Facebook Makes Major Announcements at F8 [LIVE]

Facebook Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg is making major announcements to an audience of developers and press at the F8 Conference in San Francisco.  Ben Parr from Mashable is there taking notes.   Article

Most notably: The developer policy of not storing user data for more than 24 hours is now gone — this will give developers more time to use user data via Facebook Connect.

I don’t know if this policy will make brands more social or more stalker-like.  However, it’s my experience that access to data  makes marketers smarter in general.  They tend to present more relevant content when they know more about their consumers.

10 Essential Rules for Brands in Social Media

Taddy Hall, former Chief Strategist for the Advertising Research Institute, shares his thoughts on Social Media:

These days everyone seems to have advice about how to run your social media marketing program. There are so many tips floating around, it’s hard to know what truly essential strategies you should follow to effectively use social media to build your business. Questions abound: Do Facebook fans drive sales?  Why should I fund forums for consumers to pillory my products, ridicule my service and tout the competition?  And, whatever I decide to do, how I will I know if it’s working?

In the search for truth, sometimes social media is its own worst enemy. With a self-credentialed guru waiting at every click, finding actionable, fact-based insight is tricky.

So, in a modest attempt to bring a dose of sanity to this intellectual frat party, I’ve reined my impulse to lob more “personal picks” into the fray.  Instead, I’ll follow the wisdom of an august data mining colleague to just “let the data speak.”

Our process was to query data from hundreds of our brand clients to see what testable truths emerged — and here’s what we found: 10 rules that hold up across category and time.

1. The 1% Rule

In category after category, our data show that a small fraction of site visitors are responsible for a substantial portion of total site traffic. On average, the percentage of influential users (defined for our purposes simply as a visitor who’s subsequent sharing actions result in at least one additional site visitor) on a given site is 0.6% and rarely above 4%.  However, these influencers regularly generate 20%-50% of total site traffic and an even higher share of conversion (defined however a site owner so decides). To make social media marketing effective, marketers have to identify and engage — and better recognize and reward — these super-influentials.

2. The 2-4X Rule

When it comes to conversion, visitors driven to a site by influencers are to to four times more likely to convert compared to visitors from other sources, such as display advertisements or paid search. That means your landing pages for people coming from shared links and social sites should reflect these visitors’ interests and offer enticing deals that will encourage them not only to convert but to share the deals with others.

3. The New Media/New Pipes Rule

In today’s socially driven internet, it matters far more what consumers do with your content than what you
do with your content. What they say about your brand means more than what you say about your brand. Our data shows that content spread from consumer to consumer through word-of-mouth is far more powerful at driving brand preference and purchase intent than content distributed by the brand itself. This has profound implications in social media. To illustrate, if a brand puts content on its Facebook fan page, it is far less likely to go viral than if an influential consumer puts that very same piece of content on his or her page or posts it to a relevant community of enthusiasts.

4. The Martha Stewart Rule

Throw your own party; don’t just cater someone else’s!  If you base your social campaigns in venues you don’t control — such as Facebook or YouTube — you may get great “attendance,” but data show it’s hard to convert and retain these party-goers. If your goals are anything beyond building brand awareness, it’s better to have a house of your own where friends can find you — such as your own branded social site, contest site, or customer forum.

5. The Power of “Weak Links” Rule

Influentials generally do have many direct “friends” and “followers,” but what makes them truly valuable is the number and relevance of their extended or indirect connections. As Albert-Laszlo Barabasi illustrated in “Linked,” you are far more likely to find your next job through a friend-of-a-friend than through an intimate contact. These “weak links” matter in the “real world,” and they matter even more online. A critical implication for marketers is the need to track the extended social graphs of their content if they are going to be able to understand and activate the dynamics of influence.

6. The Feed the Fire Rule

Consumers love to share relevant, engaging, useful, and entertaining content with their friends. Make it easy for them to find your content and make it easy for them to share your content.  Ninety percent of internet pages have fewer than 10 links pointing to them — making them effectively unfindable. Avoiding this abyss of irrelevance requires more thought and effort than just pasting a sharing tool on your pages. It means actively syndicating and curating your content and distributing it not only through your brand’s social graph, but through the graphs of your most influential advocates and fans.  Easy ways to do this include following/friending your influentials’ followers/friends and retweeting/posting content even if it’s not yours.

7. The More Things Change Rule

Our research consistently demonstrates that e-mail and IM remain popular ways to share content. So don’t throw out your old e-mail marketing methods just because Facebook and Twitter are the newest communication platforms du jour. The tried-and-true methods of getting customers to share links via e-mail and IM are still extremely valuable sources of traffic. Furthermore, incorporating social elements into your e-mail, such as incentives to share, can dramatically enhance an investment you’re already making.

8. Horse Before the Cart Rule

Success in social media happens when brands infuse their content with social dimensions (Facebook Connect, most notably), not when they simply stick their ads and content in social forums. In other words, if you want to succeed in social media, your brands and content need to have social attributes — content worth sharing, brands worth talking about, sites that encourage consumer participation and dialog. If your social strategy relies on advertising in social media, it’s probably better to hang on to your money.

