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New Facebook Premium Ads – the beginning of truly social advertising

Wednesday, February 22nd, 2012

So, pre-IPO, the question arises, just how are Facebook are going to earn their money and sustain their growth?

The indication below suggests that a much more social, but importantly ACTION-led suite of Facebook ads are now due to roll out. Ads which, at their heart are largely driven by the actions and inteactions of fans with your content. In this regard, this is nothing new, but the interesting considerations will be three-fold:

1) Interaction/engagement rates will climb, as will the costs – ads with social references have always out-performed standard ads (wonder of this is why Facebook dropped their average CPC rates recently). It’s easy to see how Facebook will earn more from the new version of the old!

2) How this will affect edgerank – the largely unknown aspect of edgerank has been the weighting criteria. What priority is Facebook giving to different media? The suggestion here is that  Facebook are expecting ads (and therefore your content) to become much more interactive, multimedia-focussed. Your content plan (if it isn’t already) needs to reflect this.

3) Will Facebook soon start generating social ad content off your frictionless shared content? If it is already including you in ads based on your in-page gestures such as likes, comments and shares, it is more then feasible that we will see frictionlessly-shared content appearing in ads before long. The article you read, the track you listened to, might soon all become targetable in ad campaigns!

Exciting times, come what may!
Facebook Premium Ads Overview

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Beware the 3 P’s: Pinterest, Path and Privacy

Monday, February 13th, 2012

Data…we HAVE managed to get in a right old pickle with it this week…

…first, Path, the social network whose modus operandi is limiting your personal network to 150 of your closest friends decides to upload all your personal contacts you granted it access to “in order to better personalise your experience”, then Pinterest, the fastest-growing start-up on the planet with just shy of 10m unique users (and still in beta!), reveals that when possible, it adds affiliate links to the content that you, the user, pins to your boards.

On the Facebook front, we have the widespread rejection of in-stream sponsored stories, brand/page advocacy by mere “fanship” of a Page, the 2011 integration with Spotify and the January announcement of 60 seamless sharing media partners and you begin to see an emerging, simmering suspicion that Facebook is looking to heavily ramp up its advertising/commercial initiatives post-IPO in order to bring the kinds of profits and dividends investors will demand – all off the back of your personal information.

The issue seems not, in Pinterest’s case, that they are making money from users (most users are very clear that Facebook uses their data in a less direct, but similar way), nor in Path’s case that they are collecting the data at all (it happens all the time when users grant access to an app/api) – the issue is entirely one of trust and disclosure which presents untold challenges for individuals and law-makers alike.

What we know as privacy has changed immeasurably from just a year ago and whilst we are increasingly comfortable with both the quantity and nature of what we share and when, the commercial thirst for using personal data for financial gain (often a financial gain that is not ours) has the potential to bring the whole personalised web pack of cards falling down around our ears.

We are on a knife edge with trust and privacy, with Facebook especially, pushing serious boundaries of user tolerance and legal boundaries. Despite the ASA remit now covering social media, law makers are struggling to catch up with a rate of change and innovation that is being thrust upon users in the social space.

As a result I think we are most certainly in a strange period of creatively-led law making rather than one in which businesses are required to operate within clear, unambiguous current law. And I don’t see this changing for some time – until the inevitable BIG data abuse happens, where two things will happen. 1. Users will revolt and disappear/revoke access to their data and 2. Law makers will impose “hammer to crack a walnut” style laws, governing the way personal/social data is handled in a strictly limiting, broad way.

If the law makers can’t keep up with the rate of change, then the first or perhaps second, major data abuse will bring about a blanket limitation on what we will be able to do. So, for all our sakes, everybody, please disclose, disclose, disclose…

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Insight 12 – the event

Thursday, February 2nd, 2012

So, the weeks of videos culminated in the Insight 12 event which took place in Manchester. There was a good turnout of about 60 or so of Manchester’s finest to hear what respected creatives, writers, thinkers and pr’s had to say about the 12 months that lay ahead.

