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Pinterest Partner Event Recap

May 23, 2013 Leave a comment

I recently attended the first ever Pinterest Partner Marketing Summit in NYC. This invite only event unveiled their emphasis on developing a strong partner program and also served as an opportunity to introduce new staff to the Pinterest partner team, new resources for brands and agencies and best practices to maximize the platform.

There were five primary areas of focus for the event.

1) Why Pinterest
2) Pinterest Interest Graph
3) New product enhancements (Rich Pin & Mobile Pin It)
4) Analytics & Partner Tools
5) Partner case studies & Best Practices

WHY PINTEREST

Ben Silbermann, Pinterest Co-Founder & CEO started the day by telling the story of Pinterest. He discussed his love of collections when he was young… stamps, butterflies, baseball cards, etc… he saw an opportunity as there was not an elegant solution to organize collections online.

He had roots with Google and was enamored by how the search giant was able to so seamlessly focus on enabling search & retrieval across the web. If you know what you are looking for Google provides an ideal platform for search & retrieval.

He actually related Pinterest more to Google & search than to other social channels such as Facebook. With Pinterest people vs. bots are indexing the webs content and organizing them by interests, something that is a bit more subjective but aligns with human behavior.

One of his key points was in defining Pinterests role in discovery of content.

“Discovery on the web is an unsolved problem & massive opportunity” – Ben Silbermann

With Pinterest, people are making discovery possible by organizing the web’s content around interests. This is their key point of differentiation as the platform is about discovery and action.

It was interesting to hear Ben’s story about the roots of Pinterest and it also provided insight into where the platform is going which leads to the Interest Graph.

INTEREST GRAPH

The Pinterest team spent a good bit of time discussing what they coined the Pinterest Interest Graph. An interest graph is an online representation of the specific things in which an individual is interested. And because the focus of Pinterest is based on what people are indexing on the web and then categorizing by interests, the Pinterest Interest Graph is the foundation for their business moving forward.

A key point of differentiation between Facebook’s Social Graph & Pinterest & even Twitters interest graphs are the fact that Interest Graphs are used to create people’s interest networks whereas Facebook and other social networks are organized around an individual’s friends and connections that follow them across the web.

The key to the interest graph for Pinterest is the ability to create personalized experiences that change based on an individuals life stage and interests. The association is less with people and more with things. This may include life events such as marriage, children, etc… and Pinterest hopes that by focusing on interests they are building a sustainable platform that can grow with users over time and continue to provide both utility and relevance based on discovery.

The key to the interest graph from a brand perspective is that a single product can be repined into other areas. As the single object passes across the interest graph across categories you are able to leverage the network of interests and passions vs. pushing a message and see how your product resonates in real time. This leads to driving discoverability by interest as well as distribution and lengthens the shelf life of content as it continually gets repined.

Interest Graph in action for me… I like Robots

PRODUCT ENHANCEMENTS

Pin it Button – the theme that was repeated the most over the course of the event was the focus on the Pin It button. Pinterest reiterated that a strong Pinterest strategy starts with enabling your domain. By enabling and focusing on driving & optimizing pins down to the individual product level are the key to driving more engagement and driving higher referral traffic.

Mobile Pinning – Earlier this week Pinterest launched the ability to integrate the Pin It button into a brands mobile application to further drive discoverability via mobile for both iOS & Android via SDKs. The SDK allows a brands users to create Pinterest content inside the branded app. Currently, this only supports pinning from the web, but the ability to pin local images is on the roadmap as well.

Here is an example of Mobile Pinning in action from the Brit + Co (launch partner) mobile app

Rich Pins – Also tied to this weeks launch was the release of Rich Pins. Pinterest hopes that Rich Pins lead to action and by adding more brand data to a pin tied to products, recipes & movies that more direct attribution and value for brands and users will be apparent. Product pins from a brand can showcase active inventory as well as price & references the source directly from the pin. Recipe Rich Pins allow more data to be added directly to the pin and movie pins offer insight into reviews as well as cast directly from the pin.

Product Pins

Recipe Pins

Movie Pins

Implementation – In order to implement Rich Pins meta tags need to applied to your domain and decide on the type of rich pin you want to apply for. Then once the meta tags have been validated you can apply to get them from Pinterest.

From a brand perspective, this is the first step to further enabling brand content and attribution. Especially the product pins can be of value to further drive action when discovered.

ANALYTICS & PARTNER TOOLS

On March 11th, Pinterest launched their data analytics tool. This was another key discussion point during the course of the event. The analytics tool supports Pinterest’s position to enable a brands .com as the suite focuses on content pinned directly from the .com and focus on how many people are pinning from the website, impressions & reach over time and which pins receive the most repins and who pins them as well as what other content people are pinning alongside them.

This data can be extremely useful when incorporating top pins into tailoring content for the website as well as other social channels. Nordstrom was a presenting brand and the key takeaway from their presentation was their focus on curating pins and using analytics as a driver for surfacing content on their website, e-mail as well as in store. By leveraging Pinterest in this way, Nordstrom claimed increased sell through in stores and online.

