Ben & Jerry’s Facebook App And Why I Won’t Spoon My Dad

I was having a Saturday morning scroll through Twitter when I spotted an 85 second video someone had shared introducing Ben & Jerry’s new Facebook app:

The “Wanna Spoon?,” app searches through your Facebook friends to look for mutual Facebook field values (likes, birthdays, hometowns etc), matches are shown and then you can post from the app to their wall with:

“Using a fancy algorithm, Ben & Jerry’s decided we’d make great spooning partners. Click here to see why and get a coupon for new Greek Frozen Yoghurt.”

Jumping in and checking out the app, it works well enough, it’s simple, but the matches are questionable! The first match I was given was my Dad (as he likes the Facebook pages that I manage – thanks Dad!). This would normally be fine, but I’m not going to hit a share button that is prompting me to say to my Dad in front of all of my friends: ‘Let’s Spoon’.

If we are going with the let’s spoon idea, maybe it should take into account gender and sexuality rather than other pages that you like. Also, shouldn’t it be smart enough to not pull fields without data?

I’m not a huge fan of this, both in how it works (i.e. asking me to tell my friends I want to spoon my Dad) and also how it fails to get across the key point of ‘Hey, we have a new product: buy it, tell your friends you bought it and they should buy it too’

Oh! And also, the coupon is only available in the US *sad unimpressed face*

Think I’ve been unfair? Sound off in the comments.

Dr Pepper’s Facebook App Advert

Dr Pepper have tapped into Facebook’s open graph to create an app which pulls on your social data to place you in the lead role of your very own Dr Pepper advert. Much in the same fashion as the Plan UK open graph app last year, this app pulls in your Facebook information to create a tailored experience unique to you using your friends names and photos.

Use the Dr Pepper Facebook app

You view a video shot in first person, with your social history, making it real and very memorable with the ‘Dr Pepper. Far from being “The Best day of High School” (as the title and URL would suggest), at the end of the video something highly embarrassing happens to you – which is when the ‘What’s the worst that could happen?’ tagline comes in – and since it happens in the first person, with your friends data around you are compelled to feel embarrassed, awkward and nervous. So much for positive brand associations…

Dr Pepper Facebook App post

The app is featured on the Dr Pepper UK homepage and has been linked to on the Dr Pepper UK Facebook page but has not been pulled in using a custom app/tab; I did ask why they hadn’t via the Facebook page but in 8 hours I haven’t had a reply. Something to note is that considering they have a 487k following, engagement on posts around this are about the same as any other post on their page and the click’s on the link they posted are at 800  (oh yes, they used bit.ly!). With all this in mind:

What do you think of the Dr Pepper Facebook app? Share in the comments.

What would you do with 250,000 Twitter followers?

What would you give to have 250,000 Twitter followers? An email from Twitter sales to prospective advertisers in December revealed what brands have been paying for followers on the platform: between $2.50 and $4.

Twitter thinks that you will pay between $625,000 and $1,000,000 for 250,000 followers

Let’s pretend you are willing to pay that and you now have a quarter of a million people following you or your company online: how do you use that Twitter account? Well if you are Christian Dior, you set your background image, follow some people in your industry and tweet 80 times in six months without sending a single reply.

Do you think this is the best use of a quarter of a million followers? How would you use a Twitter account with this many followers?

Share your thoughts on my blog or on Twitter: @Jack_Ashman.

How To Get More Traffic To Your Facebook Page

We all track referrals from Facebook to our websites as a matter of course, but how many of us track referrals to Facebook? It is something all of us should be doing! In understanding where traffic is coming from we can engage and exploit those sources better, convert more visits to followers and build more engaged fan bases.

How do we do all of this from a data point of view? It’s pretty simple really, you identify your external and internal referrers and you develop and build on them. Here is a detailed guide on how to get this data and then how to use this data.

How to get the referral data

This is split into external referrers (i.e. other websites) and Facebook referrals. We’ll start with external sources.

