Facebook’s New Ad Creation Interface: Facebook has made some updates to the popular ad creations interface. Age Targeting has changed, you can now target ads to as young as age 13. When you create an ad or sponsored story, instead of choosing a particular Facebook advertising program, all you’ll need to do to get started is answer a few questions about what you want to promote and your objectives. Also, if you are promoting a Page, app, or event you can enter its name in the field marked Destination. Once you’ve selected your destination, you’ll then see other options about what you want to promote, and what you want people to see when they view your ad or sponsored story.

Cadbury’s Approach to Google+: ”Cadbury has put significant creative muscle into Google+ efforts, with buzzworthy events such as recreating its page entirely out of chocolate to celebrate hitting the 500K fan mark and unveiling a new candy bar on the platform.” A great article on how Cadbury has built a following of 1 million+ on Google Plus.

Wrap Bribes Visitors For Data: How much is your personal data worth? Wrapp will give you a $5 gift card for access to your personal data… and people are taking the offer.

Kraft’s Likeapella Video: Kraft made an a capella video to thank all 4,632 people for liking one of their Facebook posts, literally naming every single one of them.

Here are some highlights:

Messages: A new feature for brand pages, which can be turned on or off at will. Now fans can send private messages to your brand page. We recommend that you use this feature to take customer service conversations to a private environment. You could also use it to administrate contests and giveaways.

Pinning and Highlighting Posts: Your Facebook posts have become much more flexible. You have the ability to give posts more visibility with the highlight option, which will make the posts much larger and more eye-catching. You can also use the pinning function to keep a post at the top of your timeline for seven days. This is a great option for promoting contests, applications, or ongoing campaigns.

Designing Your Timeline: Between photo covers, milestones, and customizable app/tab images, there are a lot of great new options to give your timeline a very unique personality and look. Use these options to create a real personality and story for your brand. Remember not to put calls-to-action, pricing information, or contact information in your cover photo. Focus instead on the emotion and personality behind your brand.

All About Content: The majority of your fans are still interacting with your page through their home feeds, and not on your page. Content strategy is still a huge focus for brands on Facebook. We walk you through our simple “rule-of-thirds” content strategy. Get all the juicy details in the presentation below.

Be An Expert on Facebook Timeline

While most discussions on social design encompass the practice of creating optimized user experiences within applications and websites, Fisher’s presentation (and ultimate strategic suggestion to marketers) centered upon the most foundational elements to Facebook’s success.

As many of us desire to stay sharp on social media strategy, I’m hopeful the interpretive summary of his presentation that follows will provide a helpful reference (if not, reminder) of what we as marketers should keep top of mind when helping businesses meaningfully engage with their customers.

Facebook’s Social Design Components Defined

First, we acknowledge that relationships and trust are foundational to any social network. The level of trust depends on the types of relationships we have, which can be categorized on the spectrum between strong ties (family and close friends) and weak ties (short-lived/formal relationships).

In this context, we can consider the following three components, beginning with the inner circle in the diagram below:

• Identity: Facebook started by enabling us to define our identities within their network. Inherently, our identities are reinforced through strong ties, or relationships with those we most closely trust who are also in the network.
• Conversation: We insert our identity into the community through conversation. By listening and responding (sharing), we personally benefit from self-expression — yet also benefit others who learn or are inspired from our contribution to the conversation. Conversation is what Fisher refers to as “the glue between identity and community.”
• Community: As conversation continues, community is developed around various common values and participating identities. The strength of community grows from weak ties that give back via the conversation. The community response may reinforce or even influence our identity. And as the community influences us, even to the extent of our mere participation in the conversation, so may we influence our strong ties.

Fisher’s Key Insight

While Facebook has been about growing community from the inside out (starting with identity) — we as marketers realize our greatest opportunities by approaching it from the outside in, starting with community.

The widespread adoption of Facebook translates to an enormous volume of communities already established — and fortunately, we have visibility into any number of them. Practically speaking, the exercise from here becomes one of social business intelligence, learning what we can about existing conversations and communities so we can properly define a conversation and add to the identities participating in them.