Nordstrom Top Pins via .com

Nordstrom in store

Pinterest also rolled out new partner tools starting with a revamped business.pinterest.com as well as a new business blog that will focused on enabling partners and will serve as the location for new product feature announcements. The team also announced that they will soon be providing webinars on best practices to further enable partners.

Unlike Facebook & Twitter, Pinterest is less about working directly with their partner teams and more about enabling the platform to allow brands to maximize their presence.

CASE STUDIES

During the course of the event four brands were represented including Target, Sephora, Nordstroms & Sony Electronics. I have already referenced how Nordstroms is leveraging Pinterest data to drive their content & in-store strategy. Below are a few key points from the Sephora & Sony Electronics presentations.

Sephora

The most compelling elements from the Sephora case study was their laser focus on identifying trends via pins. Their goals were tied to making it easier to pin from Sephora.com, use e-mail to encourage Pinterest engagement and encourage clients to pin their beauty shopping lists.

Focus on top pins to inform content strategy across channels
Content goes beyond simple product to incorporate DIY type content
Testing various types of Pin to Win initiatives that are cross promoted

Embedded Pinterest across social channels such as Facebook
Created pinnable e-mails drove significant results including a 60% increase in referral traffic from Pinterest that has not subsided
Focus on creating a shoppable experience on Pinterest
Claimed that shoppers are closer to purchase in the path to purchase and stated a statistic of 15x the sales impact vs. Facebook

Sony Electronics

I was most impressed by the work of Sony electronics of the four brands that presented. What I liked about their story is they are not the first brand you think of when you think about the Pinterest platform. They are a manufacturer vs. retailer and their audience is a younger, high tech male group who is not the primary audience of the platform. They had very clearly defined strategy objectives of driving sales, acquisition and brand affinity on the platform and they have leveraged the social power of their internal organization as well as consumers to power their experience.

Audience (Sony electronics appeal to more than women)
They curated content that existed, retro products, artist style, influencers who shoot with their cameras etc…
Launched presence with an employee contest to educate and curate relevant content across the organization
Drove awareness via the Sony Electronics blog & e-mail
E-mail is a critical component to their Pinterest strategy, pin, collect, share –> Pinterest focused messages get double the open rate
Inform their content strategy based on Pins
Leverage 3rd parties such as Curalate to identify influencers
Executed innovative programs such as Pin Deals – unlock via 20 pins – flash sale & Pin it to give it – repins = $1 to charity and received 13,000 pins

Partnered with relevant brands to enter new categories such as Pinterest partnership with American Airlines to enter travel

BEST PRACTICES

The following is a list of best practices that were discussed during the course of the event. This is not a comprehensive best practices list, but does highlight the key points that the Pinterest team & brands represented did speak to repeatedly.

Strategy

The Pinterest team reiterated that the best Pinterest strategy starts with your domain.
Remember boards are not destinations, most of the interaction will happen at the Pin level
Pinnable E-mail is a critical component to a successful Pinterest strategy, enable content to be pinned on the individual content level

Platform

Add Pin-It Button to domain
Verify the business with Pinterest
Enable Domain Analytics
Activate & Incorporate Rich Pins to create a cleaner connection to inventory and enabling action
Leverage the Mobile SDK’s to further enable sharing directly from a brands app

Content

Learn from top pins, timely relevant pins that map to domain are key
Optimize pins, Sony’s audience preferred product shots while Target’s audience resonates with Lifestyle images
Short Captions are key, the goal is to tease to promote click through
Focus on content that will drive repins
Pin your product along with other inspirational content to boards
Focus on creating ripples with content vs. “feed stuffing”

Contests

When it comes to Pin It to Win it type of initiatives, it is important to ensure that there is a variety of content to pin
A pin from a Pin it to Win it is good, but the focus should be on repins. Repins are the key to successful promotion on the platform

SUMMARY

The first Pinterest partner event was definitely insightful and the event closed with the following points:

1) Discovery on the web is an unsolved problem & massive opportunity
2) People are making discovery possible by organizing the web’s content around interests
3) You can make your business more discoverable by inspiring people to pin

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Filed under BlackFin360, Marketing, Mobile, Pinterest, Social Media Tagged with Advantages of Pinterest for business, Blackfin360, Fanscape, Pinterest, Pinterest Analytics, pinterest case studies, pinterest iOS SDK, Pinterest Mobile API, Pinterest Partner Event, Pinterest partner marketing event, Pinterest Partner program, Pinterest Rich Pins, Pinterst best practices, The Marketing Arm, TheBlackFin, Tom Edwards

Callaway Hit The Links

April 23, 2013 Leave a comment

When you are part of the “idea” business you spend a lot of time thinking, curating and throwing things (figuratively & sometimes literally) against the wall. Sometimes things stick, sometimes there are dead ends, but you are always in search of the slightest germ of an idea to spark creativity.

