Today was a big day for the social media world, with a tremendous amount of excitement about all of the big news that would be announced by Facebook at its first-ever event designed specifically for marketers. AGAIN was one of the lucky few agencies to be invited, and we were teeming with anticipation about what would be unveiled. After a few hours, a few keynotes, and a few breakout sessions, we’re now feeling… underwhelmed.

Our day, like most others in our space, began with waking up to a new notification message on all of our clients’ brand Pages about previewing the new Timeline layout for brands. Needless to say, this threw our morning into a whirlwind, with colleagues and clients all clamoring to know about the new page specs and how quickly we could change pages over. If we could make a suggestion to our friends at Facebook, we’d recommend that maybe next time they could show off the changes in their presentation first, and then let us all know that we’d have the ability to change over in the coming days? But we digress…

After navigating that early morning storm, we fought another one (this one actual snow and rain) getting into the city to hear the real news. When we got there, we quickly realized that we had already learned most of what we were going to during our early morning conversations and discovery. The event was light on details about the new Page specifications (Facebook has instead provided a wealth of documentation for brands on that), but rather focused much more on how Facebook envisions brands creating and using compelling Pages and post content to drive engagement; and, of course, how Facebook’s Premium Ad platform can facilitate that process.

While the “news” from the event wasn’t overly groundbreaking, it will nonetheless affect how all of us operate in the immediate future. With that in mind, here are the key details that we learned today:

Page-related

• Pages will be adopting the Timeline that users have already been enjoying. This represents a dramatic shift in how Pages can be leveraged by brands. While brands will have more real estate with the cover and icons below the cover to promote key initiatives, they will not be able to specify a landing destination, such as a welcome tab.
• With the shift to Timeline, there are also new opportunities to curate and highlight content. Images and videos will undoubtedly take on more importance given the visual importance of Timeline. However, the ability of brands to “pin” a specific post to the top of the timeline becomes a useful way to highlight content for visitors of the page (particularly first-time visitors).
• The new brand Page layout has a robust new Administration panel, which will include a number of features:
  • A recap of the social stream for the Page
  • A list of the 500 most recent new Page Likers
  • A module for Insights
  • A Page tips and recommendations section
  • A section for direct messages with users (though it appears that this messaging must be initiated by the user, not the brand)
• In the near future, Facebook will provide five (5) different levels of Administrator permissions for Pages

Advertising-related

• Facebook has bundled its Premium Ads products and branded them as the “Reach Generator.” Through “Reach Generator,” Facebook claims that brands can move from reaching just 16% of their fans with Page posts (on average), to reaching 75% or more of fans with a given piece of content
• “Reach Generator” is comprised of four different types of ad unit placements:
  1. Original content for the ad units will come from Page posts
  2. Sponsored stories posts on the right hand well of user home pages
  3. Sponsored stories posts that will now be placed in users’ news feeds, in both the desktop and mobile environments
  4. On the Facebook logout screen.

Other

• Facebook research has determined that a brand’s fans are twice as valuable as its regular customers.
• “Offers” (which is still currently in beta testing) will be launched as an official post type to everyone in near future
• The new Insights interface is being billed as facilitating Page management decisions in “real-time.” As we have all experienced to date, the new Insights platform has been plagued by lags in reporting data. Hopefully these comments indicate a move by Facebook to troubleshoot the Insights platform and make data analysis more reliable

As with all major updates to the Facebook platform, these changes dictate that brands take a step back and evaluate their social strategy and approach to leveraging the medium in the most effective way. At this point, we recommend that all brands take a thoughtful approach to evaluating their current Page content and imaging what is possible in the new format. Immediately, there are several considerations to keep in mind:

• The nature of Timeline provides brands with a fantastic opportunity to tell the story of their brand’s evolution. All brands should begin compiling the assets necessary to tell the unique story of their history and plan for how to best present it visually/textually.
• This change presents an excellent opportunity for brands to do a little spring cleaning of their content and sunset underperforming tabs and applications
• The new size specifications provide a larger canvas for custom tabs. Brands should evaluate their current tab inventory to determine which tabs merit an update to the new width specifications
• The new layout demands that brands begin to conceive a content plan/editorial calendar that takes advantage of the cover photo, tab pinning (only 3 will be visible) and post pinning abilities.

Live updates from fMC!

We knew today was going to be a big day, but we didn’t expect it to get started so early!

