Jun 10
15
World Cup Twitter Tchotchkes
With the World Cup in full swing, Twitter, being a truly global social network (by now, less than 50% of tweets are in English), has been adding in fun little tchotchkes into the stream including soccer balls when you tag tweets with #worldcup and flags when you use country hashtags. It’s a great way to keep things fresh – Google has been doing it for years for historical events and birthdays with their doodle.
Look for more of these little guys as the World Cup progresses. Also, users can “checkin” at the World Cup by tagging their tweets with specific stadiums. This is being rolled out globally, and it’ll be interesting to see how it plays with the geolocation services:
What do you think? Is it a matter of time before brands start paying for Twitter tchotchkes on their tags? Will #coke show a bottle of Coca-cola in the tweet? How about the specific geolocation of the tweet? What will the effect be on Foursquare and others?
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About a month ago, Techcrunch announced that Facebook would be rolling out location-based checkin functionality for their mobile app, and that it would most likely be dubbed the “Places” tab. Geo-location is all the rage now, with Foursquare nearing 1 million checkins a day and Gowalla at a quarter million users, and while it’s no surprise that Facebook is looking to jump on the bandwagon, it is surprising that they would dub their new checkin feature “Places…”
Enter Google Places allows business owners to list tons of information about their locations, offer discounts, display photos and videos, and offers analytics and insights all for free.
Why would Facebook choose to name their latest feature “Places,” the same name that their biggest share-of-web competitor, Google, has given to its local business search?
Possibly because they don’t have much of a plan going into anything (difficult when your leader has never run a business and is only 27) and they have the hubris to believe that they can be late to the game rolling out a feature that many other businesses are already implementing extremely successfully (being the biggest player in the game doesn’t mean you can get sloppy; look at AOL), and their short sightedness in making confusing changes for their users has been well documented (see: tons Privacy Changes and the new Like Button, among the most recent). As a matter of fact, “Places” would be the perfect name!
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Just finished Sun Tzu For Success by Gerald Michaelson (and Sun Tzu) at the recommendation of one of my colleagues and I have to say, it’s a fantastic motivational tool. As the title suggests, it’s about applying the general’s military wisdom to help you accomplish the goals that you’ve set in life.
The first section of the book is about personal success characteristics; be moral, listen well, practice discipline, etc. The main takeaways of this first part, for me, were two fold: seek sound counsel, and know yourself. While these both may seem obvious, they’re worth stressing.
I always like the idea of having a personal advisory board, like a Jedi Counsel, at my disposal; those who have experienced similar career paths, those who have done what I want to do. What motivated them to make the choices they made? What made them want to make changes in their career paths? A Jedi Counsel is invaluable.
Even more important is the concept of knowing yourself. “Know the enemy and know yourself, and you can fight a hundred battles with no danger of defeat. If ignorant both of your enemy and yourself, you are sure to be defeated in every battle.” This is key; who are you as a person? What motivates you? Without having a “self” compass, how can you track your progress?
Sections Two and Three are titled Strategies for Success and Tactics for Success and are applicable to industries across the board. In Strategies, my two favorite chapters were Avoid the Avoidable, which speaks to preparedness, and Go for a Breakthrough, which is very Seth Godin, Purple Cow-esque. Go for a breakthrough, be different, be amazingly unique; it’s the only thing that will keep you relevant.
Tactics for Success contains more great chapters including Move Rapidly, which warns against analysis paralysis, Occupy the High Ground, which insists on a positive state of mind, and Build on Your Successes, my favorite chapter and the one that I feel is the most actionable take-away. The idea behind Build on Your Successes is that each individual victory allows you to leverage it into another victory, and that one into another victory, and so on as you approach your ultimate goal. How can I leverage this great news into the next step towards the end game? Once you stop leveraging these small victories, you lose all your momentum, and it makes getting to the next level all that more difficult.
What does this post have to do with marketing? Nothing really, but this is a marketing blog, and I get to name the posts whatever I want. Sun Tzu For Success is a valuable read for anyone with goals. That sounds like you, doesn’t it?
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Initially, all the changes announced at the f8 Conference made me really excited. As the weeks go buy, though, I keep finding little things that irk me. Have we decided whether or not we’re migrating to the “Likes” on Facebook/the entire Internet, or if we’re still using “Fans” occasionally? We know why Facebook went with the wording overhaul; they were looking for more interaction between users and brands across the Web (especially on Facebook), and people are supposedly more likely to click “like” than “become a fan” because it’s implied that there is less commitment (even though there isn’t – a bait-and-switch which, in and of itself, seems to be a moral decision Facebook is okay with).