This stream of thought reminded me of a quote from the movie Inception that has stuck with me. It is when Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) makes the following statement:

“An idea is like a virus, resilient, highly contagious.“

Applying context to marketing, a good idea can be highly contagious. You begin to immediately see the “legs” of the idea and how it can potentially extend out. Whether it is tied to a larger brand campaign, branded content or even an activation, a good idea change the game for a brand.

I had an “Inception” moment when members of my team Brandon Stuart, Creative Director & Mike Chiavetta, Director of Social Strategy @ Fanscape/TMA, began discussing the concept & strategy associated with the Callaway activation that is outlined below. There are moments when the consumer + idea + channel + message = compelling consumer engagement program.

The Callaway Hit The Links activation was the result of a close partnership between Callaway and Linkedin to leverage their API’s and create a relevant connection with the target consumer and overlay a fun concept that is built to be shared.

When it came to developing the creative concept I asked Brandon Stuart, Creative Director at Fanscape to share his thoughts on the program.

“Hit the Links is an example of the potency a concept can have when it is derived at the intersection of creative and strategic thinking. We set out to create a consumer engagement experience that is truly first of its kind, yet still effective and personable in nature. Since golf is often an organic dialogue between professionals, Hit the Links positions Callaway as a catalyst that sparks conversations on the biggest professional network in the world. We are fishing not only where the fish are, but also where no other golf brand has fished.“

When it came to the strategy I asked Mike Chiavetta, Director of Social Strategy at Fanscape to discuss how strategy impacted activation.

“Hit The Links is the result of rigorous immersion with the brand and business. Our mission going into this was to know everything about Callaway so all of our work will result in moving their business forward and create stronger connections with their consumers. The insights we uncovered from recent trends in the category, research planning, social data and consumer behavior gave us the end result of what core golfers desired. Creating an experience that fulfilled those desires was the fun part. Theres nothing like watching all of the pieces fall into place and know coming out that you have something special.”

Here is an overview of the program:

It all starts with a simple invite that comes from the native Linkedin messages feature. By connecting the message from a direct Linkedin connection, we are creating contextual relevance for the recipient, increasing the probability of taking action.

Next you are sent to a visually appealing landing page that outlines the value proposition & call to action. This is the “why” you should engage.

Next is the authentication to connect your network with the program. This is a key point of enablement for the experience. By leveraging the authentication directly and by connecting the user to their network across both mobile & desktop allows us to provide as seamless an experience as possible.

Once connected, you then have the option to begin selecting your golf foursome. The benefit to the consumer is the opportunity to create the “ultimate golf business trip” for you and three of your connections. You pick your ideal foursome and sign up for a chance to win an advanced fitting experience and get a custom built set of clubs, a round of golf & test the new HEX Chrome+ all at Callaway’s headquarters.

The system will auto-generate a golf foursome, or allow you to pick your group from your network. At this point there is also an opportunity to opt-in and view the rules of the promotion.

Once you finalize your group, you are ready to finalize your entry for the day. It is possible to gain additional entries daily with different foursome combinations.

Once your group is finalized, you have the opportunity to let the members you selected know they have been selected and they have the opportunity to create their own entry as well. All messaging is delivered via the Linkedin native message functionality.

Also, there is a sampling initiative tied to the program as well. The first 1,000 participants can claim a box of HEX CHROME+ golf balls courtesy of Callaway to further drive a direct connection of product to the consumer.

I am incredibly proud of the team for this concept & strategy. Key members of the creative team were:

Brandon Stuart, Creative Director @ Fanscape
Mike Chiavetta, Director of Social Media Strategy @ Fanscape

Special thanks to Brad Alesi, Director, Digital Engagement @ The Marketing Arm for contributions to the Fanscape Callaway Team.

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Facebook News Feed Announcement

March 7, 2013 3 Comments

Today Facebook held an event to announce the first major change to the Facebook News Feed in six years. The theme reinforced by the Facebook team was reduction of clutter by providing more choice and control over the content and stories users will see in their feeds.

“From the beginning, our goal with News Feed was different from any other social service was trying to provide… You should be able to share any content that you want. Status updates, links, photos, etc… You should be able to share with any audience that you want, publicly, with the world, with just friends, or privately” – Mark Zuckerberg

Here are feature highlights from today’s announcement:

The newly designed newsfeed will start rolling out in limited rollouts today with a focus on a “mobile first” design.

The new design is heavily reliant on the ability to segment content by feed type allowing for more control:

All Friends will showcase everything your friends are sharing. This feed will highlight friend content and add a “facepile” type of overlay to the side of the story to show who has shared the content. Social connectivity is highlighted as the intersection of timeline & the newsfeed becomes more pervasive with the inclusion of friends “add a friend” which allows you to see more about that person directly in the news feed.

Photos will provide a feed with nothing but photos from your friends and Brand Pages you like.

Music a feed with posts about the music users listen to.

