Two Pane View

The main interface is now divided  into two panes: left and right. The left contains a new never-ending stream. The right pane allows for more in-depth viewing of content. This new setup allows users to dive deeper and discover more easily. This opens floodgates to discovering new tweets and users based on content, links, hashtags, and geolocation.

Although this makes the interface cleaner for the general user, community managers will most likely stick to third party community management utilities such as Seesmic or Hootsuite. The new interface lacks the ability to manage multiple communities in one centralized location. Furthermore, Twitter’s analytics still are not near what they could and should be for business use.

View rich media content

Twitter has established partnerships with a handful of photo and video sites. As Google is moving towards more blended results, high ranking photos and videos will be crucial to an online marketing strategy. So, now that these sites are reinforced by Twitter’s reach, being present and optimized on these sites will become a key tool in the online marketer’s tool belt.

Overall this will result in less need to click out of Twitter as all media content can now be viewed onsite. What does this mean for marketers? If you create interesting content, users will be more likely to interact with more of it. This should also give sites more reason to integrate the Tweet button on video and photo content.

Additionally, if your business is in ecommerce on sites such as Etsy, users will now be able to view products directly from Twitter.

One outstanding question is whether these pictures will be indexed from within Twitter or whether they will simply reinforce the strength of the pictures ranking in the partner sites such as:

• DailyBooth
• DeviantAR
• Etsy
• Flickr
• Justin.TV
• Kickstarter
• Kiva
• Photozou
• Plixi
• Twitgoo
• TwitPic
• TwitVid
• USTREAM
• Vimeo
• Yfrog
• YouTube

Content Discovery

Twitter will now begin thinking for you (Twitter: the new Bing decision engine??). When you click on a Tweet for more information, you will also be able to view content related to the author or topic.  This includes @replies, tweets by the same user, and tweets from the same geo area. One interesting aspect is also the ability to view tweets that link to the same link, which could hopefully reduce spam as bots will be more quickly exposed as inorganic. Interesting that Twitter has instantly found a way to beat Google instant at its prediction game by one upping it with real time.

Content shared from a peer is more trusted than paid advertising. If users become aware of a product or service through an organically generated tweet, the trust and possible  conversion will presumably be higher than discovery via paid media.

Never-ending Streams

Twitter was the original live search. Twitter users instantly find information on very timely content and now they can more easily discover more content. Add to this never-ending stream of content the new richness and depth of discovery and Twitter’s utility as a real-time search engine increases significantly.  This places 160-million-user strong Twitter next to YouTube in the most valuable SMERP category and should be thought of so when organizing an online marketing strategy.

See Hashtags in Right Pane

Now, when you see a hashtag in the left pane, you can click through to see other tweets using the hashtag on the right pane. This will mean that appropriate and optimized hashtag use can help your tweets be seen more quickly and easily by more users. Using overly generic or underutilized hashtags could have you losing out on these extra views.

View Profiles Alongside Tweets

I’ve always thought that one roadblock to attracting more followers was the lack of ease in seeing a user’s profile. Sure you  could click through, but the more clicks it takes to complete a desired action, the less likely it will happen. So, now that a user can easily see a profile, find out the feed content is interesting and follow the user, more following that will happen.

Keyboard Shortcuts

These shortcuts make it seem like the Twitter team had tech savvy users in mind (I’m not thinking a light internet user would be as interested).  For some reason the keyboard shortcuts make me imagine there is an easter egg hidden in there (up up down down left right left right a b maybe?).

Has new Twitter been rolled out on your computer yet?  Leave a comment and let us know what you think.

So why worry about investing in a marketing strategy involving Facebook places in this saturated market? Here are the top 5 benefits to marketing with Facebook Places:

1) Robust Profiling Data

Users connect their profiles to a plethora of interests on Facebook. They overtly state their interests in the “info” tab and indirectly connect themselves to interests when they “like” a brand or community page. Now, with the addition of social plugins, users connect their profiles to everything they browse outside of Facebook. This gives Facebook a library of data about users so rich that you can target for pretty much anything. Want to advertise a special only to urban hip hop lovers? Using creative keyword and location choices, you can really hone in on exactly the audience you want to view your ad.