External Referrers

It is hugely important to know your external referrers so you can continue to grow them. You can find out the number of referrals from the whole spectrum of sources: websites, search engines, Twitter (t.co), blogs and lots more. To do this, whilst in page view: ‘Insights’ > ‘Reach’

Facebook Referrals

In finding out where people are visiting your page from within Facebook you can build relationships with these individuals or pages. A good start is to look at the number of people who are exposed to posts which reference your page which are not made by your page. To do this, whilst in page view: ‘Insights’ > ‘Reach’ > ‘How You Reached People’ > ‘Stories by others’

When you have pulled up these statistics look at ‘Reach’ rather than ‘Frequency’; you will be able to see the number of people who have been reached by user-generated stories. You will be able to see if this is a significant figure or not. The question you will ask yourself is: How do I find out where these posts are coming from? Whilst some people and pages will tag you in their posts, lots of others will not, so you will have to go out and find as many (public) posts as you can. Here are 3 ways:

1. Search public Facebook posts for mentions of your page name both on people walls or timelines and in groups
2. Sign up to receive daily email alerts when your page is mentioned: http://www.hyperalerts.no/
3. Search through Facebook posts from the last week: http://youropenbook.org/

How to use the referral data

• Websites and Blogs: After you find out which websites these are you can engage them, build relationships and gain more traffic from them. Was there a specific event, promotion or news story that they were interested in? What you may find is that they are posting your web articles or other assets on their Facebook page that you haven’t thought of doing. If they are engaging with you on Facebook you could look into reciprocal marketing.

• Search engines: Unfortunately you are only given the search engine and not search terms. Whether you are receiving no search engine traffic or lots of search engine traffic you should SEO your Facebook fan page (this post is coming up soon so make sure you subscribe).

• Twitter: Are people talking about your Facebook page on Twitter? If they are and you are not tracking these conversations then it is time for you to do this in a serious way. Facebook does not provide breakdown of Twitter referral in terms of specific links or users. This is where you have to make sure that your Twitter analytics and tracking are up to scratch.

• Facebook: Once you have found out the topics and the styles of posting that people are using to post about you on external pages using the methods above you can use the data in several ways:

• If you are able to find out a type of post that is most shared by individuals on Facebook, try and post this kind of content on your page and ask people to share it.
• If you are able to discover pages that are talking about you engage with them and be proactive in targeting pages similar to the ones who are actively engaging with you.

 

Once you are able to draw more of the conversations already happening on Facebook onto your page you have to make sure that you are converting them into Facebook fans so they continue to receive your status updates; lucky for you, I’ve got a blog post on just that!

 

Facebook Insights: How To Engage More Fans

We all have a pretty good idea of who is engaging with us on Facebook. Okay that’s not true… but many of us think we do! Luckily with Facebook Insights you can quickly and easily get accurate information on who is following and engaging with your Facebook page.

These two audiences (fans and people actively engaging with you on Facebook) are not always the same. This guide will teach you how to track these audiences and give you 3 simple ways to overlap them with the overall aim of increasing the number of engaged Facebook fans.

Who talks about you on Facebook

Do you know who is engaged with you on Facebook? You think it might be more men than women from what you remember about your recent ‘Like’s but your just not sure. Facebook Insights tells you exactly who your active audience is.

You can find out the following about your active fans:

• Gender
• Age (by category)
• Country (via IP address)
• City (via IP address)

To do this, whilst in page view: ‘Insights’ > ‘Talking about this’

This will show you demographics by percentages. If you want more detailed information: ‘Insights’ > ‘Talking about this’ > ‘Export’ > Go to the ‘Daily Demographics People Talking About’ tab and you can see the number of people engaging with you on a daily basis broken down by age and gender.

Who are your fans on Facebook

You now know which demographic is engaging with you on your Facebook page. You may have been surprised and you may want to change it but it is very important to know this and overlap who is talking about you with who your fans are.

You can find out the following about your fans:

• Gender
• Age (by category)
• Country (via IP address)

To do this, whilst in page view: ‘Insights’ > ‘Likes’

This will show you demographics by percentages. If you want more detailed information: ‘Insights’ > ‘Likes’ > ‘Export’ > Go to the ‘Lifetime Likes by Gender and Age’, ‘Lifetime Likes by Country’ and ‘Lifetime Likes by City’ tabs to see the number of people who like you broken down by age and gender, or country or city.

When doing all of this pay attention to the date range you are selecting and make sure it is the same for both the data sets you are comparing. You can pick a long period of time or the last week or month, or even when you had a particular campaign or event running.