At a more granular level, we can get into the kind of strategic modeling that specifically addresses the content, context, and campaigns which inspire people to act and share.

Additional Notes on Social Design

As implied at the start, this post could be considered a very different angle on social design. Although the importance of “traditional” social design merits a separate post, the following are some quick insights and references I hope you will also find useful.

First, if we had to boil down the common goal of social design, it would be to maximize the accessibility, ease and usefulness of social interactions between people and content. Since most agree that social media is about conversations, it’s easy to recognize there is great value to designing interfaces that best enable them.

Fortunately, we don’t need to become user experience (UX) design experts to take advantage of what’s been learned. The following are a few great references, many of which provide highly practical examples and tips:

• Guiding Principals for UX Designers
• 10 Principals of UX
• Creating Engaged and Passionate Users
• So You Wanna Be a User Experience Designer
• Putting People First

What Happened in 2011

For most brands, perhaps the most predominant focus with Facebook marketing in 2011 was growing the fan base. We saw a variety of custom Facebook applications (tabs) paired with Facebook ad buys – where requiring a Like (the becoming of a fan for that page) was the first or even final call to action.

As a result, some of the most common questions emerging were:

• What’s the value of a Facebook fan?
• How many Facebook fans shouldwe have?
• Now that we have these fans, what should we do with them?
• What can we be doing with Facebook outside of Facebook?

And honestly, many have even asked, “why are we doing this again?”

It’s The Data, Stupid

If you’re saying, “oh no, not another discussion on analytics or the latest changes in Facebook Insights,” fear not. This discussion goes beyond tracking simple key performance indicators (KPIs) within some marketing dashboard that spits out monthly reporting with +/- percentages.

On the contrary, it goes straight to the core of how companies can use a new breed of tools leveraging Facebook data to dramatically improve advertising results, content creation and overall business strategies. For the sake of brevity, we’ll take a quick look at two tools in particular: CalmSea and InfiniGraph.

CalmSea

CalmSea is a technology platform that enables you to create a conversion-based offer that can be accessed via a website, email, tweet, mobile device or Facebook page. As an example, let’s consider a coupon.

Normally, the basic data you would expect to collect with an online coupon might consist of clicks, shares and redemptions. Of course, you may also collect some demographics – or even additional data, depending on form-related entries required of the user in order to get the coupon.

The trick with CalmSea lies within an extra click that prompts your Facebook authorization in exchange for access to the coupon (or other offer). This authorization includes access to 3-4 of your Facebook permissions, which provides the CalmSea platform with multiple data points specific to your social graph (likes, interests, demographics, friends, etc.).

All of this activity can take place on any web page, including your ability to share the coupon with others on Facebook without actually ever going to your Facebook page.

When I spoke to Vivek Subramanian, VP of Products for CalmSea, he said they are seeing upwards of a 70 percent acceptance rate on the permissions authorization for branded apps (which could include coupons, sweepstakes, private sales, group buys and more).

The Power of The Data

CalmSea takes the Facebook user interactions and news feeds around the given offer – then combines that data with purchase/conversion analytics (could be Google Analytics) to aggregate and display insights on segments of users/customers with the highest levels of:

• Engagement
• Profitability
• Influence

This kind of data goes beyond Facebook Insights, in that it enables you to build predictive models based on distinct attributes that best describe current and potential customers with respect to the three items listed above.

In the figure above, you can get a slight feel for CalmSea’s dashboard, which demonstrates, among other items, the ability to view social insights compared to purchase data insights on users who have authorized the offer.

Depending on your role in the company (media buyer, content creator, channel partner/affiliate manager, etc.) this kind of data ideally improves how and where you spend your time and money.

The initial offer you develop with a platform like CalmSea will likely have a consistent conversion rate with similar offers you may have conducted in the past. It’s the offers that follow, leveraging the data collected from your first use of the platform, that stand to produce significantly improved results.