2) Immense existing audience

Facebook Places is currently available only in the US. This equates to an audience with about 150 million users, while other LBSs  struggle to hit the 1 million user mark. These users have an average of 130 friends. Users who are likely to be early adopters to Facebook Places will most likely have a higher average number of friends. These users group themselves into communities in groups, community pages, and brand pages. As a manager of Facebook brand pages, you get to know the active community members well quickly. If active users checkin to your place, they can quickly and organically make a very large audience aware of your business.

3) Unique Advertising Opportunities

As a member of the team focused primarily on optimized organic campaigns, I often get sick of hearing about all of the display advertising capabilities of Facebook. Despite my personal nausea over the topic, Facebook really is doing something right. There are constantly new types of ads to engage users. These ads often have better bang for your buck and a better ROI than traditional non-SMM ad types. Great display can lead to successful branding campaigns, event marketing, and fan acquisition. You can serve photos, get users to “like” your page in the ad, view videos, pretty much everything short of purchase directly in the ad (I claim a portion of rights if Facebook comes out with this anytime soon). All I get served by Facebook are ads around shoes, pizza, and travel. They know me well.  Many LBSs services offer the chance to advertise, but Facebook is definitely ahead of the game in the variety of possible ads.

4) Viral Sharing Options

When a user checks in, the check is blasted to their wall, and into their users stream. The check in is linked to the place, and able to be commented on and liked. Every time a user interacts with this check in, the viral potential grows. Some LBSs have yet (or have just begun) to allow integration with other social media sites. Users may adopt and share more in Facebook’s new all-in-one social media community and LBS, without the extraneous checking in with other services.

5) Make a splash, be the first

This benefit will only be applicable for a short time. There are currently no brands making marketing headlines with a nifty Facebook places campaign. Whenever a new social media function or website comes along, audiences pay most attention while the new feature is still “shiny and sparkly”.  For a little more than some creative genius and some effort, you can get the extra return that a groundbreaking marketing strategy can bring you. So, put on your genius hats, grab a six-pack, get your smartest players, and come up with the cool campaign that will rock everyone’s socks off.

Have you tried Facebook Places yet?  Give us your initial impression of this new service.

A location based service in this case refers to smartphone applications which utilize GPS in order to locate your device and provide some location-specific insight.   In addition to providing useful information about venues and customer reviews, many of these apps have a social-gaming component to build user engagement.  The gaming aspect comes in when the application rewards you for actions you take. Often these are as simple as acknowledging your location, also known as a “check-in”. Rewards can be virtual and usually consist of a picture or a badge to decorate your profile.  Rewards could also come into the real world with fame or fortune (social notoriety or fiscal) by way of free or discounted goods/services, or having your name written on the menu board.

These social check-in sites have gotten a ton of buzz recently.  Foursquare has been growing rapidly and is now up to 1.6 million users.  Although the company is nowhere near profitability, there have been rumors of acquisition by both Yahoo and Facebook.  These sites also have their critics, such as Time Magazine which included Foursquare on its list of The 50 Worst Inventions, calling it “the next generation of creepy social networking” and “just another tool tapping into a generation of narcissism.”

I love Foursquare. My social graph on Foursquare is not nearly s large as on other platforms, but it has become one of my daily use social networks, second only to Facebook. As such, when Gowalla did a huge push at SXSW this year, I had to download it as well. This spawned a month long journey into the depths of location-based services, annoying my companions as I spent ten minutes checking in everywhere we went. I knew it was time to pick a winner and drop the rest when my fellow Search Agents made fun of me at dinner for checking in on 7 platforms. If my fellow online geek friends thought it was too much, maybe I had a LBS problem.

So, with the hope of saving you some pain and embarrassment, I’ve decided to publish my findings as the “Comprehensive Guide to Location-Based Social Media.”  I’ve done my best to summarize the strengths and weaknesses of 12 different location-based social media sites, from the perspective of both the user and the marketer:

Social Check-in Sites

• Foursquare
• Gowalla
• Blockchalk
• BrightKite
• Whrrl
• MyTown

Social Review Sites

• Yelp
• WHERE
• Geodelic
• Tellmewhere

Social Scheduling Sites

• Loopt
• Plancast

Calling this the “comprehensive” guide probably doesn’t make much sense.    Just in the time it took to research and write the paper, many of these sites launched new features and enhancements that I would have loved to include.  And I undoubtedly left out a few sites that have either a niche following or are just starting to build some traction.  Facebook was set to debut its own check-in functionality, but apparently shelved it in the wake of their privacy brouhaha.   Assuming Facebook will eventually launch its own service or partner with one (or more) of the leaders in locaton-based services, it goes without saying that Facebook has the scale and engagement to turn this entire market on its head.