Following, a feed with the latest news from the Pages you like and the people you follow, think of this as a Facebook “newspaper” feature.

Within the News Feed design, photos are getting larger in the new design and attachments from links will also get more space. This will include a much larger image, a more prominent title, and a longer summary to accompany a linked story.

This is great, but what does this mean as a brand?

Visual Enablement: Further enabling visual storytelling and cross platform consistency are at the heart of the change. One of the forgotten elements previously is the brands cover photo. Yes, it will pop in the newsfeed when the image changes, but with the refresh the cover photo will be pulled into page “Like” stories in the news feed for both organic & paid. This will provide more context about the page, but also provides another opportunity for the brand to be relevant and engaging with their cover photo & profile photo combination. More frequent updates may be required to ensure that brands are maximizing their opportunities.

Also note that when people and pages post photos, Facebook will try to display the caption on top of the image if the caption is legible and the image does not contain text and when the image is of sufficient size (at least 425x157px). This puts additional emphasis on either minimal or extremely engaging copy.

Engagement: The core motivation of this revamp is focused solely on keeping users engaged by allowing more freedom and control over the platform and the information that is relevant for them. Facebook is positioning this change as a more engaging place for brand messages. The goal is to get more people spending time reading and interacting with the news feeds and this should beget more opportunities for us a marketers to reach & engage with our audience.

In my opinion it is too early to tell whether this is good or bad news for brands. The fear from a brand perspective is to lose engagement opportunities by being relegated to a lower visibility feed such as the “following” feed, which currently will not support paid at the initial rollout, but Facebook left it open for opportunities later this year.

Also, one key point to consider, the affinity & engagement of content is key in this new structure, as the more individuals engage with content, the higher the position within the feeds. Obviously this is a key attribute of EdgeRank, but engagement on a post level is still as important as ever. Facebook did confirm that as of now the change is mainly aesthetic for desktop and there will not be a change to Edgerank as it stands today, however this is something that continues to evolve and I would not be surprised if there are changes when the change is fully rolled out to the public.

Paid: The initial rollout will focus on better utilizing paid assets via incremental value adds vs. new streams tied to feeds . but Facebook did leave the door open for injected paid units into subsequent feeds such as “following”. Let’s fast forward for a moment, the new feeds will offer more opportunities to append paid for both small & large advertisers as a whole. The new model also reinforces spend on the post level to further drive visibility of content across feeds. It will be interesting to test media against feed types as units become available as the new design looks to further enhance existing units and offer more opportunities for engagement.

Example of new Page Post Ads

Example of new Sponsored Ads

Brand Reach & Visibility: More real-estate should theoretically increase the throughput of branded content if it is optimized for EdgeRank. This also reinforces the importance of having a relevant content strategy that can maximize content distribution across the various feeds. The thought is that this change will net more visibility for brands moving forward. The key to increasing reach and visibility is to combine organic engagement and then amplify the content via paid that is driving engagement naturally. This Pwned Media approach will optimize paid while leveraging the best of organic engagement to propel content and further drive impactful brand reach & visibility.

The assumption on increased engagement through segmentation/multiple feeds may have an initial lag. The native user behavior of the primary newsfeed as the consumer catch-all and primary point of engagement will remain for awhile until users are reconditioned to filter feeds. One of the inherent benefits of the news feed over the last six years has been tied to the simplicity and minimal effort on behalf of the user to engage with content. It remains to be seen how much usage the secondary feed options will see in terms of interaction type.

Analytics: From an analytics perspective, my hope is to also append feed distribution as an option to track content performance. This would then inform content decisions in addition to social interactions to further optimize content for optimal impact. As it stands today, Facebook has stated there will be no immediate impact on performance, and they will continue to monitor various performance metrics, including performance of Page posts and paid media.

Here is a link to Join the waiting list for the new News Feed.

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Filed under BlackFin360, Facebook Marketing, Marketing, Social Media Tagged with Benefits of the Facebook Newsfeed, Blackfin360, Facebook, Facebook Newsfeed announcement, Fanscape, Impact of Facebook Newsfeed changes, The Marketing Arm, TheBlackFin, Tom Edwards

Evolution of the Newsfeed

February 12, 2013 Leave a comment

Today I met with one of my local Facebook team members as we were partnering on a client initiative and our conversation sparked an interesting thought about the future of newsfeed publishing and how brands should be thinking about maximizing their publishing strategies as Facebook’s platform continues to evolve.

I have recently written a number of posts on the subject of Facebook publishing from the intersection of Paid & Owned, the importance of visual storytelling and best practices for optimizing content. All of these topics are relevant to this conversation and further frame the importance of the following statement:

“Everything happens in the newsfeed vs brand pages“

This was an incredibly simple statement that all of us who publish on behalf of brands sometimes take for granted. The numbers definitely back up the statement with 115 billion impressions served daily via desktop and 65 billion newsfeed impressions served daily via mobile.

Think about your own behavior when it comes to interacting with brand related content on Facebook. How often are you clicking through to a brands page to consume their content? This divide is even better visualized when it comes to users mobile interactions?