InfiniGraph

The InfiniGraph platform aggregates Facebook and Twitter data for the purpose of identifying relevant (real-time) affinities, content and interests that are trending around a particular brand, product or industry. There are two key considerations with respect to how this platform’s output produces actionable value:

• Improved performance on your Facebook ads: Gives you insights to new interests/keywords you should be targeting as part of your selection process within Facebook’s ad platform.
• Insights to assist with content creation and curation:Gives you a clear picture and delivery mechanism for content that is trending via a content “Trend Score” that algorithmically combines likes, comments, clicks, retweets, and shares.

InfiniGraph’s approach to identifying content that’s trending on Facebook, in particular, provides a level opportunity that is certainly missed by many brands wishing to dive deeper into content strategy (check out the Digital Path to Social Media Success to view the four kinds of content you could be addressing).

To describe how this works, imagine a series of Facebook status updates that are posted about subject matter relevant to your fans (on your Facebook page or another Facebook page your fans follow).

In the sample from InfiGraph above, you can see the dates these status updates were posted, in addition to the enormous amounts of engagement they received. Here’s the problem: Think of how many fans of this page would also be interested in this content, but simply didn’t see it. Now think of how quickly those status updates will slide down the page and disappear.

As Chase McMichael, President of InfiniGraph, told me, “Humans can’t keep up with trending content, nor can they see how content trends across multiple Facebook pages containing fans with similar interest.”

McMichael alludes to “crowdsourcing” of the human voice around collective interests and actions. Not only can this aid in the repurposing of content otherwise lost, but as McMichael so eloquently puts it: “you can know where to double-down from a media buying perspective. Who needs comScore when you have a resource that is guiding you where to advertise based on what a large audience is in essence telling you?”

Wrap-up

Although the summaries on these platforms don’t do them justice, my hope is you’ll be inspired to dig deeper regarding the possibilities they offer. It will be interesting to see how Facebook will continue enabling access to data, but I think it’s a safe prediction that advanced marketers will leverage it to the hilt.

This is undoubtedly impressive, but what does this mean for your brand?  Should you be on Pinterest?

The short answer is yes.  Historically, most companies wait a little too long to dip their toes into a new social network to make sure that it’s going to last.  This leaves them playing catch up, and you don’t want to be late to this party.  At the very least you should secure your brand username before a squatter does.

The longer answer is maybe.  There are a few key considerations with how to allocate business resources that should always be considered before committing them to developing social media communities:

1.  Is your audience hanging out on this social network?

2.  Is your audience actively participating on this social network?

3.  What are your business goals that will be tied to your activities on this social network?

4.  What is your overall social media marketing strategy and how well does Pinterest fit in?

5.  Are “Pinners” already spreading your brand around Pinterest?  Type the following URL into your browser and replace “yourdomain.com” with your own web site: http://pinterest.com/source/”yourdomain.com” to follow and identify “Pinners” and boards that your brand’s content is appearing on.

Lifestyle brands benefit the most from Pinterest.  Currently 97% of Pinterest’s 1 million+ Facebook fans are women.

The current Pinterest user base is 83% female; 30% of whom are 25-34 years old, and 25% of whom are 34-45 years old.  These women are well educated with over 60% having some college experience, 19% holding Bachelors degrees, and 6% holding Graduate degrees.  They are more likely to live in mid-west states with 35% living in households with incomes between $25,000-$49,999, 34% living in households with incomes between $50,000-$74,999, and 14% living in households with incomes between $75,000-$99,999.

Therefore, if this is your target audience and you aren’t on Pinterest, you should open a new tab on your browser and request an invite.  Yes, Pinterest has had the growth mentioned above as an invite-only website.

If this is not your target audience, consider how your products and services can become attractive and valuable to this active audience.  Think about the lifestyle benefits and attributes of what your company offers and how your customers use your products or services to enhance their lifestyles.  If you’re not sure where to start, there are dozens of resourceful articles that can steer you in the right direction.  It would be a shame to not connect with all of these people who are having fun, sharing pictures and videos, and driving traffic to retailers.