The AGAIN team was fortunate enough to be one of the lucky few agencies invited to attend today’s fMC event in New York at the Natural History Museum (very clever, Facebook – announcing Timeline for brands at the history museum…). To share the love, we will be providing live updates throughout the day here, on our Facebook page and via Twitter. So, while all of you are either watching along online, or sitting in other meetings and unable to watch it, don’t fret about knowing the details and how they will impact your social programs – we’ll have you covered!

We’re about to head inside, so stay tuned, but for now, we wanted to share the news from this morning with you. The most highly anticipated feature to be released today for most of us marketers is the Timeline Page for Brands. What we didn’t anticipate was that Facebook would jump the gun and roll out the functionality and detailed guidelines this morning in advance of the conference! Below is what we know at this point about the new Timeline for Brands pages, and we expect to learn a little more today as well.
Implications of Facebook brand Page updates – what we know so far:

• Timeline with cover photo/hero image is fully implemented (this affords a unique opportunity to present the history of brands. We are recommending that all clients begin compiling a rich variety of content/assets that we can utilize to tell this story)
• Cover photo guidelines indicate that Pages cannot use promotional imagery that directs people to visit particular tabs or take particular actions (their editorial guidelines are limiting this space to a branding mechanism only)
• Page profile image is now square (and should be at least 180 pixels wide)
• Brands can place a maximum of 12 applications on a page (photos, likes and applications now live at the top of the Page, with photos always showing in the first spot. However, we can change the order of everything else – so we can feature certain applications more prominently than others)
• Application icons are now 111×74 pixels instead of the 16×16 pixel format used previously in the left hand navigation
• Managing entries/updates in the Timeline – we can feature specific entries more prominently in the Timeline by hovering over a story and clicking on the star icon to make it wider, or on the pencil icon to pin it to the top of the Page, additionally, entries can be hidden or deleted entirely
• Pages can communicate directly and privately with individuals using messages (this has tremendous implications for customer service efforts!). Notifications about new messages appear in the admin panel
• Custom tabs/applications are now full page — meaning that all live tabs appear to now by 820 pixels wide (this may mean that some existing tabs will need to be resized for optimal presentation)
• Default landing tabs appear to be disabled in the new format (this is a disappointing development and we’re anxious to hear more about the logic in today’s commentary)

The answer is easy: learnings. That’s not what most companies want to hear, as they are looking for yet another channel to drive sales, but the reality is that we can only realistically hope for greater intelligence as we dive into this phase of social marketing, using e-commerce through Facebook (and possibly Twitter and YouTube later this year).

History shows us that we always have a learning curve when we start trying to sell things within new marketing channels. It was true for the first wave of commerce-enabled web sites, also true for the use of email to drive sales, and most recently, during the development of search marketing. None of those channels came out of the box and immediately made sense as a major part of a direct response marketing mix. And social media isn’t going to be any different.

While some companies have already been playing around with “almost commerce” on Facebook by enabling shopping-like experiences with SKUs and coupons and sharing and the like… The reality is that you then go to the .com with your wish list or coupon to check out. And why not? Aren’t most consumers now used to going to several web sites, and doing several searches, to make sure they are getting the best price on the best possible item they want to purchase? So, why would you just find something on a company’s Facebook page, and decide to buy right there and then? Plus, the trending over the past year shows a drop-off in social fans actually going to your company page anymore – they interact with us much more now through our posts on their newsfeeds. Even Forrester made the bold proclamation that “companies that herald Facebook as the next big thing in e-commerce have “the credence of a cultist who insists that the world will end next year.” Read more

So, it’s not a surprise that the results at this point have been minimal, even though retailers like JC Penny and GNC have rolled out pretty big investments to have e-commerce enabled Facebook presences.

Then, how can doing this be beneficial in the near future?

First, the things people want to buy within an experience like Facebook need to be unique, targeted, and time-sensitive. The last part is the only way to make a unique call-to-action to elicit someone to buy right there. Having a special offer that you can only get there, and you only have 4 more hours to make up your mind, is a good way to start learning what types of products and price points social fans are going to bite on.

Second, make sure the e-commerce strategy you are building for Facebook keeps in mind the one part of that social network that is addictive, and is the engine that makes it hum… the newsfeed. This isn’t a channel where you can just pit up a static store with a product gallery and expect consumers to visit it, let alone buy there. Whatever the e-commerce approach is, we need to incorporate how regular status updates will help drive sales interest and engagement, without pissing off our fans with too much of our own promotional spam.