Here’s my slides – which are deliberately simple…so let me know what you think!

Insight 12 – Digital Predictions for 2012
View more presentations from Paul Fabretti

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Insights 12 – what needs to be on your digital agenda in 2012? Nine of 10 – Social TV

Thursday, January 26th, 2012

Long gone are the days that tv or radio shows were simply for consumption. Calls to text, email or write to us have been full of in-broadcast calls to actions for several years and this doesn’t just stop at TV. Radio, has been a great exponent of the interactive broadcast.

At the other end of the scale, we have audiences populating social media channels talking about what it is that they just watched, or, in the case of the Apprentice – giving the “characters” a real bashing on Twitter as they play out on our screens.

And, floating around somewhere beyond social media TV we have transmedia storytelling – a multi-screen or multi-platform way to tell and interact with the same television story – extending the programme’s reach and almost turning consumption almost into experiential.

In 2009, we saw Obama’s inauguration all being streamed live through Facebook, in 2010 The Jonas Brothers broadcast interactive, live streaming gigs and interviews through Facebook and last year, the Black Eyed Peas broadcast a Google Plus Hangout via a laptop at the back of their stage. So we are already some way on with social tv, but not in any consistent way which audiences are now expecting.

I think his year we will see much more of events like Channel 4′s How to save £100bn event – where tweets and comments from external networks were filtered in, in real-time to the show presenter and became the topic for debate. The content also provided additional visual stimulus which again, formed the basis for discussion in the show.

Also expect to see more play-along activity, such as that already being run with The Million Pound Drop. Viewers can play along with the questions on tv, on their computers, interact with a live-show twitter account, appear on the show themselves and can follow the stories of the contestants and behind-the-scenes material is broadcast through Facebook to maintain dialogue between shows.

And, with Celebrity Big Brother experimenting allowing viewers to pay for votes with Facebook Credits, we are going to see a much more interactive television experience in 2012.

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Insights 12 – what needs to be on your digital agenda in 2012? Eight of 10 – Social Websites

Tuesday, January 24th, 2012

Websites as we have come to know them are dead. In 2012, the brand whose sole social media/website “integration” consists of a share this page, Facebook or Twitter icon will fast become a thing of the past.

There are now so many social networks and so many conversations taking place away from conventional websites, that their original purpose has evolved to the point where many have become redundant. What were brochureware websites are now becoming interactive conversations on social channels about what the product is, how it works, what is good or bad about it.

With Google assigning more authority and visibility to social channels, more and more real-time, opinion-forming content is appearing within search results – influencing the next-click decision (or even purchasing decision) before people have even arrived at your previously visible brand site.

As such, it will be crucial for websites that are in development this year to understand how they can better integrate social content into their websites – whether that be brand mentions sitting alongside brochureware pages, user-generated reviews or images sitting alongside product or simply a list of bookmarks to social channels where product is being mentioned – all will help to ensure that rather than arrive, then leave your site to find opinion-influencing social content, customers will be able to make a balanced purchasing decision on your site.

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Insights 12 – what needs to be on your digital agenda in 2012? Seven of 10 – Social CRM

Monday, January 23rd, 2012

If social media has anything going for it, it is metrics. Whether you are tracking awareness, driving traffic or looking at influencers, the number of metrics available to marketers is immense. One of the biggest problems though, is identifying which metrics meet which objective.

Criticisms of ROI-aside, it’s fair to say that whilst there has been some standardisation of social media metrics in the last 18 months, 2012 will take things a whole league further by integrating social media metrics into conventional CRM (customer relationship management) systems thereby closing a significant loop, or missing piece of the social media ROI jigsaw.

Whilst referral traffic from social networks provides some evidence of the influence of social networking channel interactions on purchasing decisions, we will begin to see this year, the ability to integrate these brand interactions with actual purchaser behaviour which will present untold conversion modelling and customer journey insights. Whilst cookies are great (within the allowance of the European Privacy Directive) , the one thing they do not show is the influence that social interactions have.

