MindComet

Hanging with Mike Haines, Regional VP of Facebook

Ok, so I didn’t actually hang with Mike Haines, in like a grabbing a beer or going golfing sense, but I did have the pleasure of attending a speaking engagement he hosted through the AMA Central Florida chapter.

Overall, the presentation was very basic, and to Mike’s credit, he explicitly warned us in the beginning. It truly was the 50,000 foot view. However, there were a couple of interesting points that Mike shared, which I thought invaluable, no matter how much of a “guru” you are.

Facebook is all about news streams.

In an average Facebook session of 22 minutes, a user spends 19 minutes of that time in their news stream. That one tidbit has an obvious and significant impact for marketers and their Facebook strategies - break the confines of your Fan Page and get your marketing message in user’s news feeds.

If you’re struggling with ideas on how to do this, maybe you’ll be inspired by IKEA’s approach to this. It is insanely simple, yet brilliant.

10x views on a stream vs page

If you were to post the same message into your fans news stream and only on the fan page wall, the former post would receive, on average, 10 times the views as the latter. Same message, different delivery method, different results. Not surprising, but it’s interesting to know the metrics surrounding it.

All in all, a good event. Thanks AMA CFL and Mike Haines!

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Posted by Jeremy Hilton on Nov. 18, 2009

What are you doing with your Facebook fan page?

Imagine this for a second.

You visit a website and there’s some really good information on the homepage. It’s about a subject matter that interests you. Now imagine there are “photos”, “discussions” and “videos” links in the top nav. And when you click on them, the page that comes up has no content. What would you think? What would be your first impression? If it were me, I’d think that the site’s creator had abandoned the project and published anyways.

Doesn’t sound like a great experience right? Well, that’s the experience provided by a large majority of Facebook fan pages. The title of this blog post asks, “What are you doing with your Facebook fan page?“. On second thought, I think the question should be, ‘What are you not doing with your Facebook fan page?“.

Take a minute and evaluate your fan page. Are there tabs that serve no purpose? Is there a tab (think blue sky here) that would serve a purpose?

Why waste real estate?

If you’re not using the default fan page tabs, why not just remove them? Did you know that you could? Or, better yet, use the Static FBML feature of Facebook to create a custom tab! This forum thread shows you exactly how to achieve this feat.

So what am I really saying?

Apply the same critical eye to your fan page as you would to your main website. In fact, do this with all your social media outlets. As your social presence grows, these outlets will be the first impression your brand makes to new visitors. Make it a good one.

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Posted by Jeremy Hilton on Aug. 05, 2009

Facebook privacy directions

I’ve had some requests from friends asking how to prohibit 3rd party applications from accessing your Facebook photos… here they are in screen shot form.

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Posted by Jeremy Hilton on Jul. 24, 2009

Facebook, why aren’t you protecting your greatest asset?

Did you know that Facebook, by default, allows 3rd party applications to access your photos? What’s the harm in that you ask? Well, it turns out that some nefarious application developers are using people’s likenesses in some alarming ways.

Blogger, Cheryl Smith reported this originally on her blog. [At the time I wrote this, her blog is down, no doubt to Digg-effect like traffic…think of all the Adsense revenue she’s missing out on!]. Her husband was browsing Facebook, when he was displayed a “hook up” advertisement letting him know that “Hot singles” were waiting for him…pretty common ad on Facebook, except the face in the ad, was his wife’s. DOH!

Yeah. Fortunately for him, Cheryl wasn’t up to any shenanigans. She was the victim of Facebook’s inadequate protection of user data. A 3rd party ad network, had retrieved her photo and displayed it in ads that we’re presented to her friends. Let me be clear, this is against Facebook’s terms of service (TOS), and the ad network was disabled by Facebook. However, it raises the question about what obligation Facebook has to protect your privacy and in this case your reputation?