Luckily for you, Facebook is rolling out a new functionality called Parent-Child. It allows you easily claim, administrate, and manage places pages and check-in deals for brands with more than five locations.

There are a few huge benefits to Parent-Child:

• Locations Tab: As seen on pages like Sanrio and Starbucks, Facebook will list all of your retail locations under a single tab. This allows visitors and admins to easily find place pages for indivdual locations.

• Manage Deals: You can now push a single check-in deal to every location through the parent page. It makes it a snap to roll out an all-encompassing campaign to every location. You also keep the ability to create individual deals at single locations.

• Assign Admins: A longstanding debate has been whether to create individual Facebook pages for every location, or to operate a single brand page. Now you can operate from a single brand page, but allow your local store managers to run their own Place page.

• Consistent Branding: As you claim your child places pages, you are able to create uniform descriptions and meta data. You may also push a single profile image to every place page. This keeps your place pages consistent with the parent page.

To read up on all of the main features, and to learn how to get Parent-Child implemented on your Facebook community, check out our Facebook Parent-Child slideshare document below:

Update: We’ve had several folks reach out to us who were interested in setting up these features for their page. Truth be told, Facebook doesn’t want these features to roll out to all page owners at this time. Your best course of action is to contact an agency with preferred advertiser status and work with them (ie. Room 214).

After many long, heated conversations, they decided that the best thing to do would be to tag all marketing materials and websites with the phrases “Find us on Facebook” and “Follow us on Twitter”. That’ll do the trick…right?

Most of us now know that the answer is no, that will not do the trick. Yet lately, I’m seeing more and more examples of brands begging for fans and followers, and then doing nothing with them.

Before you look at your huge social following, pat yourself on the back and start thinking about which leather sofa will look best in that corner office upstairs, let me just throw a few things out there:

• Fans are not king. Engaged fans are.

• Everywhere they go, consumers are surrounded by “Like” and “Follow” buttons, and clicking them has become almost second nature. It is your responsibility to turn those fans into brand advocates.

• 100 fans who are talking about your brand are far more valuable than 10,000 who are not.

• Consumers are used to seeing companies who give out incentives for becoming a fan. When’s the last time you rewarded your current fans for being so loyal? That oughta get ‘em talking…

• The only thing worse than negative comments and complaints from fans & followers is an empty response from the brand.

The short answer? Fans & followers are worth as much or as little as you like. Let this serve as a friendly reminder of a few key Social Media best practices.

Well, I’m here to tell you that it’s not enough. Having social media accounts is certainly a great (and quite necessary) start, but if you don’t use them to interact with your current and potential customers, there’s really no point.

Luckily, I’ve picked 3 simple and free social media tools to get you pointed in the right direction:

• OnlyWire: Have a few social media accounts, lots to say and little time? Check out OnlyWire. This tool enables you to post content across multiple social networks at the same time, with the push of a button. The service includes all of the top social and professional networks, and the free version allows for 300 submissions per month. Say goodbye to multiple log-ins and hello to your customers.

• Roost: Use Facebook and Twitter, but not always sure what to post or when? Give your content a boost with Roost. Their free Campaign Creator connects to your profiles, lets you schedule single posts or entire campaigns, and analyzes their reach to suggest areas for improvement. This tool can also apply a fancy algorithm to your Facebook data, spitting out a score that determines whether or not your audience will drive business to your location. It’ll even tell you the geographic spread of your fans.

• Timely: Under the impression that the more times you hop on Twitter and drop your knowledge the better? Timely begs to differ…according to this tool, it’s not about the number of times you tweet, it’s about which times you tweet (however, please don’t forget that first and foremost it’s about the content). Timely will analyze your last 199 tweets, figure out the best time slots, and auto-schedule your posts based on the data. Now you can start dropping that knowledge when it’s most likely to be picked up.