The number of times a customer tweets us, likes a status, checks-in or leaves a comment or brand/product mention will soon be able to sit alongside their purchasing habits so we can begin to see exactly how frequently we need to interact, the nature of the social interactions they interact with and the kinds of topics they are interested in are all clues as to what it takes to get them to the page and convert into a sale.

Add in the power of dynamic personalisation and in 2012, I think we will see the introduction of some really, really smart technology.

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Insights 12 – what needs to be on your digital agenda in 2012? Six of 10 – Social Commerce

Monday, January 23rd, 2012

Social commerce has been on the rise for well over 12 months, and was actually a topic for my presentation at last year’s Insight’s conference. At that time, it was fair to say that the web was awash, with Facebook shops becoming commonplace. With it came the debate about whether or not Facebook users were ready yet or even at all comfortable with their favourite Pages becoming direct sales channels.

The ASOS experiment which made up so many of the headlines has gone quiet and ASOS have (not surprisingly) kept the results of their shop close to their chests – but are Facebook shops ALL social commerce has to offer?

As we have already seen in other videos, the increasing integration of our Facebook data – “the opening of the social graph” into applications, mobiles, the websites we use, as well as now ubiquitous checkins means that at every turn, we are AUTOMATICALLY able to see what our friends are doing, where they are, what they have watched, what they have bought or quite simply, what track they have just listened to.

i.e. things that WE may also want to do or buy.

Now whilst this is nothing new to anyone involved in word of mouth marketing, the big difference is that all of these actions, pre-2012 required a conscious decisions to post to our networks. As such, many of the actions which may have influenced a friend to rent the same film, buy the track their friend is listening to, or be the first to buy the dress that 2 of their friends were looking at on Site X were missing.

2012 will be a much larger and commercially-focussed one for the understanding of what social commerce actually is – the influencing of purchasing decisions through the integration of social data (profile and friends).

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Insights 12 – what needs to be on your digital agenda in 2012? Five of 10 – Platform Management

Thursday, January 19th, 2012

The management of an ever growing number of social media channels has been a challenge for social media practitioners for years. As more and more clients come on board, each with their own time allocation, the number of channels increases as does the number of people required to manage them – but as we all know “technology scales, people don’t”.

In 2012, this will become much less of a cliche and more of a reality as brands see more and more interactions in social channel requiring more and more content to be published. Done properly, more and more engagement is generated, requiring more time for interactions. As a result, more fresh content is needed to be curated, located, edited, approved and published again. All of this can quickly slow even a two-person community management team right down and affect engagement levels.

Adding more people to the team doesn’t necessarily solve the problem either. There will be different writing capabilities, understanding of the content plan and team availability – all restricting the free flow of content, sometimes even its quality. We’ve all read about the case of the brand who has given the role of channel management to the junior in the office with most time on their hands…Habitat anyone?

To coin a new phrase “people are people, skills vary.”

Platform management dominates service provision in 2012
If 2010/11 was the year that social media monitoring became a staple part of your communications strategy, 2012 will be the year that belongs to social media management platforms even though systems of one form or another have been around for years.

The ability to a) manage many more, remote individuals (all of whom may have valuable contributions to make to your social media management channels), b) specify different publishing and moderation rights and c) schedule content, make the content creation and posting effort a much more effective, team effort – without losing ANY of the top-line control that the true social media specialist requires in order to manage multiple channels.

Likewise, email-driven workflows ensure that interactions of the slightest nature which require moderation or attention can be directed to the right individual – backed-up by smart pre and post-moderation.  Add in reasonably sophisticated analytics and you have take a huge step to solving the scaling and skilling problem so often associated with social media channel management.

