Yesterday Facebook announced a whole raft of significant changes to the way developers can integrate their own sites with Facebook tools.

To translate all the industry excitement into plain English, what Facebook are trying to do is become the glue that binds together a users Internet experience with all their friends.

The announcements from Facebook are hugely ambitious, but already some very interesting new features are appearing on a variety of high profile web sites.
Firstly, what Facebook have done is to make user behaviour on their site, such as ‘liking’ something, become a permanent reference in the users profile.

At the same time, they’ve changed the way users connect with brands from ‘Becoming a fan’ to ‘liking’ – just like users already do with their friends’ posts, or photos, or comments.

While this seems like a pretty innocuous change, it actually makes behavioural targeting of marketing messages much, much simpler for advertisers.

Now, if a user ‘likes’ your brand, you’re able to see all the profile details that user is prepared to share with you. And the more stuff they like and the more often they like it, the better your understanding of that loyal advocate of your brand becomes.

Which of course kicks up a whole lot of privacy concerns.

Unsophisticated users of Facebook still have a whole lot of personal and private information switched on for the world to see. And with the changes announced by Facebook yesterday, that will extend to automatically publicising some potentially private information. The fact that you ‘like’ a film, or a song may not be an issue for you to share, but what about political parties, social issues and sexuality?
Facebook have repeatedly changed their privacy policies over the past few years, often causing a big stink with privacy advocates when they do so. These announcements already have privacy advocates screaming ‘foul’. Over the next few weeks and months expect to see headlines related to individuals’ private lives being unwittingly revealed by Facebook.

This has very big implications for the web in general, as more and more sites are trying to get their customers to act as ambassadors for their products, and trying to make their products, services and brands more ‘social’.

The next big change that Facebook are offering web site owners is the ability to deeply integrate Facebook features into their own sites. So if you’re a retailer, Facebook have just made it much simpler to add ‘Like’ buttons to every product in your catalogue, every promotion or announcement and to your brand itself.
Why is that important? Because every time a customer clicks the ‘Like’ button, they’re telling all their friends on Facebook about it, and potentially driving traffic back to your site.

The opportunity to generate traffic, word-of-mouth and testimonial around your products is now immense using Facebook’s tools and reach.

For many years marketers have been talking about ‘behavioural targeting’ of customers to improve the accuracy and relevance of marketing messages and personalising offers to individuals. Until now, that has been a very difficult thing to achieve, simply because finding out enough about customers to achieve this was very, very difficult.

Yesterday, in one fell swoop, Facebook has opened up both the data and the technology to make this sort of marketing dream a reality.

So how can you take advantage of these changes?
There are a number of things that you could do right now to take advantage of these changes, and make your web site more social and useful for your customers on Facebook:

• Add ‘Like’ or ‘Recommend’ buttons to your products, articles or images


• Adding these buttons to your own web site allows your customers to tell their friends on Facebook that they like your stuff, and hopefully drive much more traffic to your web site


• Add Facebook Comments to your content or product listings and allow people to share their views with their friends


• Add Facebook activity feed from your Facebook page to your web site


• Let all your web site visitors see that your Facebook page is a vibrant community and encourage them to join


• Add a Facebook Livestream to your site


• Do you run live events? The allow your visitors to publish live updates to Facebook via your own web site.

If you’d like to implement any of these features on your web site, please contact Reactive to discuss how we can make your site more social.

Labels: Social media, Technology, Web marketing

We have just had our article "Using Facebook to "Connect" with your customers online" published on the Digital Ministry Web site.

Follow the link now and have a read, please feel free to comment.

Here is a short extract:

"Facebook has been around for a long while now as a social networking site, but how can companies make it work for them as a tangible marketing tool? Isn't it just the forum for connecting with old and new friends, family and colleagues? Facebook is now really coming into its own. But it's important that you don't just introduce a social media initiative because you think you should have one, you need to make sure it has an objective and is appropriate for your customers."

Tim O'Neill, Joint MD

Labels: Facebook, Social media

Often the methods available to us of ‘helping’ those in the developing world is limited to donating to charities, often large organisations where it is difficult to feel that our contributions are making a difference at a grass roots level.

But there are organisations out there who are harnessing the power of social media, social networking, and crowd sourcing to make a real difference to people’s lives in the developing world, while enabling us in the developed world to really see the difference we can make by ‘giving’ in a non-traditional sense.

Give Now
A new iphone app was released this morning which allows users to help refugees get paid for completing small pieces of work.

The app has been developed by Samasource, an organisation which aims to empower people in developing nations by providing access to paid (often digital-based) work, and CrowdFlower, which connects companies to a crowd sourced workforce. The system benefits workers who are paid for completing small ad hoc tasks, and organisations who can outsource tasks to an unlimited workforce as needs arise.

The Give Work app works on the principle that a few minutes of your time, and a few minutes of time spent by a refugee in a camp in Dadaab, Kenya, means that the refugee is paid for that work. The Give Work app supports these refugees by asking you to complete some short on-screen tasks on the iPhone, which refugees in Kenya are also being trained to complete. This ensures quality assurance for the companies paying for the tasks to be completed, and thus payment for the workers in Kenya. Although the payment amount is small to the western world, to refugees who receive the payment it is a vital source of income.