That’s fine. I’m okay with that. I’m enjoying the idea of “liking” things across the Web – my favorite places on foursquare, my favorite restaurants on Yelp, my favorite movies on IMDB, etc. – and having them show up both on the sites and on my profile for my friends to see. My problem is with the semantics of the new system. On the back end, if you manage a page, you’ll see in the analytics that Facebook is still calling them Fans. Why? Well they don’t have much of a choice.
They’ve now created a situation where “likes” mean two different things on the same page. On a brand’s page, you can see “likes” that are people (where “Fans” used to be) and “likes” that are on-page actions (eg. “7 people like this” thing that you’ve posted to your wall). In your page’s Facebook Insights, Facebook can’t say that you’ve gotten 18 “likes” this week, because does that mean you’ve gotten 18 new people or 18 new actions from people? That’s why they’re still saying you’ve gotten 18 new “Fans” and 18 new “interactions.” How long will the front- and back-end have different terminology? I’m not sure they know. Facebook has kind of dug themselves a hole here. Shouldn’t this be a big deal?
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Over the last few weeks, I’ve been playing, as we all have, with the new Facebook social plug-ins across the Web, and I’ve come across a problem. It’s an organizational problem, and as some of you know, I have more than mild obsessive compulsive disorder, so the fact that I haven’t been able to find a reasonable explanation for why the Graph was designed like this has really been bothering me.
This now-omnipresent “like” button doesn’t change in appearance from place to place on the Web, but it seems to perform more than one task as it relates to my Facebook profile. The first, and coolest, thing that may result from me “liking” something is that it will show me on the page as “liking” that social object, along with other friends of mine who have done the same. Additionally, it will throw that thing onto my Facebook profile under Movies, Interests, etc.
For example, I “liked” the Peter Sellers movie “Being There” on IMDB (part of the group of test sites for the Open Graph), and this was the result:
But what’s that directly to the left of “Being There – 1979″? It’s The Community Page for the movie “Being There” on Facebook. When you click the Interest that was dynamically inserted from IMDB, it takes you to the IMDB page for “Being There,” but if you already had the movie as a favorite before f8, or added it after, then you will have two movies with the same title in your Movies section, and they will go to different places (one elsewhere on Facebook and one to IMDB).
To me, this is a bad consumer experience; yes, I like the movie, it was already in my Movies section before f8. Now I stumble upon the “like” button on IMDB, and I don’t see myself as “liking” the movie there. Of course, I want my friends to know that it’s a favorite movie of mine, so I hit the “like” button, and now I have duplicate links in my Movies section on my Facebook profile. There has to be a more integrated solution – isn’t that what this whole Open Graph is supposed to provide?
Another place that I hit the “like” button was in foursquare on the page for the Schuylkill River Park; I play basketball there and just in general love the vibe there. Now this same “like” button is performing a third action. It’s just counting how many people “like” that location. It’s not going onto my profile under interests (why not?), it isn’t showing me which people “like” the Schuylkill River Park within the foursquare interface, but it is showing up under my Recent Activity that throws me back to the foursquare page:
This is an OCD nightmare. The “like” button can’t look identical, be used in a sentence identically, but still do several different things to my profile at the same time, including creating Interest duplicates. Am I crazy??
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Yesterday, “Star Wars Day” for those of you not in-the-know (May the 4th Be With You), Twitter announced (thanks SocialTimes) the launch of a brilliant tool, dubbed Blackbird Pie, that allows bloggers and others to snag an html coded version of a single tweet. When you paste in the URL of the original tweet, Blackbird Pie spits a block of code back at you that, when put into your blog or site, looks like this:
@charlieguevara @bill_sebald @joshuaklucas May the 4th Be With You. Happy #StarWars Day
Jed Singer
jedsinger
As you can see, you can go right in and edit the code that it gives you (I’ve removed the nofollows from the links in my tweet, for example) but I didn’t bother correcting the cell padding. Like it says on the site, Blackbird Pie isn’t guaranteed to work on your platform, but will intentionally pick up some of your blog/site’s styling. Additionally, the timestamp isn’t real – it’s showing when I used the Blackbird Pie tool, not when the actual tweet was posted – which may or may not present future problems. Overall, easier than just taking a screenshot? What do you think?