Where do you consume brand messages on the desktop?

This becomes even more apparent via mobile!

The reality is most social interaction happens via the newsfeed. Interactions being likes, comments and shares. Most brands approach content publishing from the perspective that users come to the brands page and consume their content in a linear manner. The reality is brands need to create a publishing strategy that is optimized for Edgerank and based on deliberate content buckets that are relevant & engaging for the brands audience that can be consumed in a non-linear manner but still represent the core social persona of the brand. This requires a detailed strategy that is grounded in the core attributes of the brand that then leads to content pillars that are designed to maximize engagement.

The following graphic represents the % breakdown across interaction types.

With so much consumption happening via the newsfeed, shouldn’t the in-stream experience/opportunities be as relevant and compelling as possible? This leads me to what I see as the next step in the evolution of brand publishing and that is going a step beyond visual storytelling and incorporating compelling interactive experiences to enhance the publishing strategy.

The recent announcement and coverage of Stipple’s Facebook support and subsequent usage by Justin Timberlake to provide interactive cover art is a glimpse into the future of newsfeed publishing.

Interactive posting is not a new concept. I remember first seeing this executed by Vitrue’s platform back in 2011 via the Buffalo Wild Wings example below. Leveraging this type of interactive content publishing was one of the enabling factors that has driven Buffalo Wild Wings to acquire over 9 million fans. Their content strategy has led to an engagement rate of 4.8% over the last 30 days with over 477,000 interactions. Having a point of differentiation in-stream has led to positive results for the brand.

The number of vendors supporting interactive posting in-stream has grown since 2011 with shops such as Shop Igniter providing solutions that are optimized to support rich interactive in-stream campaigns to drive lead generation, giveaways, promotions, etc…

The real key point of differentiation now vs. then is the ability to create immersive newsfeed experiences for both desktop & mobile by leveraging responsive design. Now it becomes easier to publish across both desktop & mobile to drive in-stream & even in-app (Facebook’s app) interaction.

The example below shows an example from Shop Igniter’s platform that enables in-stream video that then drives to a mobile optimized experience based on responsive design that allows the flexibility of staying within the application, but also allows the addition of an action object in the experience that extends the reach of a users action beyond the newsfeed into the activity ticker. This is a key element to further drive distribution and discoverability of content as well as the fact that the newsfeed does not support action objects directly.

The GoPro example is a great example of a light weight execution that does not rely on driving to an end destination to generate engagement & story creation. This in my mind is the next evolution of content publishing in-stream.

Similar to the evolution of static banners to rich media, creating compelling content that is optimized for EdgeRank, light weight in design and contains the experience within the existing stream and Facebook application across both desktop and mobile that also taps into the social graph to append actions is an ideal addition to an owned content strategy.

This also maximizes the principles of real-time paid amplification that I have discussed in the past because these are actual posts being created on Facebook’s platform that can fit seamlessly into a paid media strategy.

The other benefit to this type of publishing is the engagement data on the content level that can drive further optimization of content moving forward. By tracking impressions, engagement rate and social actions, we can directly map to our core KPI’s.

When it comes to Facebook, it is not enough to just have a content calendar. It is incredibly important to have a true strategic framework that outlines the brands publishing strategy and how the content will be optimized to drive targeted reach, but it is also important to leverage interactive assets to drive tangible results and activation where appropriate.

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Filed under BlackFin360, Facebook Marketing, Marketing, Social Media Tagged with Benefits of Interactive Facebook Posts, Benefits of Shop Igniter, Blackfin360, Facebook, Facebook Buffalo Wild Wings Case Study, Facebook Rich Media, Fanscape, Interactive Newsfeed, The Marketing Arm, TheBlackFin, Tom Edwards

Facebook Graph Search

January 15, 2013 2 Comments

Recently Facebook announced one of the biggest changes to their search feature to date with the limited beta release of Graph Search. Mark Zuckerberg stated Graph Search would become the third pillar of the Facebook experience in addition to the News Feed and Timeline. This post will review the features of Graph Search while also outlining what it all means.

Here is the official announcement from Facebook

The creation of Graph Search is reflective of the current direction of social which is the inevitable convergence of social and search. With so much information being created and limited alignment between traditional search and the social graph, Graph Search could be a key bridge to a new type of search behavior based on relevant and timely socially curated content.

Example of Bing Facebook integration which applied social as an additive to traditional search. Graph Search takes the inverse approach of searching inside of Facebook.

When you begin to dig into the initial information about Graph Search, it is not intended to be a true web search engine like Google or Bing, but an engine that will search out information across all of Facebook and provide personalized answers to queries about people, photos, places & interests.

Here are various examples of the types of searches that can be conducted.

Here is an example of my friends in San Francisco, as well as recommendations of individuals with similar interests in the area.

