign to save mates from superficiality, the app, uses Facebook Connect to allow users to pick their mates' most offensive feature, from too much time spent in front of the mirror, pouting in their facebook photos, albums full of glamourous locations, or flashing too much flesh in photos.  


The app allows users to point out their friends' shortcomings by staging a "Facebook Intervention", and create a bespoke video to outline their lowlights. Over 5000 mates have survived the Facebook Intervention to date, and there are more apps from the campaign to follow.  Check out Droga5's latest at http://vb.com.au/intervention 

Sunday, 29 August 2010

Connecting Facebook and your brands website - The secret to creating a dynamic link between your content and constituents


Currently available on more than 50,000 websites+, devices and applications, including CNN, CBS.com, Digg, Yelp, YouTube, Xbox, and Nintendo DSI - Facebook is today the epicenter of our social activity via APIs (or whatever "Connect" is called this week).  With just a bit of code, Facebook Connect enables seamless integration between Web sites, pages, communities, and networks and the Facebook identity system.

For example, if you’re commenting on a blog, you can now login with your Facebook details and not only will your comment and link to your Facebook profile appear on the blog, the activity of commenting is also linked back into your activity feed for your friends and colleagues to see. Digg, another example that was shared on stage, also supports FB Connect, making it possible for Diggers to log on using their centralized Facebook ID and for each story they digg, the activity is documented back on their profile.

FB Connect API's transform the social network into a portable profile that travels with you across the Web, placing you and your brand at the center of the experience.  The ongoing integration of support for social services in the Facebook NewsFeed is aggregating and expediting personal lifestreams and quickly becoming representative of our true online activity, painting a vivid picture of who we are and what we represent online and in the real world.


Static websites should therefore socialize and focus on creating a dynamic link between content and people.  As great example is Levi's (above).  As businesses and communities can now directly connect corporate brands with personal brands, and more notably, the people behind them, it stems to reason you should capitalize on this.  The good news is that social networks build and leverage expertise and reputation.  They also carry thought leadership, preferences, causes, and relationships from community to community - - effectively changing your shotgun into a sniper rifle. 

Facebook Connect is a powerful catalyst for investing in and increasing Social Capital, and optimizing SEO (as Facebook “public” pages are heavily indexed in online search engines and can be among the top results when your name is searched).  

Here are just a few of the features of Facebook Connect:

Trusted Authentication
Users will be able to connect their Facebook account with any partner website using a trusted authentication method. Whether at login, or anywhere else a developer would like to add social context, the user will be able to authenticate and connect their account in a trusted environment. The user will have total control of the permissions granted.

Real Identity

Facebook users represent themselves with their real names and real identities. With Facebook Connect, users can bring their real identity information with them wherever they go on the Web, including: basic profile information, profile picture, name, friends, photos, events, groups, and more.

Friends Access
Users count on Facebook to stay connected to their friends and family. With Facebook Connect, users can take their friends with them wherever they go on the Web. Developers will be able to add rich social context to their websites. Developers will even be able to dynamically show which of their Facebook friends already have accounts on their sites.

Dynamic Privacy
As a user moves around the open Web, their privacy settings will follow, ensuring that users' information and privacy rules are always up-to-date. For example, if a user changes their profile picture, or removes a friend connection, this will be automatically updated in the external website.


YOUR Homepage

Shopping is better with friends. By using the Activity Feed or Recommendations plugins on the homepage, users can see what their friends are liking and sharing on your site. Instead of only navigating to old favorites or promoted items, users are compelled to check out what their friends are interacting with, too. This creates long term engagement between the user and your site, and the social context encourages them to interact with the content.

YOUR Products

When you add a Like button to products in your store or merchandising platform, you give users the ability to express themselves and create long-term connections with things they like. Specify an image for the product so that when a user adds a comment, the feed story becomes more attractive and effective at driving users back to your site. Once a user establishes this connection, you can publish to their stream whenever you have news or updates about that product. For example, if a user likes a particular style of shirt, you can send them updates when the shirt goes on sale, or when you offer the shirt in extra colors.

YOUR Local / Categories

Users want a personalized shopping experience. By adding the ability to like specific categories like "Toronto restaurants," "Beauty products," or "Petite styles," users can express what they care about. Once a user establishes a connection with these topics, publish relevant content pertaining to the category. Share new styles or secret tips and menu items at restaurants. Allow users to interact with the category in a way that is personal and fun to keep them coming back to your site.
Need some help adding Connect to your online platform.  Give us a shout.  We're happy to help.
---




Wednesday, 28 April 2010

More than 10m people each day become a “fan” of a brand on Facebook.


