Facebook Click Fraud, Stanley the Piano and More!

Here are some of the top social media trends circulating the Room 214 office from the past week. We have some interesting news from Facebook, Pinterest and Foursquare along with a fun video about a piano named Stanley. Check it out and let us know your thoughts!

Stanley, the Interactive Piano Player: Stanley, a self-initiated project developed by Digital Kitchen, made his debut this past weekend at Seattle’s Capitol Hill Block Party. To make song requests or chat with Stanley you simply sent a tweet with your song or message to @StanleyPiano, and fans were notified when their song was up.

Introducing Stanley from DIGITAL KITCHEN on Vimeo.

Pinterest Blocking Some Pins: Top Website, Pinterest, has been widely known for its role in sending huge amounts of traffic to other sites. While it seemed they were embracing their role as a distribution tool, Pinterest has started taking steps to disable particular sharing links in an effort to fight off spam. The site is fighting off three specific links as of now:

• Affiliate links from sites such as Amazon; Pinterest treats them as spam, and has been doing so since April.
• Links posted with URL shorteners. So if you want to post something using an analytics service like Bitly or Awe.sm that redirects to the actual site, anyone who clicks on the link will see a Pinterest roadblock sign warning them not to proceed.
• Stripping information added to the end of a URL so if you use links generated with something like Google’s URL builder in order to track click-throughs, Pinterest will delete the additional information from the end of the link before making it public.

Facebook Click Fraud: This is an interesting article that came from the BBC investigation that alleges Facebook ad-generated Likes are not real. From experimentation and some analysis of particular ad campaigns, peculiar profiles were discovered such as people with profile pictures, histories and cover photos but no activity besides Liking hundreds and hundreds of Facebook pages. These investigations have been given a lot of attention, but so far, Facebook hasn’t taken any actions regarding the allegations. Has anyone noticed any trends like this in your ad campaigns?

Foursquare to Let Brands Talk to Users: Foursquare has created a stronger incentive for brand followers to be active on the platform by letting businesses message their users who have checked in repeatedly. The tool has the potential to give brands a reason to actively manage their Foursquare account. Brands from H&M to Wolfgang Puck have already started using this function.