Here is an example that leverages Friends Check-In’s via social graph data to uncover Restaurants that may be of interest when in London

Here is an an example of the capability to search for specific types of photos either that you as a user have liked, or topical such as the recent Red Bull Stratos jump.

The Search Graph is a natural extension of the curation of social graph data. By creating deeper connections across interests and access to crowdsourced information, Facebook will now be enabling a cleaner connection to relevant content beyond simply searching for users, brands and apps.

This immediately jumps to questions of privacy from a users perspective. The current explanation is that the Graph Search will honor your privacy settings and only show information to your friends if your privacy is not set to public.

WHAT DOES THIS ALL MEAN?

For starters this will eventually play into the Facebook revenue model. Initially this will be an ad free feature, but make no mistake, by further aligning interests with broader behaviors beyond a profile, it will help to further enable personalization as a search and interest overlay and will become an even more accurate tool to re-target relevant ads.

Also, by adding this as a third pillar, Facebook will eventually be able to monetize against Facebook centric search in a similar manner to how Twitter can place ads via search results with their various promoted products.

Here is an example of a Disney Twitter query that immediately ties into the upcoming Hansel & Gretel movie as a paid unit.

From a brand perspective, this will mean more avenues to differentiate via search results. If the users behaviorally adopt the new way to engage with the rich and relevant content within the social graph, then placement upon search category & interest relevance will be at a premium.

Similar to Google Adwords & promotion of Google+ accounts, brand positioning associated with search may become the new premium Facebook units if users adopt the platform.

It will be interesting to see if the existing Facebook recommendation engine will be put into service as the vehicle that enables placement associated with the results of the search. I did recently speak directly with Facebook and confirmed that the current recommendation engine is not a brand controlable asset, meaning it is not currently part of the paid options to insert a brand, it is strictly algorithm based. But with this new development, the recommendation engine may be a critical component to differentiate from the rest and that will most likely come with a cost.

Example of the Facebook Recommendation Engine for Apps

I am certain that this will have a significant impact on Facebook as a platform moving forward. The amount of objects being added to the social graph will continue to scale at an exponential rate as the introduction of action objects (verbs) into the social graph in addition to all of the various pieces of content that create via interactions with Facebook will now be applied to a system that will make connections beyond the individual more feasible and better align individuals and brands.

Building a system that can now quickly mine relevant information that is based on interests and likes vs. traffic is an interesting proposition, especially when applying the overlay of your social graph with real world use cases such as finding a restaurant recommendation in a new city through the platform you already check 20 times a day.

While there was no immediate mobile support announced, previous behavior suggests that this will also further drive the move towards mobile enablement. If you are able to extend your social graph beyond 1:1 interactions to actually leveraging the data while you are on the go, this is an incredibly important addition and one that will have a significant impact on the future of Facebook’s mobile ad platform.

It will also be interesting to see if a new algorithm, such as edgerank for the newsfeed, can be organically impacted by the amount of followers to a brand (similar to Google+ recommendations via search) or if other factors such as engagement or virality rates will impact which content types (brand content) will be served.

Example of the EdgeRank Algorithm

Facebook initially has recommended the following:

1) The name, category, vanity URL, and information you share in the “About” section should be up to date.
2) If you have a location or a local place Page, update your address to make sure you can appear as a result when someone is searching for a specific location.

There was also an ominous tease towards other factors defining search results. Some early thoughts are possibly tied to engagement & virality rates. It will be interesting to monitor the progression of Graph Search with no immediate mobile version, no Instagram integration, API’s and English only at this stage of the beta, we will monitor the evolution of Graph Search and Facebook SEO.

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Filed under BlackFin360, Facebook Marketing, Marketing, Social Media Tagged with Benefits of Graph Search, Blackfin360, Faceboks new Graph Search, Facebook, Fanscape, Social Search, The Marketing Arm, TheBlackFin, Tom Edwards, What is Graph Search, Why care about Facebook Graph Search

DM Confidential Feature

December 10, 2012 Leave a comment

Recently my commentary was featured in a DM Confidential article discussing the Top 10 Best Practices for Creating Effective Landing Pages for Lead Generation.

When it comes to platform providers, I am a big fan of the KickoffLabs product offering. I highly recommend their offerings when creating viral landing pages & beyond.

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Filed under Social Media, BlackFin360, Marketing Tagged with Tom Edwards, TheBlackFin, Blackfin360, The Marketing Arm, Fanscape, TMA, DM Confidential Tom Edwards, Benefits of KickoffLabs, KickoffLabs, Creating effective landing pages, how to create effective landing pages

Facebook EdgeRank Changes Impact Organic Brand Reach

October 26, 2012 4 Comments

On September 20th, 2012 Facebook rolled out a significant change to their EdgeRank algorithm. This change directly impacted the organic reach of brand pages on Facebook. According to initial reports, this change has potentially impacted organic reach for brand pages with a decrease per post upwards of 50%.

After the initial announcements, instead of simply reporting what the changes were, I wanted to see what a month’s worth of data would look like to truly gauge the impact that our brands are seeing. Prior to jumping into the results, let’s quickly recap how we got to this point.