In such a dynamic era of social media, I’d love to know what you think of these services.  Which sites have you found to be most helpful?  Do you find these check-in sites “creepy”, or do they have long-term applications we haven’t even considered?

Take a look at the white paper and leave me a comment.  I’m sure this journey is just beginning.

Facebook has just sent out the following information regarding Facebook Privacy Day:

• Our current privacy model revolves around networks, but some have grown so large that they’re no longer the best way for you to control your privacy.
• We’re removing regional networks completely and creating a simpler privacy model where you can set content to be available to only your friends, friends of your friends, or everyone.
• We’re also introducing a new feature called Publisher Privacy Control, which gives you control over the privacy of every single thing you post, at the time you post it.
• Our goal is also to help users find and connect with each other, which goes to the heart of the Facebook experience. That’s why we’re taking a basic set information that almost everyone on Facebook today is already sharing with everyone and making it publicly available.
• No changes whatsoever to ads on Facebook. We do not give—and have never given—anyone’s data or personally identifiable information to advertisers.

However, let’s not get too attached to changes happening at Facebook. Back in June, Facebook added live search in their privacy setting updates. At the same time, Facebook allowed users to a fantastic level of control by allowing users to choose which list has permission to see each individual status update. This feature was promptly disabled, much to the dismay of the casual user as well as the business minded user.

SEO becomes more relevant in the social media space almost daily. Between these new privacy adjustments, real time search, and Bing’s deal with Facebook and Twitter, search and social media are becoming one inseparable entity. Today’s changes will ironically make it more likely that private information will be easier to search. As users may have the choice of making private information public, status updates may begin to appear in the SERPs (and more often in the SMERPs . This can be of great advantage to users establishing themselves as both a person and a brand. A Facebook profile with a vanity URL will almost always appear as one of the first results for the name used. What are the results when you Google your name (come on, we all do it)? As social media sites begin to take top positions in the SERPs, what will appear?

Social Media is the new frontier. It is that undiscovered galaxy just waiting to be named. There are all new beings, all new galaxies — Twitter , Ning, Outside.in.  And all new phrase guns — Knowem, SocialOomph, Quarkbase.  That means it’s time to get familiar with some lingo that will help us maneuver this uncharted territory.

This lingo is what we have come to use around The Search Agency. All of these new words have been born from necessity to discuss common social media happenings, many maybe even right here in the TSA office.

Must-Know Jargon: The Top 6 New Social Media Terms

SMERP: “Social Media Engine Results Page”.  This is my personal favorite (ok, yeah, I invented it.) SMERP is the social media version of the SERP in search. Social media searches are becoming undeniably key in social media. What comes up when a user searches for your brand on Facebook search? 53 pages with the official name and logo? What would a user find if they did a Twitter search for your brand? Are your videos ranking above the fold in a YouTube search? What appears in the results when you Google “[your important keyword] video”?

Landing Tab: Much like a landing page on a website, a landing tab is the tab which you set as your brand’s default tab on Facebook. Facebook has maintained strict limitations on what can be customized. A landing tab is the first and one of the only visual impressions potential fans have of your brand.  Here’s an example of the Facebook landing page for Napster. It is large space where you can entice, engage, and turn users into fans. This is the Facebook version of speed dating.

Fan Acquisition: Social Media is all about building an engaged community. Fan acquisition is the building of the community members. If there are no other members of the community it gets pretty boring. No one to interact with and worse yet, you feel like a loser for liking a brand that no one else likes. Fan acquisition is done by making creative content, an enticing fan page/ channel/ stream, and quality display ads. If you build it (well), they will come.

Property Management: The day-to-day management of social media properties. Tweeting, updating statuses, responding to comments, retweeting, and asset distribution are all  part of property management. A brand’s social media presence needs to be well maintained in order for users to be excited to interact with it.

Social Media Bait: Content or assets which are so awesome, users can’t help but share it. This could be a Facebook app, tweets, status updates, videos, photos, or blog posts.  When you create content and assets (http://twitter.jackjohnsonmusic.com/) with the benefit of the user in mind (rather than blatant self-promotion), they will most likely enjoy and share it.