9. The PR Pitfalls Rule

Blogger outreach and content seeding may be popular ways to get your message into the social world, but our data show that more than 90% of seeding has no material impact.  Up to 5% gets some response, but less than 2% of seeding drives valuable traffic.  In other words, if you can’t track efficacy of these efforts, don’t bother.

10. The Customer-Service Rule

Social marketing programs succeed when they provide a service to the consumer. Traditional media-planing processes that begin with reach and frequency targets are largely unhelpful in social media. Reach and frequency — as well as engagement, preference and conversion — are positive consequences of giving consumers content that is sufficiently relevant and useful that they propagate your message across their own social graphs. Focus on providing useful content and offers to your target audience and they will spread your messages for you.

Social media isn’t a science, but applying data-backed principles to your social efforts provides a structured framework that will enable you to improve effectiveness and ROI over time. And one final note: Every rule has exceptions. We live in dynamic times. Find what’s true for you — and share.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Taddy Hall is chief operating officer of Meteor Solutions and former chief strategy officer for the Advertising Research Foundation.

Facebook acquires event tagging specialist Divvyshot

Facebook recently completed its acquisition of Divvyshot, a relatively new group photo-sharing operation with 40,000 users. While terms were not disclosed, it is clear that Facebook is buying technology and talent, not revenue or subscriber base. Divvyshot specializes in event tagging in photos, and has made a name for itself in maintaining photo quality, an area in which Facebook has struggled. With just three employees, Divvyshot gives Facebook a way to stay ahead of its would-be competitors in photo technology. This purchase makes a great deal of sense – buying Divvyshot before it gets big is the least expensive way to improve photo sharing technology. Facebook users upload 3-4 billion photos a month to the website. The ability to perform group tagging at events will keep users happy and ward off other competitors.

If A ‘Social Media’ Program Is Launched And No One Participates, Is It A ‘Program’?

While this article is couched in the context of Healthcare, it really applies across all industries and is good advice for all marketers.  Is your participation in social networking more about “checking the box” or is it a strategic approach to engagement and advocacy?

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by Tom Simons

We’ve seen ambitious programs launched that invite audience activity — “Post your video,” for example — and the invitation is summarily declined.

These are not the efforts of fly-by-night agencies or cavalier clients. Quite the contrary.

Our observation is that these are programs in which social media is seen as a box to be “checked off” — not a strategic component of a larger plan intended to cause a positive business outcome.

Since the only goal is audience participation, the audience sees little value in the invitation and opts not to get involved.

We understand the seduction. We have clients saying, “We’ve got to do something in social media!” It probably isn’t the second coming, but it is a phenomenon that is game changing in all kinds of respects. More importantly to them, it’s cheaper than paid media.

But if an organization wants social media success, it must integrate it into a larger context. Social media have more richness if they interlock with complementary marketing and media strategies — and if the messages in each are insightful and synchronous.

It can be complicated for companies that feel the imperative to jump into social media up to their ankles. But it’s better to think it through so you don’t find yourself having to explain to the CEO or the CFO how the social media experiment turned into another marketing expense that failed to generate any return.

Social Media and The Rise of Healthcare Consumerism

When it comes to healthcare, making social media part of an overall strategy can have significant benefits to reach a new kind of active and aware healthcare consumer.

Escalating health premiums — a barometric reading of increasing healthcare cost pressure — are no longer sustainable. Cost increases are created by factors that include: amortizing the expenses of treating those without insurance; lack of coordination of healthcare services that often leads to redundancies and inefficiencies; and inconsistent quality.

All of these factors are making us more active healthcare consumers. We are more active than our parents: we are 78% more likely to research information on physicians and 75% more likely to evaluate treatment options. Only 24% of us trust our doctor completely to make the right decisions for us in terms of where we should go to get our care. When choosing a hospital, only 5% of us feel that hospitals are doing an excellent job educating us on why their facility is better than others.

Healthcare consumerism is growing and requires consistent nourishment — that is where the profound opportunity lies for health organizations. The more options patients have to deepen their engagement, make informed decisions and manage expenses, the better. Hospitals regularly generate data that show patient satisfaction has direct bottom-line consequences. Health plans encourage members to use the system appropriately and manage their own health more actively to avoid the system as much as possible.

Hence, social media are vital, necessary components to integrate into all communications. They are strategic tools in the arsenal just like public relations, advertising, search, community outreach.

Healthcare consumers want — and are getting used to — freedom of choice. They are taking a more active role in making decisions about selecting who will provide their care and where they will receive it. Reform-minded providers understand that the patient experience, and patient satisfaction, can have profound consequences.

So go build something that educates and adds value, something that integrates with other programs and includes measurable online media in conjunction with traditional media. We know the majority of patients are online looking for health information and they’re discussing it.

Rather than avoiding social media, join the party. Get the brainstorms going. Think about new ideas. Start conversations in new ways with patients and doctors. Let them tell us what they want.

And then you will engage consumers on a more organic level. And they will see value. And participate.