When first faced with the prospect of marketing on social networks, many people ask a reasonable question: how many people want to be friends with a brand? The answer – surprisingly, perhaps – is: millions do, on a daily basis.
More than 10m people each day become a “fan” of a brand on Facebook. The world’s largest social network – with well in excess of 400m members globally – plays host to more than 1.4m branded fan pages on Facebook. BrandZ Top 100 brands such as Coca-Cola and Starbucks, along with other smaller brands outside the Top 100 such as Adidas (brand value or BV of $3.3bn in the latest MBO list), have each “befriended” millions of people.
“A lot of our best brand builders are also some of the best companies using social media,” says Joanna Seddon, chief executive of Millward Brown Optimor, which compiles the BrandZ ranking. “A lot of the leadership in social media is really centred in the top 100 brands.”
Social media has matured rapidly in recent years. Sites such as YouTube, Facebook and Twitter offer scale and reach to rival Google – still the most dominant single site for online advertising – and many television channels. The best advertisers use social media alongside these traditional channels for a combination of brand-building, direct sales, customer service and PR. The worst simply ignore them, blissful only until they realise the complaints and accusations that disgruntled customers are telling other would-be consumers.
“Social media have given consumers a voice to respond, as well as hundreds of channels through which to do so,” says Debbie Klein, joint chief executive of Engine, a UK-based agency group. “These websites have fundamentally transformed marketing from a monologue to a dialogue. Brands cannot hide.”
Eurostar, for instance, faced criticism last December for ignoring Twitter messages – which, unlike most Facebook posts, are usually made public for anyone to read – from angry customers trapped on trains between Paris and London. Eurostar had failed to grab its brand name on Twitter, and its main presence on the site – named “little_break” to tie into a wider marketing campaign – was still showing special offers rather than information on the disrupted service for some hours after the problems began.
In the fast-paced, “real-time” environment of Twitter, just a few hours is long enough for such criticism to spread widely, be chewed over by its denizens and, if it reaches a certain volume, be picked up and amplified further by the mainstream media. Kevin Smith, a film director, caused a similar Twitter storm when he complained to more than 1m followers that Southwest Airlines threw him off a flight for being overweight. Southwest later made two public apologies on its blog.
But for every Eurostar or Southwest, there is a success story that proves social media need not be just for moaning and crisis management. Dell, another Top 100 brand, claims to have generated several million dollars in sales from Twitter alone, where it regularly posts special offers on its computers.
Facebook likes to point to the example of Adidas, the sportswear maker which has more than 2.7m fans on its Adidas Originals page. Each fan is estimated to be worth around $100 a year in footwear, making its fan page a community worth more than $200m with which it can communicate directly all year around, for only the cost of maintaining the page. Becoming a fan of a brand on Facebook means agreeing to allow a company to send messages into that user’s main “news feed” – the part of the site in which Facebookers spend around two thirds of their time.
The new forms of social media are also generating new creative possibilities for brands. Ahead of the launch of its new Fiesta, Ford (BV up 19 per cent this year to $7bn, just short of the cut for making the Top 100) gave 100 “internet celebrities” the latest model and gave them freedom to document their experience online. Millions of YouTube viewings later, they had sold 10,000 cars in six days and had ready-made content for the TV ad officially launching the car.
Last year, Burger King’s “Whopper Sacrifice” offered a free hamburger to anybody who deleted 10 of their Facebook friends. Each sacrificial victim was sent a message explaining what had happened, and so the message spread (at least, until Facebook made Burger King tone down its application after more than 200,000 such sacrifices were made).
But although social media can be used to achieve high impact with much lower investment than traditional media, seasoned observers note that many ostensibly “viral” campaigns have had more than a little nudge along the way.
“The beauty of social media is that they are accessible across a large range of budgets,” says Jason Klein, co-president of LBi in New York, a digital agency. “[As for Facebook] pages with hundreds of thousands of people, some [companies or products] have brand equity to attract that but a lot, I would assume, have been driven up with some form of media buy … Facebook has been shrewd about building a platform that makes it very difficult to grow groups organically.”
Facebook’s “engagement ads” are one way for companies to buy traffic for their fan pages. Twitter has recently introduced advertising in its search results, in the form of “promoted tweets”, which have seen Starbucks’ messages appear when people search for “coffee”.
But Mr Klein warns against using follower counts or group size as a measure of success in social media. “People don’t know what they want to get back so they have to hang their hat on the number of posts, friends or comments. We have tried hard to educate our clients that even though these aren’t the exact metrics to know something is successful, to focus just on the numbers takes your eye off the ball a bit. Would I rather have thousands of people believe in my brand than hundreds of thousands signing up because they got a free key chain?”
Navigating the constantly evolving world of social media will claim more casualties yet.
Simon Clift, until recently the chief marketing officer at Unilever, has warned of a “lost generation” of marketers who do not understand the social web, either because they are too old, or too young to learn from their children.
“There is no question that social media of all the challenges in media is the hardest one,” Mr Clift says. “You have to listen rather than impose, which is difficult for all marketers.”
Meanwhile, in another sign of the times, Facebook has made its own debut in the BrandZ rankings. With a BV of $5.5bn, it is not yet in the Top 100, but slips in as 20th in the Technology Top 20.

Friday, 19 March 2010

COMCAST TOWN -Equal parts Second Life and Social Gaming with a dash of product placement.

Comcast Town is Goodby’s fun Sims-style (isometric view) game experience that allows users to choose a neighborhood and build their own space using the capabilities of (Comcasts) “Triple Play” bundle feature (TV, phone, internet).  Subtle.

Comcast Town allows users to express their identity visually using avatars, rather than just through written words. It also leverages social networks like Facebook and makes great use of Facebook Connect integration for a fluid user-experience. 

View Recent Comcast Town TV “Future Hopping” Ad





by Goodby Silverstein and Partners, working together with Nexus Productions and Unit9.



Saturday, 2 January 2010

THE GOODBUZZ FACEBOOK BUNDLE


Toronto-based Social media agency Goodbuzz is launching a new bundle package for its strategy and campaign services, which focuses on building a branded online presence specifically on Facebook.  


The Goodbuzz Facebook bundle includes a Facebook application, Facebook Connect integration with their client’s site, and a branded Facebook Fan Page for engagement purposes with Facebook users.

  We'll also link to Twitter, You Tube, and any number of others dependent on client objectives.  The bundled package is customized to each individual client, with provisions for design, campaign management and tracking. Other features include quality assurance testing, consulting, campaign launch support and other key analytics for measuring purposes.




What can we do for your brand? Contact Goodbuzz today.