Mashboard: A real-time aggregate of current brand or keyword mentions across various platforms. This one screen format allows you to see updated tweets, blogs, videos, photos, or just about anything very easily. It is an integral monitoring system for brand or industry sentiment , reputation management, and campaign success measurement. It is also a really handy tool to use when looking for quality information for your next tweet, status update, blog, or video.

“Just swapped pants in the middle of a bar in the Valley. Oh the wonders of Tequila”

First, I was jealous that my Saturday had not been so post worthy. Secondly, I wondered if she had clients or work superiors reading the same thing.

I had pretty much assumed that anyone with a Facebook account and a job knew about the old “Friend vs Work Profile”.  I chatted about this over the water cooler and got some surprising news — even tech savvy people don’t understand exactly how to do this. People had even opted out of using Facebook for fear of what business associates may stumble upon on their page. The truth is that Facebook can be a fantastic tool for both career-oriented networking and communicating with friends.

So, here is a quick guide of how to separate work life from private life on Facebook:

1)      Establish Lists of friends:

To do this, go to the Friends tab, and select all friends. At the top of your friend list you will see a “Create List option”.  I recommend three lists:

1. Inner Circle: Really intimate friends you don’t mind seeing your newborn child, you really drunk, or every other personal detail of your life
2. Acquaintances: Work associates you have lunch with, friends you haven’t spoken to since second grade, or your aunt.
3. Work Contacts: people you work with (or want to), clients, or your really conservative parents.

2)      Put each Facebook friend into one of these categories. To the right of each Facebook friend, there is a drop down menu that says “Add to a list”. Drop down the menu, and add each person to a list.

*Remember that each time you add a new friend or accept a new friend request, you should add them to the appropriate list.

3)      Set Privacy Settings for Each List. To do this, select “Privacy Settings” from the “Settings” drop down on the top upper right hand corner of your profile. Click on Profile. From here, there are ten options of Facebook actions that you can select to allow or not allow for each group.

*If you want everyone but a certain group to be allowed to view something, select “Custom” from that items drop-down. A pop-up will appear allowing you to allow everyone but a certain list. For example, I allow everyone but Work Contacts to see my tagged pictures (the group of pictures friends post of me that I prefer not to obsessively monitor)

4)      Make sure your photo albums privacy settings are appropriately set. I had one of a particularly rambunctious Fourth of July that I would rather keep to the inner circle but had posted before I set-up my lists. So, we must go back and adjust viewing permission.

To do this, go to your profile. Click on pictures of me. There should be a group of tagged photos and albums which you have posted. Click on “Album Privacy” right about your albums. From here, select which groups can (or cannot with “Custom”) view each album. Save settings and voila.

So go out, swap pants at a bar in the Valley and maintain your professionalism Monday morning.

Social Media is like high school

In social media, a brand’s voice and identity is one of the most important components in building their brand online. A brand’s presence cannot be the cold, flat, boring, kid in the back of AP Calculus who no one notices (or cares) is missing from prom night.

Each brand needs to decide who they want the class to see them as:

Are you the super smart kid whose intelligence is to be emulated (or cheated off of)?

Are you the class clown everyone wants to listen to just to see what witty thing they come up with next?

Are you the one-in-the-know who knows where to get a copy of the upcoming mid-term?

Possibly are you the coolest kid in school everyone calls on Friday night to find out where the party is?

A brand’s voice allows their social community followers to get to know what the brand is all about. A consumer who knows a brand’s identity can then decide they like the brand, identify with it, and want to hang out with it.

So how does one go about figuring out who they are?