Having your likeness displayed in a comprising and possibly damaging context, by an irresponsible 3rd party, could have far reaching impacts to you. Imagine if you’re using Facebook for professional networking and your colleagues saw that ad. What impact would that potentially have to your career? As far as her marital relationship, what if this unnecessarily caused friction between her and her husband? Lets that take argument to the extreme and ask, what if Cheryl’s husband was the jealous type, who had a violent temper and Cheryl had been harmed physically as a result of him seeing the ad? Luckily they realized how and why this happened, took it in stride and found humor in it. However, I wouldn’t expect the average Facebook user to be able to “put the pieces together” and walk away with a chuckle. This is a potentially dangerous situation.

This is against their TOS, and the ad network was punished, isn’t that enough? HELL NO! The fact that Facebook’s developer platform allows programmers to explicitly violate the TOS, without any safeguards, is alarming.

Why hasn’t Facebook taken the job of protecting it’s users reputations seriously?

At the end of the day, we’re their greatest asset. Without us, their $10 billion valuation goes right into the toilet.

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Posted by Jeremy Hilton on Jul. 21, 2009

Facebook is dead. And so is Twitter.

An interesting argument was made by Dustin Clingman, a local game designer, at the DMAF’s “State-of-the-Digital Media-Industry” event in Orlando.

He makes the point that Twitter, unlike Facebook, has positioned itself as an extremely efficient method for spreading out information with global context. He makes his point by asking the question, “Who found out about Michael Jackson being dead on Facebook?“

In his comparison of the two platforms, from a mass-communications standpoint, I totally agree with his point that “Facebook is dead”.

However, I think his comparison is short-sighted in a couple of regards and is clearly from the stand point of a non-marketer.

For one, Twitter has lost alot of it’s trust factor. It’s becoming a very noisy platform that’s been infiltrated by unscrupulous marketers, get rich quick schemes, hackers, hoaxsters and hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of bots (no one, not even Twitter knows the extent of this problem). Following the death of Michael Jackson, who found out that Jeff Goldblum, Ellen Degeneres, and Britney Spears had died on Facebook? These claims were all over Twitter, yet were all completely false.

Secondly, Dustin has failed to factor in the huge marketing potential that Facebook provides—the potential for word of mouth marketing in groups of friends with an implicit level of trust that’s unparalleled on other social platforms. According to a recent study by eMarketer, 34% of US Internet users bought a product based on a recommendation from a friend or relative. Compare this to a mere 5% who were influenced by a blogger (or micro-blogger).

So while were doing comparisons, from a social media trust and WOM standpoint, I believe that “Twitter is dead”.

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Posted by Jeremy Hilton on Jul. 02, 2009

Facebook is a pond. Social Media is an ocean.

Sorry for not posting last week. I’ve been really good about regularly posting to either Social Enchilada or my food blog, Home Culinaire (which needs some love). However, this week, I failed and I’m kicking myself for not staying on top of it, although I do have an excuse…I was in NYC for the Mirren new business development conference!

Now, you might be thinking, “Jeremy, haven’t you read the 30+ blog posts from Chris Brogan where he explicitly tells you to be proactive and write your posts BEFORE you attend a conference?“. Honestly, I really thought I would get them done while I was there, but as you can see in the large gap in my posts, I didn’t.

Self-deprecation aside, the conference was insanely good. We came back with a bevy of insights into our business; what we’re doing wrong, what we’re doing right, and what we’re doing that no one else is! We also came back slightly irritated by the lack of understanding about what social media is in the digital/interactive agency world.

Many digital agencies are way behind in their understanding of social media. From what I gathered, in their world, social media is this very flat landscape that is comprised of Facebook and MySpace.

There was no mention of ratings and reviews sites like Yelp or social commerce sites like Amazon. When John Winsor from Crispin Porter + Bogusky asked if anyone had ever heard of the crowdsourcing platform, Crowdspring, I was one of a handful of people in a room of 100+ that raised their hand. There were less than 20 people Twittering from the event. I wouldn’t have even dared to mention BrightKite out of the fear of completely confusing everyone in the room.

This conference solidified my belief that consumers are now more digitally savvy than marketers. We’re constantly playing a game of catch-up. And the smart digital marketer, will closely follow emerging social media trends/platforms. If we’re going to fish where the fish are, we have to acknowledge that Facebook is a just a pond, and there’s a whole ocean full of fish yet to be discovered.

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Posted by Jeremy Hilton on Apr. 14, 2009