With new social media monitoring tools (many of them free) popping up almost by the day, there should be no excuse for neglecting your networks. Start engaging with your current and potential customers and you might be surprised by the increase in online conversations surrounding your brand.

Don’t worry – it’s not a throwback to the days when your friends would send you a link to a photo you stared at, only to be freaked out and thrown out of your seat when a screaming zombie appeared. That’s old school. In an age where over 800 million people are active on Facebook, Take This Lollipop taps into collective fears about privacy and personal information in social networking on a much deeper level.

After clicking on the link from your feed, you are directed to a landing page where you can launch the app. The Facebook Connect logo appears, making it clear that the app will use your login and profile information if you provide access to it. There is also message reassuring you that none of your information will be stored, and nothing will be posted without your approval.

If you’re a fan of horror movies, you’ll get a familiar feeling as you are taken down a dark hallway where faint light emanates from a room. Distorted sounds and a broken soundtrack immediately create an unnerving atmosphere. As the camera enters the room, you see a malnourished and disheveled man at a desk.

His scarred face, damaged fingernails and aggressive look gives you the idea that he is clearly disturbed. Maybe you’re not yet scared, and when you see that he is on Facebook, you may feel a sense that this is probably going to be lame. That feeling of false security quickly fades as you see the profile he’s logging onto: it’s yours.

Feelings of dread overcome you and your attention is immediately gripped as you see him hovering over your profile, your posts, your photos and posts from your friends, and there’s nothing you can do about it. As he further trolls your profile, he grows unstable and desperate, unable to decide what to do next. Soon, he knows, and is back to typing: he’s looking up your address on Google maps. For a moment, he is eerily calm as he creepily caresses his screen. If you’re not disturbed yet, you will be: his head turns slowly toward you, revealing a delivish grin on his face.

Next, he appears in his car, driving furiously to your location. Cut scenes show him gripping his steering wheel in anger, at times even screaming and looking very dangerous. He finally arrives at his destination, and as he is shown exiting his car, the final scene shows the camera panning over to reveal your profile photo on his dashboard. Creepy. The app concludes and you are taken to a final screen. The ride is over.

After a few moments and once your heart is beating back to normal, you breathe a sigh of relief: it’s all just a trick, and you’re safe. There is no creepy cyberstalker on his way to pay you a visit. Most importantly, no one’s hacked your Facebook account, and all of the stuff you never wanted the world to see is still private. Or is it? Just kidding — it really is, I promise.

At the time of this writing, over 350,000 users have Liked Take This Lollipop, and Google News locates over 40 articles written about the website. Though who was behind it was a mystery at first, it was later determined to be the work of Los Angeles-based director and experienced digital marketer Jason Zada, the brain behind the highly successful “Elf Yourself” interactive campaign for Office Max.

Though Zada said in an interview with the New York Times that he is not promoting any product or brand, and he simply created Take This Lollipop to entertain and thrill, he has managed to capture the attention of hundreds of thousands of people. If nothing else, by letting his work speak for itself, he has found an intelligent way to further market himself and enhance his reputation as an interactive and experiential marketing expert.

Why it’s smart

• Uses Facebook Connect integration for quick and easy login
• Draws from a user’s Facebook profile and photos to create a compelling and personalized experience
• No brand or product associated, leaving participants curious about its origin and motivations of the creator
• Perfectly timed to release close to Halloween

Why it’s effective

• Taps into collective and individual fears about privacy and information on social networks
• Makes people feel vulnerable: it’s disturbing to see someone looking at our Facebook profile, one of the most personal digital properties anyone can have
• Emotional impression haunts the viewer long after the interactive experience is over
• The cinematography and production value is high, and Bill Oberst delivers a chilling performance as the cyberstalker

Facebook Privacy Settings and Previewing Your Profile

Have you tried the app? If so, I bet you’re feeling like now would be a great time to double-check your privacy settings, even if the cyberstalker in Take This Lollipop was shown as somehow having your password. If you haven’t looked them over in a while, the interface may be unfamiliar because it has recently changed.