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So a ton of new stuff on the Facebook front, got that. But what’s on the horizon? We definitely haven’t heard the last about these two topics, but the “no-show” items from the f8 Developers Conference Keynote were:
Facebook Credits
Virtual Credits have been touted as one of the biggest opportunities for Facebook in 2010, and with the blossoming of the micro-payment model, it’s surprising that Facebook decided to put it on the back burner. Companies like Playfish and Zynga, maker of the unbelievably popular Farmville game, are reporting huge revenue from getting users to spend small sums of money (as low as one dollar) in exchange for virtual credits or items to be used in games or given to friends. Additionally, apps like Buxter, created by London-based ClickandBuy, allow friends to exchange small amounts of money (no more than roughly $60) to pay each other back for dinner the night before, or what have you, and, of course, charge a small fee on top of each transaction. It would only make sense (cents?) for Facebook to drive these smaller players out of the space and become the Credit standard for their more than 400 million users. But, alas, there was only brief and vague reference to what Facebook was doing with Credits, plus a small, technical “session breakout.”
Geo-Location
In real estate, location is everything; however, at during the f8 keynote, location was nowhere to be found. Due to all the hype in recent weeks and months about Facebook launching some sort of location-based check-in technology to its platform, we arrive at three possible conclusions. First, that Facebook has abandoned incorporating geo-location: highly unlikely. Second, that Facebook has been so busy building and rolling out its new platform that they haven’t had time to think about geo-location: possible, but unlikely. More than likely, Facebook is waiting for a deal to be structured between Microsoft and foursquare, the front-runner in location-based social networking, and is hoping to incorporate the new Open Graph directly into foursquare once it becomes a Microsoft property, much like they’ve done with Docs.com. We haven’t heard the last of geo-location and Facebook, especially if the deal with Microsoft doesn’t happen (which it probably won’t – foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley still has a bad taste in his mouth from selling his previous startup, Dodgeball, to Google, only to watch them let it wither and die), but it certainly wasn’t discussed at the f8 Conference.
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Apr 10
29
“The Roundtable”
Love a roundtable meeting. They definitely feel like the best way to learn; much better than a presentation. The whole ‘knowing that you could speak at any moment’ thing keeps people on the edge of their seats and paying attention. When you’re being presented to, there are so many opportunities to loll off, I mean, we all have a million things to think about, but we should be absorbing what the speaker has to say. In a group discussion, the back and forth, listen and respond, really keeps everyone’s motors running. The roundtable meeting is interactive, it’s alive, it’s engaging. It’s how our Social Media Group meetings are set up at my office. It’s how I wish more meetings and presentations were set up.
We just had a fantastic Social Media Club Philly meeting at Temple’s Business School roundtable style, and one of our members, Cecily, even tweeted that it was the “best SMC meeting EVER” and because this was only my third SMC meeting, I was, of course, happy to be a part of such a momentous occasion. People get to talk, share what they’re doing with social at work, share their personalities, it’s fantastic. Annie and Gloria do a great job with the SMC; I was taking notes.
Some people are absolute wizards with a slide deck, but for the most part, can we make “powerpoint” a dirty word? More conversation leads to more engagement, leads to more learning. And that’s the point right? What do you think about a roundtable versus a presentation?
Posted in strategy by .
Still giddy from some of the announcements from Facebook’s f8 yesterday.
More to come later today and tomorrow while everything sinks in, but definitely check out the replay of the keynote:
http://apps.facebook.com/feightlive/
My favorite user comments during the presentation:
“hey zuck, maybe invest in some Toastmasters for your next keynote!”
It’s true, he was mad awkward. And…
“biggest announcement from facebook f8…MARK HAS A GF!”
Anyway, also check out Levi’s brand new Friend Store, part of the open graph discussed at f8. You can see jeans that my friends like, upcoming birthdays, etc. This is the future of ecommerce:
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Apr 10
20
Soovle for Search
Just discovered this nifty tool, Soovle, via Search Engine Journal that allows you to search a term and see related queries in up to fifteen major engines including Google, Yahoo, Bing, Amazon, Wikipedia, eBay, and Netflix. After using today’s date as a query, the Soovle Link supplies you with the “best” result, and Wikipedia reminded me of the holiday:
The “Secrets” button has some goodies (including a whitelabel feature), and you can also save searches and see their trending via Google Trends.
Definitely a tool worth playing with if you’re doing a keyword build or content campaign.
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Jed Singer – Socialight Media
Jed Singer is an Engagement Associate at Stuzo in Center City Philadelphia. The views and comments in the Socialight Media Blog are those of Jed Singer and not necessarily those of Stuzo.