Finally, keep in mind this is social media. This is a two-or-more-way conversation. We can learn a lot from our fans about what they want to buy, how much they’ll pay for it, and where they would prefer making the transaction. And they’ll appreciate being a vocal part of defining that process. So, let’s test some things with social commerce this year, and make sure to set expectations with our fans/consumers that we are testing… and listening to them. The more we can include them in defining how this is going to work in the years to come, the more they will be invested in the evolving approach, and hopefully the more we will be smart about how to sell things to them (or not) in these new channels.

Authored by Glenn

A great piece on Forbes.com this week about the epic corporate blunders of 2010 should remind us all of the pendulum swinging above our collective heads, as well as remind us of the importance of the 7Ps in utilizing social media for reputation management activities. (If the term 7Ps doesn’t ring a bell, then you’ve clearly never served time in the British Army, and should look here.)

Why are the 7Ps important in online reputation management? Well, among other commonly identifiable gaffes in the Forbes examples, one big theme jumps out: despite putting little to no effort into their social media presences previously, many of those companies immediately hopped on the social media bandwagon as a primary channel in their response efforts. You can imagine the frantic conference room conversations:

“We’ve got to get in front of this thing… We need messaging out there… Everywhere! Now! …To show that we care!”

“What about Twitter? We’ve got that account that customer service uses… Oh, and we should put the release up on our Facebook page! Somebody call marketing!!”

“The intern that set up Facebook account is apparently the only “page administrator”… we need him to give us access to get the release up… Does anybody know his cell phone number!?!? “

And of course, their collective social media response efforts failed. Miserably. Need proof? The parody “@BPGlobalPR” Twitter account has more than 180,000 followers, while the official “@BP_America” account has just 18,000. The scariest part? Several of those companies are major players in the online space!

Compare the above failures with a pair of successes this year: first, Southwest, in dealing with the Kevin Smith incident; and second, JetBlue, in dealing with the Steven Slater incident. Does this mean that airlines are more adept at managing crises? No – sadly it means that I’m not as good at coming up with examples as is Forbes! But w it also demonstrates is the power and importance of properly integrating social media into your overall marketing communications mix. By establishing yourself in social channels ahead of time, you position yourself for success when it matters.

Both Southwest and JetBlue had robust social media presences established before their respective “crises.” And both survived these reputation management firestorms by relying on the social media channels that they had spent time and energy nurturing. Sure, there was a lot of buzz around both of the above issues, but the attention was brief, and the lasting impact was negligible. Why? Because they took action quickly, leveraged the trust capital they already garnered in social channels, and when they communicated with their consumers, they were taken at their word (mostly) because they had established themselves as reliable and trustworthy players in the space. (A great piece by Kristi Bolsinger on SocialFresh provides hard data on how little impact the Steven Slater incident had on JetBlue’s lasting reputation – and she uses our partner Alterian’s SM2 dashboard to do it. Very cool!)

Are you ready for your brand’s crisis moment? If you haven’t established an effective an ongoing dialogue with your customers in social channels, then don’t fool yourself into thinking you are.

Authored by Tim

(Note to Sally Field, if you’re reading this, this piece has nothing to do with you – and if you’re not a film buff or you were born after 1984, look up the title and Sally Field and catch up with us old timers…)

Cone released its Consumer New Media Study last week, and the results should be both encouraging, and scary, to social media marketers. The research shows that while more and more consumers are using new media channels, and their willingness to engage with companies online is rapidly growing; they form distinct relationships with very few brands and when they do, that relationship is tenuous at best.

While eighty six percent of consumers expressed willingness to engage with companies via new media, the average number of companies that a consumer officially bonds with (via a Facebook “like,” Twitter “follow,” etc…) is just 4.6! The main reason they decide to actually form that bond? Incentives. Seventy seven percent of consumers are looking for for free products, coupons or discounts before making that decision. And once that relationship is formed, it appears that consumers are ready to sever the tie quickly – with more than half of respondents saying that they’ll stop following a company if it acts irresponsibly toward them, over-communicates with them or provides irrelevant content.

Unsurprisingly, all of this points to the need for a coherent and cohesive strategy to acquire, convert and maintain audiences through social media. Simply “buying” fans – either directly or via outrageous incentives – will provide only a short-lived spike in fan base if a company is not prepared to maintain the relationship, by providing both real and perceived value to the consumer – through a robust mix of news, information, entertainment and promotion that is unique to and aligns with the brand’s personality.