In the new Privacy Settings area, you can select the audience that you want your posts to be visible to by default. You can make all of your new posts public, visible only to friends, or even keep certain lists of people from seeing them by selecting the custom option.

Also, from this area you can control how people find and connect with you, whether you want to enable others to tag you, and what applications and websites have access to your profile. For each item in each of the sections, you have extensive control over what you share publicly or with friends, and the level of access you wish to provide to apps, websites and features within Facebook.

You can also control what information from your profile is visible to the public and your friends. To do so, go to your profile page and click on the “Edit Profile” button in the top-right corner under the “Home” link. In the drop-down menus next to each item, you can select who can see that detail of information.

Once you’ve fine-tuned your privacy settings, you can preview your profile to see how it looks to others. On your profile page, simply click on the “View As” button next to the “Edit Profile” button.

You can type in the name of a friend or acquaintance you’re connected with, and see a preview of how your profile appears to them.

You an also click on the “public” link on the preview page to see how it looks to anyone who’s not on your friends list.

Though your profile is all set, you’re still not finished: you still have photos to secure. To control privacy settings for pictures, go to your Photos section and click on the button under the right corner of the thumbnail for a photo album. In the drop-down menu, select the audience you want to share its photos with.

Going through your privacy settings periodically is always a good idea. However, this only keeps people who aren’t on your friends list from seeing your personal information and content you wish to keep private. If someone has found a way to hack into your profile, everything will be available for view. Keeping passwords secure, electronic devices like phones and iPods safe, and logging out of Facebook on public computers is the best way to keep creepy guys in dark rooms from getting access to your account.

Have you taken the lollipop? Post your reaction in the comments – we want to know what you have to say.

What we’d like to focus on is a point made by Tech Crunch. In their haste to split these two entities, the folks at Netflix neglected to acquire the social network properties before their big launch. TechCrunch highlights the user who owns the @Qwikster handle on Twitter, who is currently trying to sell this handle to Netflix.

After a look into the top social networking sites, it seems that they have not created an official page on Facebook or YouTube. There are however 7 unofficial fan-created Qwikster pages, all aggregating negative comments about this change.

So why is this oversight so bad? Why is it important to lock these online real estates down before you launch a new brand, company etc?

Control

Because Netflix did not secure these, they are not in control of what their critics and customers say about them. Had they obtained official accounts prior to the announcement, they could give customers and their company an official forum to comment and respond. The messages are out there, and it seems they are doing very little to respond or explain, which is not going to endear them to their customers.

Random Squatters

They now have to deal with people who are holding onto these properties, and will potentially have to pay them in order to acquire (some speculate in the six figure arena). People can get mighty greedy when they have the whip-hand over a corporation. This cost could have been avoided had they handled this in advance, or gotten a similar handle i.e. @QwiksterOfficial. In addition to the cost, they could have avoided a very public discussion about what kind of deal this yoo-hoo was after.

Confusion for Customers

Not having official outlets for your customers to comment, complain or ask legitimate questions can be very confusing. If they comment on an unofficial forum and never get a response, they may feel negatively about your brand.

Embarrassment

Netflix is a revolutionary company; nothing that they have done can change their impact on the digital-media landscape. However, it’s kind of embarrassing that an Internet-oriented company did not think of this in advance. It seems they don’t really even have a cohesive branded presence on YouTube as Netflix.

Four Easy Steps to Avoid This

1. Determine which social networking sites are the best fits for your company. It is usually smart to incorporate more incase you need them, or at least protect them.
2. Research what is already out there, if there is someone who already owns your brand name, what variation could you use across all of the social networks (i.e. if @MyersCorporation is taken, consider @MyersCorporationOfficial), consistency is key.
3. Grab them! (it will probably take less than an hour)
4. Figure out how you are going to consistently leverage these accounts, so that they become synonymous with your official brand.