1. Market Research: Most established brands will already know who they want to attract. However, if you are releasing a new product, have waning market pull, are rebranding, or just are smart, you should check in and make sure you are not trying to hang out with the wrong crowd. This should be an holistic research process (aka in the real world).
2. Social Media Community Research: Find out who is already talking about your brand, product, industry, or what you did last weekend. Find out who you should be hanging out with (key influencers) (Twellow, TweetFind and WeFollow are good ) and what everyone’s saying behind your back. Are they talking smack? Go the customer care route.
3. Are they confused and need answers?  Go the informative buddy route. Are they bored with you/ the product/ the industry? Take a tone to re-engage them.
4. Find Out where the party is: Is everyone just irritated and tweeting about it? Are people really into your product and making fan pages on Facebook? Get on there and get your foot in the door!
5. Listen to them: No clever analogies here. Just shut up for a second and listen. Set up profiles on the appropriate channels, utilize the appropriate monitoring systems, and figure out what tone your customers will identify with. Figure out what they think is cool, what bugs them, and what conversation already exists to partake in.
6. Show up with a six-pack you stole from your parents: Go to the party. Start talking. Be who your customers are seeking. Do not over impose yourself on them. They honestly do not want to read 15 tweets about your 15% off deal. They are not interested in dry blog posts being reposted on all channels.

The goal in social media brand identity can be thought of in this way: If your customers saw your brand hanging out at the local bar, would they know what to buy you to drink? Are you an entertaining brand who does tequila shots? Are you a refined industry staple who prefers a good red wine? Are you a casual helpful friend who deserves a trendy micro-brew? Would you like a little paper umbrella in your Mai Tai?

Think about it. I’m buying the next round!

For Social Media heavyweight Starbucks, Tuesday’s Free Pastry promotion should have been a slam dunk.  Starbucks was a forerunner in blogging with MyStarbucksidea.com, is a best practice shining star on Twitter and Facebook, and is highly active in numerous other social media forums. Even for this accomplished Social Media brand, executing an online promotion/real world execution campaign can be a mine field to navigate.

Starbucks Free Pastry Day was announced via Facebook. They wisely advertised by utilizing Facebook’s new event invite publisher which shows up in the news feed section of profiles. Customers could either print out the coupon or show a certain event webpage to the barista on their mobile. Over 158,800 people responded as attending. For a brand which estimates 3 people convert for every 4 people who interact with the brand on social networking sites, this is quite an accomplishment.

As their bleary-eyed fans rolled out of bed and jumped online, Starbucks became a hot trend on Twitter (#2) and “Starbucks nutrition” rose to the top of Google Trends. They scored big time on the gold-winning metrics of brand recognition, customer loyalty, and even reach beyond the specific campaigned product. Sounds like their social media team of 7 people worked overtime for awhile on that one!

Bombs started exploding when it came to execution. The Free Pastry (with purchase) was available until 10:30am or until supplies last. By 8am the blogosphere, Twitter, and Facebook were bursting with woes of local baristas refusing to honor the webpage as a coupon, shortage of supplies, and complaints of having to make a purchase to receive the freebie. Negative comparisons were made to McDonald’s  which required no purchase for its Free Mocha Monday. The hashtag #FreePastryDay soon was paired with the words “bust”, “denied”, and the hashtag #fail. Starbucks social media team took to Facebook to reply to these complaints with sentiments that amounted to “This is why we made it so obvious you had to have a coupon and that supplies were limited. Silly customers!” Even though their statements were accurate and the rules of the promotion were clearly promoted, this was the golden opportunity to preserve goodwill and make things right with their loyal fan base.

In the real world, problems are often unforeseen and inevitable. This is where social media shines as not just a mode to repair the damage, but possibly even come out as a knight in shining armor to bruised customers.

Ideally Starbucks would have read the mass of complaints, issued sincere apologies, and maybe even offered some other promotion or giveaway.  They could have won over lost customers and earned new customers by utilizing their online listening skills, directly responding to as many customers as possible.  They could have posted a blog, Facebook note, and tweeted their retribution for the free pastry fumbles. Where else does a brand have the opportunity to hear a customer complaint, have direct contact to fix that individual’s woes, and also blast out to the masses about their awesome customer care, all in 140 characters or less?

There are so many reasons to love this!  Getting fans on the initial launch (or anytime really) of a Facebook page can cost ad spend and time. With this widget, a brand’s official website can embed the widget, allowing site visitors to fan the Facebook page, all while staying on the site. The widget also shows how many fans the page has and recent posts. Creating a social media presence that integrates and supplements a brand’s website is vital and this widget makes it super easy with the high traffic from homepages. You can add the widget from your page under your profile pic and viola! You have the code to add to your site. Where was this widget over the last few weeks when everyone was trying to meet the minimum fan requirement in order to snag their pages’ vanity URL’s?