Platforms = Control = Accountability = Assurance
Nervous or inexperienced brands need assurance  to see that if you are being their brand guardian that the proper systems are in place to manage their reputation – if you are going to be serious about social in 2012, a management platform is a MUST.

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Insights 12 – what needs to be on your digital agenda in 2012? Four of 10 – Definition of Influence

Wednesday, January 18th, 2012

2011 was the year that Influence, its definition methodology and benefit all came on to the radar. Pretenders like Klout, PeerIndex and Kred all entered on the to the scene with a bang and began to make life a whole lot easier for “people” to identify those movers and shakers who could, with the right approach, make a splash about your product or brand.

However, what many of these systems do is not make clear, nay avoid the main issue around influence – and that is context. Scores are great (Google’s Page Rank is a great generic indicator of a site’s relevance the search terms you are looking for) but on what basis is an individual in an area that I am trying to get my client to talk?

Klout most certainly is attempting to define this context (i.e. topics) based on the content we produce, making suggestions about the kinds of things we talk about – but this, as with all the other methodologies have to be based on a rational mix of frequency and time.

I actually think that this is one of the main reasons why Klout has suffered such criticism. Not because its methodology is flawed or any better than anyone else’s, but because it has barely had a full year to “get to know” someone’s content. Likewise, the challenge is to make sure that it can gather enough information abotu the changing topic tastes of an individual at the rate that they change them.

The year ahead

In 2012, both our understanding and experiences of these tools will mature as we make more sense of the definition of influence and pretty much spend more time WORKING with the tools and the influencers they highlight. Outreach mistakes will continue to happen as lazy PR’s think that the score is the key to the door and end up making an irrelevant approach to an unrelated influencers, so do NOT rely solely on score alone.

If Google’s most recent, fundamental changes to the way that they define search results has taught us anything, it is that influence is WAY more social and personal.

The score is a back-up – a tick-box and should be considered only in the context of a whole host of other content and channel-related metrics. So, understand influence before you write your next influencer email and your approach will change significantly – and I’d bet much for the better too.

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Insight 12: What’s on your digital agenda in 2012? Three of 10 – Dynamic Personalisation

Tuesday, January 17th, 2012

As marketers and communicators, we’ve long known that the more we know about people, the better our chances of success. The right message delivered at the right time to the right person stands a much greater chance of generating a reaction than something irrelevant. To coin a more recent social medial cliche, we are talking about context.

As media become increasingly digital and therefore accountable, there are plethora of ways to understand and identify patterns of habits through activity (and a lack of activity) around certain contant. However, in this increasingly social world, these are number, faceless statistics. At Brazen, we call these HARD metrics, things which are simply numerical in value which contain little indication of sentiment or emotion.

In walks Facebook and its social graph.

The social graph (upon which Facebook’s Advertising Platform is built) presents the significant human angle to analytics – the missing piece so to speak.

That we can now select and understand people’s personal and lifestyle preferences means that we can have a previously untold picture of WHO not WHAT the person is.

The Open Graph

Now that the Social Graph has become the Open Graph (i.e. 3rd party services can now connect to your Facebook profile data), we are entering an area where the web experience can be a totally customised one – and one which you may well not even realise is personalised until you see someone else’s version of the same site.

I expect to see a huge increase in 2012 in the number of sites personalising your website experience as a result of being able to access your social graph, introducing content and products that are more relevant than ever before.

The right product to the right person at the right time.

The Trust Issue

Facebook has to continually battle trust issues for good reason. Without the trust of its users (i.e. the respectful handling of sensitive, personal information), they lose the virtual tons of lifestyle information customers pour into it and Facebook loses a revolutionary way to provide insight for advertisers.

In some way, one might argue that in collating all this social data, Facebook’s more sinister data gathering role is actually helping to bring about a better experience for web users. But this will only work as long as trust prevails.

For 2012, get your head around how you could personalise your customer’s web experience just by looking at what information YOU give to your Facebook profile. It could be the most creative thing you could do today!

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