So, before you commit to growing your fan base by X% next year, make sure you’ve got a plan in place to nurture those connections once you make them or else you’ll be wasting a lot of time, energy and budget. (And if you need help with that plan and its supporting technologies, AGAIN can help).

If you’re ready to commit, the rewards can be great. According to Cone, the consumers who perceive value out of these connections are more likely to:

· Share information about the company across their own social networks (62%)

· Feel a stronger connection to the company (61%)

· Feel better served by the company (60%)

· Purchase the company’s products or services (59%)

Authored by Tim

Once upon a time, our conversations around the office pitted the virtues of two giants in social media against each other — MySpace and Facebook. That seems like a long time ago. In the few years since, we’ve witnessed Facebook, and more recently Twitter, become the darlings of social networking while MySpace become a niche, albeit still well-visited, site for music and entertainment. Change was inevitable, though most of us predicted that this change would be My_____’s death. Now, like Rocky Balboa before it, the network has pulled itself up the ropes for one last fight.

In making its (possible) last stand, MySpace has shifted its strategy, and its design, to be less about being a competitor social network and more about embracing its core user group — the entertainment industry. Individuals can still have a highly customizable profile page, but the site now works harder to channel users into interesting and popular music and video content, which is still in ample supply.

Will it be enough to save My_____? While I think the shifts they’ve enacted are smart, their relevance will be hard to re-attain. Here’s why:

My____ Doesn’t Do It Better
While the new design is a significant improvement with no particular flaws, it doesn’t offer any functionality for presenting and sharing content that can’t be matched by its nearest competitors, including Facebook and YouTube. With Facebook gaining more and more ground as a destination for businesses (including musicians), and brand sites increasing their integration of social media, it’s going to be harder and harder for My_____ to hold onto its already shrinking market share.

Audience Overlap
My_____ no longer has an audience that is unique. Its users are equally likely to have a Facebook account. As its content continues to be replicated elsewhere, the reasons for a user to keep up on her My_____ account will dwindle. Sure, there are those anti-Facebook folks out there, but My_____ is no longer the cool alternative kid. It’s the mom and dad of social media. Not cool.

Standard User Backlash
On top of the challenges above, My_____ must now deal with a significantly changed business model and the user backlash that comes with it. It happens. It’s normal in fact. However, whereas many businesses can expect to gain more users than they lose during such a transition, it’s hard to see where those new users will come from. Is this change in business model enough to attract a whole new generation of My_____ users? It’s hard to envision.

While my opinion of My_____’s future is bleak, I do laud My_____ for these recent changes (even the new logo!) and only wish it had enacted them a year and half ago. Hopefully, it’ll prove me wrong as I think the social networking scene is more interesting with them around. I’m guessing we’ll know within the next 6-9 months.

Authored by Terrence

Since the launch of Facebook Places in August of this year, there has been a ton of anticipation about when we could really start using the incredible reach of the Facebook platform for geolocation marketing. Facebook Places already has 7 times as many users as Foursquare (30 millon to 4 million), and the opportunity to grow exponentially larger, into the 540 million user base of Facebook itself. But until now, those users haven’t really been using it.

And here haven’t been any reasons for us marketers to cheer, either, since Places has lacked any real way to run promotions to customers, and doesn’t support bulk claiming of multiple retail locations, nor a way to manage all of a companies locations from one central account.

But, maybe we are seeing all of that change in short order. First, Facebook is rolling out a check-in rewards system called “Deals” which incentivizes consumers when they by tag friends in a check-in to a Place then show a Deals confirmation page to an employee of that business. The Deal can be shared with those connected to that Place’s Page, and companies can monitor use of the Deal through an admin interface.

They’re also working on a system for large marketers to claim and manage multiple locations, but they aren’t spilling any beans on the timing of that feature.

There could be user abuse of the Deals system, depending on what Facebook does to mitigate against it. Users could create multiple fake accounts and check those fake “friends” in, limiting the exposure of the check-in. Users could also check-in friends who aren’t present, as check-ins don’t require a confirmation. Users could also collect their reward before a friend sees and delete their tag in the check-in. These are just a few of the challenges that Foursquare will need to safeguard against if this is going to be used by serious marketers.

So what can we do? Get ready. Make sure you have your store/location list updated, along with geo coordinates for each place, so you can claim them as soon as it’s possible. And start talking with your sales associates and partners about what kinds of offers could match up with this type of consumer touchpoint. And while you’re at it, you might want to ask your customers what they could get excited about when it comes to check-in rewards – a simple poll can go a long way in understanding what will work, and reduce any testing once the channel is ready to go.