The app is available to download from the iTunes store right now –it would be great if after you read this you go and get the app and let us know what you think. Its free and wont take more than a few minutes, so do it!

Kiva
Kiva is effectively a crowd sourced micro-financed organisation that supports entrepreneurs in the developing world – lenders are individuals who provide a small loan of about $25 US which you can choose to lend to a goat farmer in Turkmenistan or a fruit-seller in Peru.

The amount of money an entrepreneur needs to borrow is gradually provided by a number of lenders, and the loan is always repaid, and the lender then has the choice of withdrawing the loan or re-investing in another entrepreneur.

Most lenders choose to re-invest the loan, so the initial gift just keeps on giving!

Jolkona
Jolkona aims to address the need for individuals to feel connected to those that their donations will be helping – it allows donors to select small projects individually, and to track the impact their donation is having by directly connecting them to organisations on the ground who make use of the donation.

For example, $100 US can rescue a young girl in Nepal from slavery – Jolkona has partnered with a grass roots organisation in Nepal who use the donation to rescue a child, and then send the donor a picture of the child who has been rescued so the donor feels the direct impact of their action. It is hugely motivating for many people to see the huge impact on real lives of even small amounts of donated money.

It is amazing that small actions taken by individuals can have such a large impact on those who most need the support. And when the power of digital and social media is used by innovators who see the potential to do great things with the technology, amazing things can happen!

If there are any other such initiatives that you know of, we’d love to hear your comments below.

Related links:
http://mashable.com/2009/10/13/give-work-iphone/
http://www.samasource.org/iphone/
http://crowdflower.com/
http://www.kiva.org/
http://www.jolkona.org/

Su Debnath, Account Director

Labels: iPhone, Social media

So the two big news items this Friday are Google Wave and Microsoft Bing. Here’s the low down.

Google Wave
Looks very cool. An über-communication and collaboration platform, integrating a bunch of functionality to create a rich mosaic of threads and conversations, or a 'wave'.

The screenshots look like Gmail on steroids but it’s not email, it’s not chat. It’s something totally new. The key takeout is that it’s collaborative, live and concurrent, more like a real conversation. The underlying principle behind the new service is something called 'operational transformation', which you can find out more about in this video (Warning! Very techy content):



Here’s the full Google Wave developer preview video which tells you everything you need to know and more (it's quite long):



Overall, I'd say Google Wave looks really innovative, and definitely 'new'. Especially because a wave is a stream of content about a subject or topic, and the content contributed to a wave is recorded over time; so it’s as much about the evolution or creation of the wave as it is about the ultimate result of that wave.

This also has implications for search because this will allow for the search of a wave, or stream, of content, rather than the search of a static result. So it’s like searching for a story about something rather than a static page of information.

So Google are again putting the focus on individuals and personal communication and experience. Giving the users the tools to make their own stuff.

If it works and isn’t as confusing as it sounds (the timeline stuff sounds like it could be 'Back to the Future' complex), then it will be awesome.

Microsoft Bing
So the other big news this Friday is MS’s new search engine called 'Bing', which is replacing Live Search (which no one uses). They’re pitching it as a ‘decision engine’ and have integrated categories of search, like shopping and travel. Not sure what else to say here except that it sounds interesting but we’ll wait and see how good it really is, the proof is in the pudding.

I’m a little skeptical though, simply because it sounds like they’ve gone down the portal model, which doesn’t really sound like a new concept, in fact portals are something which represents the legacy Web, and I can’t think of a good example of a portal that survives today which is very successful.

Maybe MS have developed a super smart Bing 'brain' which will know more than people know themselves about what they're searching for...but I'm finding it hard to see the innovation in this new search engine.

Whilst competition is a good thing, we're not sure how this changes the game nor really delivers on the promise of a 'decision engine'.

Google killer? Doubtful.

Here’s the promotional video:



Carl Panczak, General Manager Sydney

Labels: Search Engine Marketing, Social media, Technology, Web Culture and Trends

So you’ve heard about this new micro-blogging service called Twitter? Or may be you haven’t. Well here’s a brief 101 which might help you understand how you can leverage the power of Twitter for your business.

Professionally
Carl, our Sydney GM, uses Twitter to keep in touch with industry colleagues who often post useful information and links. It’s also a great way of seeking help or advice, by posting a question on Twitter, your followers can respond and offer ideas.

Marketing
Businesses can post news and announcements via Twitter, new products, sales, promotions etc.

Customer service
Companies can use it as a way to build relationships with their customers, receive feedback and ideas and suggestions.

Here’s a great example of how Twitter was used in the recent US election countdown by Tropicana: http://anorangeamerica.com/ the idea here was to track keywords related to either candidate and to display them using info-graphics, whilst linking it cleverly to the brand message ‘Freshly Squeezed Election Tweets: We’re not red. We’re not blue. We’re 100% orange.’

More about Twitter here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter

Update: Annemarie Hunter from Reseo has written a much better blog post about Twitter over here.

Carl Panczak, General Manager Sydney

Labels: Social media, Twitter, Web 2.0, Web marketing