2)      Gmail is no longer Beta

No actual reason. It just surprises me that it remained beta for so long. This makes me believe that the God of Google may not be so omnipotent. Maybe, just maybe, they are still figuring things out over there.

3)      Starbucks Free Ice Cream App

Starbucks is promoting its launch of branded flavored ice creams via Facebook and hitting all the right spots. They have created an application in which they give away 800 coupons for free ice cream every hour until July 19^th. Users enter in recipient info and are then prompted to publish the fact that they got free ice cream. This is a free way to access a user’s infinite network, all from the trustworthy user herself. Also, on the application page, there is the opportunity to fan the brand page, visit the website, and invite friends. Right on Starbucks! Now I just hope the free ice cream is as awesome as the Facebook campaign.

4)      Facebook’s Page Insights

Facebook is really stepping up the functionality of pages lately. In this newly added analytics, administrators can track their page’s total interactions, see a breakdown based on comments, wall posts and likes, and even check out the demographics of fans that were active this week. This is a kick-butt tool for general info, but more importantly for campaign metrics of audience reach, call to action success, and even geo-based breakdown.  Easy to use even for the less number/ tech savvy.

5)      That the “NoFollow” scandal has died down.

I don’t know if this one or the MJ-palooza was more overplayed. There was nothing good to read in the blogosphere since SMX Advanced and the “no follow doesn’t work” fumble. There are tons of ways around this and in SEO things are constantly changing. Our world does not crumble at a slight change. Skillful architecture and knowledge-based linking can take care of this with a little effort.

Coffee Bean’s campaign went like this: they created a Facebook app and event promoting the release of three new Ice Blended flavors. Users voted on which flavor seemed the yummiest, and then on July 1^st the winning flavor was given away at participating locations.  So far so good.

It was an awesome idea, but it seems like they put in a lot of effort for relatively short-lived gains. All those people who came out as fans of Coffee Bean for the length of the promotion could have been converted into long-term brand loyalists and maybe even the coveted brand ambassadors.

They did some things right with this campaign, but could have utilized Facebook to achieve even better results for less ad spend, and built a broader group of fans and followers.

Consider the following a list of must-do’s for any brand developing a Facebook campaign:

• Make all Facebook destinations be the company page.  Coffee Bean could have attracted permanent fans either to the brand page or to a new flavors page.  Facebook recently added the highlights stream on the right of each profile. Each time someone fanned the new flavors’ page, the new fan’s canoodle of friends would have been notified in this *FREE* stream. Free advertising to reach an infinite number of peer-suggested customers? Yes, please! Even after the contest, this new flavors page and its’ fans could be used for countless other promotions and consistent consumer awareness of the brand’s happenings.

• Develop a quiz or other application.  Coffee Bean could have reached an infinite number of customers for free. For example, offering a quiz to tell me my personality was more like the Instant Karma flavor (nutty and sweet?) would have gotten my attention! Also, same as above. User takes the quiz, all of user’s friends are notified and invited to take the quiz. Rinse and repeat. At the quiz results page, a link to the new flavor’s page and Free Ice Blended Day announcement could have been provided. Here quiz takers fan the page, and again, notify everyone how much they love Coffee Bean.

• Avoid making an event. An event achieves only temporary brand awareness and fans. I became aware of the Free Blended Day from a paid ad with the event as the landing page. This means Coffee Bean had to spend ad money to promote an event whose fans were going to disappear on the event’s date.  Also, as a person with a plethora of friends, I do not even read many event invites. They appear in the same section as all the silly invites I receive. I do not read my 14 daily requests to play Mafia Wars, nor would I read a corporate promo event announcement.

When utilizing Facebook or any other social networking site, we have to remember the most valuable advertising comes from the users themselves. If we create content users like and use, the content will be used by fans and then shared with their network. It is with transparency and user-oriented content that companies gain users’ trust and loyalty.

As more and more companies are starting to blur the line between digital marketing and real-life rewards, it becomes more and more difficult to keep the two very distinct goal measurements separate.  In “the real world,” we measure a campaign’s success through (more or less) getting product in the hands of the client. However, in the world of digital marketing, success is often a bit harder to judge. For many brands, the more valuable metric is acquiring a user as a friend/ follower/fan.  These friends then  become brand loyalists and ambassadors for life.  And get even more of their friends hooked on Ice Blendeds.