In our business, there are constantly bright, shiny new toys to ogle and exploit, but few know the ecstasy of a meteoric rise to stardom and the agony of a fall from grace as well as Myspace. From reaching 100 million monthly unique users in March of 2007 (Facebook didn’t get there until December of 2009…) to the declaration that “Myspace is Dead” by ReadWriteWeb in April 2009, the social network has ridden on a very exclusive roller coaster.

So, what’s a poor billionaire like Rupert Murdoch to do? Why, reinvent the property, of course! Calling itself a “social entertainment destination for Gen Y.” Myspace announced today a complete revamp of the network, with the new property seemingly focused on allowing users to share what they like with the rest of the world.

The big question is, will it work? That remains to be seen, but we do see a niche here that seems like a ripe opportunity. As opposed to Facebook, where the vast majority of users appear to be flaunting themselves in an effort o be popular, Myspace will let users aggregate and share the things that they like with others – in effect, letting users congregate around shared content of interest.

The marketplace for such an offering seems both open and closed at the same time. While Facebook’s Community Pages effort has been a failure at both aggregating such communities AND becoming the ultimate vessels of shared knowledge (I mean, c’mon Facebook – you thought simply piping in Wikipedia content would spark this thing?); a quick search on “Fan Clubs” shows that the online community has a depth and breadth of experience in creating rich destinations for their favorite artists and content. So, is a portal for such communities really necessary? That’s the bet Rupert seems to be making.

So, now that Myspace isn’t popular for simply being Myspace anymore, they are going to leverage pop culture and let the business of popularity and fandom make their network popular once again. It’s an interesting concept, and we’re eager to see who jumps on the bandwagon.

The hottest trend in digital marketing just got a lot more interesting, this time due to a new feature from an established direct marketing channel. Google is rolling out its new Place Search today (Thursday, 10/28), which will give users more instant search information for local businesses, to drive consumers into stores and restaurants. Now, instead of just getting a title and short description for local searches, users will be served more information including a photo, and verbatim snippets from consumer-driven review sites such as Yelp.

So, what does this mean for marketers who are trying to stay on top of all of the localization opportunities? It means that on top of Foursquare, Gowalla, and Facebook Places, we should also be claiming Google Place pages and paying attention to the listings and reviews that users see there. The advantage of this new channel is that Google always knows how to help marketers have more influence on their success (if you’re willing to spend some money). We can use their “Boost” ads, which lift your Place page to the top of the results screen, while making them look like the organic results. That’s something worth testing… as long as your business’ reviews are positive!

It also means that local/geolocation channels are maturing to the point where we need to have a real marketing plan just for this area – making sure we are using each appropriate platform to its full potential, and also integrating them all so we aren’t just testing five different ways of reaching local consumers without a wider perspective of what is going to work.

And while public relations and customer service teams are addressing reputation issues in review sites, digital marketing staff are looking at buying localized ads, and social media leaders are trying to manage an ever-expanding footprint across expanding channels — new channels like this force us to all dovetail our efforts to ensure the most effective way of connecting with consumers.

The announcement of Bing Social, a partnership between Microsoft and Facebook, wasn’t as groundbreaking once you actually visited the site and saw what was there. [http://bit.ly/9Yhk3P] It’s not that fun to just see them provide Facebook search results in a slicker interface, and a list of trending topics. However, this is definitely a big step in the direction of crossing the streams between the massive volume of online searches for products and services, and the more than 50 billion monthly page views on Facebook where users are connecting with their friends and favorite brands.

Where we all assume this is going is that when we search for something we might be interested in buying, all of friends in our social networks will overlay their opinions and influence our purchase decisions. And if the major search engines begin to feed in this type of information from our networks, while at the same time Facebook continues to spread its tentacles into other parts of our online lives through their Open Graph API tools, there’s little doubt we will get there within months.

But the exciting part of these channels is that they aren’t done innovating yet. That means the actual integration of these two forces will probably be different, and more powerful, than we are imagining at this point. The only way to be on the edge of that is to be using these things, and being a part of the experimentation on how we can leverage what is available now, and push for more opportunity by being a force of ideas and smart marketing that will make big change happen. So, while we are already testing the impact of different social marketing efforts on natural search… and have long been optimizing influencer marketing across these channels to drive sales, we need to keep going back to the lab to come up with new approaches to try.