WHY THE CHANGE?

Here is a quote from Facebook’s Q2 earnings call… “Feed quality is crucial in order to not turn off users” – Mark Zuckerberg

Facebook is laser-focused on making sure the integrity of a users newsfeed stays as relevant as possible. With billions of pieces of content being shared, and brands trying to drive organic engagement through content, Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithm serves as the overarching authority of what content ultimately gets surfaced to an individual user. Here is a previous post outlining EdgeRank.

Facebook also strives to maintain an 80/20 mix with 80% of the content coming from relevant organic content and the other 20% coming from paid units. The goal is to streamline the newsfeed to reduce the impact of “spammy” messages while seamlessly integrating their paid offerings.

Now with the throttling back of organic brand reach, this may force brands into making decisions about how to proceed.

WHAT IS THE POTENTIAL IMPACT?

Early reports indicated that the new changes take into account the number of individuals who are most likely to take an action on behalf of the brand and removing impressions to users who are less likely to take action such as Like, comment or share. SocialBakers and other groups have reported average post’s reach dropped by roughly 50% since September 20th.

Working with Michael Fein, Fanscape’s Director of Research & Analytics, we took a cross section of 20 tier 1 accounts over the course of 30 days to gauge the impact before and after the September 20th date. To summarize, it appears that by Facebook tightening their formula, they are giving less reach to an individual brand, but that the reach they are eliminating is the reach that was not converting. We saw a decrease in organic reach, but a slight net increase in virality. (Virality defined as engagements / reach).

That said, we saw organic reach change by -4.3%. Industry reports noted a -6.5% shift. This means, (compared with -6.5%) our decrease was 33% less than the average decrease on Facebook. By following best practices tied to our brands content, we were able to reduce the impact but the fact remains that this change will cause fundamental changes in how we approach engagement rate KPI’s and the owned & paid mix.

HOW TO MAXIMIZE THE OPPORTUNITY

After the September 20th change, brands can earn their media or pay for it, or both. In order to drive organic reach, brands will need to continue to focus on an engaging content strategy. To truly maximize content that is driving engagement, paid amplification of content is strongly recommended. Below are recommendations to continue to maximize reach through engagement.

Primary recommendations:

Engaging Content Strategy – This is a best practice and consistently the focus of most Facebook conferences/events/briefings that I have attended. Brands should provide contextual quality/relevant content grounded in the social persona of the brand. According to Facebook, content should be as compelling as information shared by friends and family to break through the clutter.

One strategy that we have seen be very effective is to be very deliberate in the creation of a branded content calendar. This includes developing content buckets that are a direct extension of the social brand persona. Segmenting content by type makes it even easier to track the impact of each type of content and provides consistency & diversity of content. This includes following best practices tied to time of posting as well as mixing UGC with relevant branded content.

Here is an example of a brand campaign extension from Snickers. This content would fall in a “branded content bucket”. It is visually interesting and extends the new “Horseless Headsman” Halloween campaign. Other forms of content could be tied to polls/trivia, pop-culture or brand partnerships. Again, each content bucket is grounded in the core attributes of the brands social persona (voice).

Paid Amplification – We have worked with Facebook directly on a number of campaigns and our focus prior to the September 20th change has been to create relevant and engaging content that resonates with our brands fans. Prior to the change, we had also begun to experiment with creating engagement thresholds tied to content “events” that can trigger amplification of content.

An event is any piece of organic content that receives a high amount of engagement. We then work to create a virality rate that ultimately becomes a threshold for organic content. Once the threshold has been exceeded the content can become a part of the paid Facebook inventory for a brand. This strategy ensures that the content that is most likely to drive engagement is amplified to maximize reach. This also allows for acquisition beyond the core base as the paid components allow affinity targeting beyond the current user base.

Here is an example of how it can work. This is a post from the AT&T On The Way To Saturday campaign. By driving engagement levels past a certain point, for this example if the post exceeded 1000+ likes, it could then be considered for amplification in the model mentioned above with increased targeting tied to college football even more specific, University of Georgia fans.

Here is another example that shows an organic brand post that has been amplified. Note the clear call to action to share. This is another important element tied to driving sharability and engagement with content.

Secondary Recommendations:

Targeted Content – I had recently wrote about the new targeting abilities tied to posting content. A quick recap, brands now have the unique ability to target beyond language and location and focus more on demographic and interest targeting. Targeting content is going to prove to be a very valuable asset in brands content strategies moving forward. The ability to speak directly to certain audience segments on the post level can have greater impact if the content is relevant to the target. By targeting/personalizing the content to the segment can lead to greater engagement rates which leads to increased organic reach based on engaged content amplifying through a users friends.

Facebook Branded Groups - I recently wrote about the potential benefits of Facebook Branded Groups that are currently in Beta. Branded groups can provide many benefits for a brand, including the ability to further segment and target messaging, either by group topic or content within a group.