When the demographics of Facebook followers and active followers don’t match

You may find that your Facebook fans are not of the same demographic as those who are engaged with you on Facebook. There are 3 things you can do to overlap these two audiences:

1. Target your inactivate community

Now that you know who your inactive fans are, try changing the way you post so that it engages these people (of course don’t exclude your already active fan base). This might involve running a contest, changing the types of updates you are posting or even the times which you are posting them.

2. Recruit fans from your active demographic pool

Run sponsored stories targeted to people who might be interested in your page with similar demographic background to those who are active. You already know that these type of people are engaged with your page.

3. Your active community are not your existing fans

The ‘Talking about this’ data does not discriminate between fans and non-fans. In order to make sure you are converting people who are active on your Facebook page into fans of your page you need to have an optimised ‘Like gated’ / ‘Fan gated’ landing tab. If you do not have a fan or like gated welcome tab you really do need to have one in place: it will drastically increase your conversion rate and your number of Facebook fans. If this is something you are interested in setting up for your Facebook page please email me for more information.

This is part of the “Facebook Insights: How To” series of blog posts on using Facebook Insights data to create more engaging Facebook pages.

10 Headline Brands Say ‘Thank You’ To Their Facebook Fans

Here are some great examples of how global brands, music artists, tv shows and game developers are thanking their fans upon hitting the one million mark. Enjoy!

Cadbury Dairy Milk: Thanks A Million

Cadbury making a huge chocolate Facebook like and involving a top fan. This was also built into a Facebook tab.

One Million Heineken Hugs

‘Heineken Huggers’ (female models) out on the streets of Amsterdam hugging Heineken drinkers.

[Michael] Jordan. 1 Million Fans Thank You

Famous basketball players thanking fans for joining the Facebook page. This was built into a Facebook tab.

Porsche. Thank you. A 1,000,000 times

Facebook fans names have been put onto a Porsche. A similar thank you for 2,000,000 Facebook fans has been built into a Facebook tab.

Swarovski - One million fans on Facebook

Staff from across the organisation and across the globe giving thanks.

Westlife Thank YOU For 1 Million Facebook Fans!

Westlife just say thank you.

Hollyoaks Facebook hits 1 million fans!

A thank you within the soap world of Hollyoaks with a bit of comedy involved.

The Humane Society of the United States – 1 Million Facebook Fans

A reminder of why you are a fan and features a call to action asking for user generated content. This was built into a Facebook tab.

Gameloft - 1 Million Fans on Facebook!

A visualization of a million people and a bespoke Facebook competition.

Miniclip Celebrates 1 Million Facebook Fans!

A conga line through the office.

Which is your favourite?

BlackBerry’s Plus 5 Campaign

I was surfing Facebook, as you do, looking at Facebook ads, as some of us do, and I stumbled across Blackberry’s Plus 5 campaign. Not so much stumbled across but got smacked round the head with it on every single friend’s profile I was on. The thing that struck me was they were running multiple ads (good Blackberry!) and the tab itself was very very slick.

I know I’m late to the party on this one as the campaign has been running for over a month: forgive me. For my sins I have broken the campaign down very neatly for you.

The Blackberry Facebook campaign

Check out the BlackBerry Facebook page and tab yourself.

The other components to the Plus 5 campaign

Alongside Facebook ads which redirect to a the Facebook tab through which the Plus 5 campaign is being run, there is also:

• Banner ads on BlackBerry’s site and mobile site
• Status updates on both Facebook and Twitter (of course)
• Google Search ”Blackberry plus 5″ brings up “uk.blackberry.com/campaign/plus5/” which redirects straight to the Facebook tab (clever!)
• YouTube teaser video which drives you to the Facebook tab (and is embedded in the Facebook tab). Here it is:

So what is Plus 5?

It’s never explicitly said! BlackBerry promise it as “the best night of your life”, but Marketing Week summarize it a bit better as ”an online and experiential music campaign to build BlackBerry’s association with events, music and socialising, following the launch of the BBM Music service in November“.

Plus 5 is targeted at 16 – 24 year olds and offers the chance to win tickets for themselves and five friends (Plus 5..) to an event which is being described as ‘the greatest night of their life’.

The head of digital at BlackBerry said:

The BlackBerry ‘Plus 5’ campaign is the latest development in support of our overarching strategy to drive brand awareness, engage and excite our current and prospective customers by allowing them to share their experiences with BlackBerry. Social Media together with the music scene can be an extraordinarily powerful combination and we’re confident this campaign will create the buzz we’re looking for in our core youth market.