One of the key benefits to leveraging branded groups is the fact that when a brand posts to a group that user is subscribed to, the content updates show up directly in a users Facebook notifications. This is one of the only ways that branded content can show up in a users notifications outside of the brand directly interacting with the user. Note that the Facebook Brand Groups are in beta and require the assistance of your Facebook rep.

Interest Lists – One additional method to drive greater visibility of branded content is to direct users to action to see a majority of a brands posts. When a user hovers over the “Like” button on a brand page, they will see a drop-down menu. On this list they can be directed to ”ADD TO INTEREST LISTS”. The user can then create an interest list to ensure content associated with this interest is given a stronger weighting. This obviously puts the onus on the user to take action to maintain visibility of your content.

Even though organic reach has been somewhat throttled, virality rates are increasing for content that does get served. But note that more effort may be required to meet Reach KPI’s that were set prior to September 20th. Be sure to re-evaluate your KPI’s and client expectations, focus on creating engaging & contextually relevant content and strongly consider amplifying content that exceeds certain engagement thresholds.

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Filed under BlackFin360, Facebook Marketing, Marketing, Social Media Tagged with Blackfin360, edgerank and reach, Edgerank changes, edgerank organic reach, Facebook EdgeRank Changes, facebooks edgerank algorithm, Fanscape, Impact of Edgerank, Omnicom Social, The Marketing Arm, TheBlackFin, TMA, TMA Social, Tom Edwards, what is edgerank

Dallas Digital Summit 2012

October 18, 2012 Leave a comment

I was chosen as one of the speakers for the upcoming Dallas Digital Summit which will be held on December 4th-5th at Union Station here in Dallas, TX.

If you are local to the area I hope to see you there!

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Filed under BlackFin360, Events, Marketing, Social Media Tagged with Blackfin360, Dallas Digital Summit 2012, DDSUM12, The Marketing Arm, TheBlackFin, Tom Edwards

PRWeek Feature

October 15, 2012 Leave a comment

This afternoon my commentary was featured in a PRWeek article discussing the social platform provider ThisMoment and their DEC publishing platform.

The interview covers many topics associated with my usage of their platform over the past few years on behalf of brands such as AT&T.

Here is a link to the full article.

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Filed under BlackFin360, Facebook Marketing, Google+, Social Media Tagged with Advantages of ThisMoment, Benefits of ThisMoment, Benefits of ThisMoment's DEC platform, Blackfin360, Distributing Branded Content, Facebook publishing, Social Content Platforms, The Marketing Arm, TheBlackFin, ThisMoment, Tom Edwards, YouTube Customization via ThisMoment

Benefits of Facebook’s Custom CRM Audience Targeting

September 19, 2012 3 Comments

Recently a new Facebook feature rolled out of beta that can provide brands with a viable process to connect their offline CRM databases to those users on Facebook. Now, this process of custom audience list targeting has just rolled out to all brands who advertise on Facebook.

This new feature can be a significant enabler for a brand, as most have larger customer databases outside of the social sphere (after years of traditional CRM outreach) than they have engaged on their social properties.

With Facebook’s new targeting capabilities, brands can bridge the connection of their offline data through social channels. By targeting the exact individuals that the brand already has or had a relationship with, the impact of the targeted reach can be greatly enhanced.

With the new Power Editor, the brand has the ability to identify “who” they want to target beyond the general parameters that have been available. This applies to current customers, prospects, people who like specific products, lapsed users, etc… The ability to take these offline lists and create custom audiences via Facebook’s ad platform is a major step forward for the platform and allows a greater level of targeting to a base that has already established a self-selected affinity towards the brand at some point in that customers brand life cycle.

Brands can create lists based on email addresses, phone numbers, etc.. that represent the groups of people in a CRM database. These elements are then matched to Facebook’s own records to create the custom lists.

In terms of ownership of the data, Facebook does not receive the brands customer data fully. The data is protected and resides on your local computer, then the data is imported via hashes. Facebook then matches the hashes to it’s own records and deletes the data. All that remains is a custom target list. This list is then tied to the individuals Facebook ad account. No other advertisers can use the list.

My recent discussions with Facebook state that their clients have seen a higher ROI based on beta interactions. This applied to higher conversion rates, lower cost per fan, lead or reengaged users than with other campaigns.

Brands have the ability to create unlimited lists at no cost and have the ability to keep audiences up to date. One additional benefit, is that it is possible to map the custom lists to those who have and have not liked the page.

This option is not available at the page level, but only as part of the advertising platform. The ability to marry offline data with Facebook’s social graph to further amplify existing connections is a key addition to the platform.

Follow Tom Edwards @BlackFin360

Filed under BlackFin360, Facebook Marketing, Marketing, Social Media Tagged with Benefits of Facebook CRM Targeting, Blackfin360, Facebook advertising, Facebook CRM, Facebook custom audience lists, Fanscape, Omnicom Social Strategy, The Marketing Arm, TheBlackFin, Tom Edwards

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