Winners are set to be announced this month and the event scheduled for February (according to The Drum) so lets see what they’ve got up their sleeves!

What do you think of the campaign? What could be improved about it?

Exclusive Interview: The Guardian’s Year in Lego News Gallery

The Guardian have re-told the story of our 2011 in a crowdsourced Flickr gallery. I spoke to Laura Oliver, one of the Guardian’s community coordinators, to find out more.

The aim was to create a feature that fits the traditional year in review model but with a twist – telling the story of the year’s news in a creative and memorable way.

'Year in Lego 2011'. Image: 'Vignette a day: Steve Jobs' by lego27bricks

What were the aims of the Lego summary?

The Year in Lego news gallery was originally something set up just on Flickr as a way of linking up with and taking part in groups already on Flickr. The plan was to create it just for Flickr as a bit of fun for our followers there. But after contacting the individual contributors to our gallery on Flickr and seeing the reaction it got there, we decided to take it a step further and produce a bigger gallery of images involving Flickr members on Guardian.co.uk. The aim was to create a feature that fits the traditional year in review model but with a twist – telling the story of the year’s news in a creative and memorable way.

How did you come up with the idea?

In July Rupert Murdoch was cream-pied during a parliamentary appearance. We were live blogging the hearing of the department of culture, media and sport committee at the time and in the comments on our coverage someone shared a link to Jim Walshe’s picture of the incident. I kept the link to this stashed away somewhere and the idea in mind that I would return to it later in the year to see what other news scenes recreated in Lego that I could find on Flickr. I soon realised what a great community of Lego creators there is out there and how active some of the groups on Flickr were, so started to make links and seek out individual members who might be interested.

How did you promote the Flickr Gallery?

We promoted the gallery both on site, by giving it space on our homepage, and via @guardian on Twitter, the Guardian’s Facebook page and by spreading the word to Lego groups on Flickr too. We made sure to link back to all the contributors’ original images on Flickr and contacted each of them directly beforehand to strike up a conversation and ask them for permission and make sure they would be interested in being featured on the site.

What were the outcomes of the gallery?

In terms of traffic to Guardian.co.uk, it’s been really successful at pulling people in and has been a big hit off site as well – at time of writing it’s been recommended more than 21,000 times on Facebook and retweeted more than 4,000 times. I’ve also seen responses posted to it by other news sites around the world, like this from LA Weekly. It’s nice to see that it has inspired efforts elsewhere. The best outcome for me, however, has been the response from individual readers and groups inspired by the gallery – for example, a learning mentor used the idea with a group of pupils as part of an exercise on this year’s news and we’ve received many more emails from those trying their hand at creating a Lego scene for the first time. We’ve also now set up a group on Flickr - wanting to return to the community we started with and the group of people without whom we could not have made the gallery – for people to share what they are making.

What do you think was the best thing about crowdsourcing the photos?

Making connections with people and by chatting to them, seeking out new contacts and getting in touch – all of this helped us create something in collaboration with a great and very creative community that already exists on Flickr and the more specific Lego enthusiast communities that we soon became aware of. It was intended as a light-hearted way to represent a very busy news year, but also a good way to reflect the stories that have captured the imagination of those consuming the news, not just from an editorial point of view.

Where there any challenges?

Thanks to the forward planning of this and the cooperation of individual members on Flickr, the process of putting it together was relatively straightforward. Obviously there are even more scenes out there that we didn’t discover on this occasion – setting up the gallery on Flickr first did help put out the call for contributions – but hopefully we can now work with our fledgling group to come up with future creative ideas.

What do you think the best thing about using Lego photos was?

As previously mentioned, it’s a good way to capture news events in tableau and to offer an alternative look at the news moments that defined 2011 from a news consumer’s perspective. I hope that through Lego’s popularity the gallery also helped inspire other people to get creative and to look up existing sites, blogs and communities that already exist and to take part in these.  Something that began as a bit of fun for a particular community became something broader and hopefully more inclusive.

If you could go back and do it again, what would you do differently?

I’d probably go to even more forums and groups on Flickr and elsewhere to get their input into the gallery – both in terms of additional pictures and for their feedback – as I’m still only just scratching the surface of all the homes of Lego fans on the web.

Thank you Laura for taking the time to share the story behind the Guardian’s Year in Lego news gallery. Please take the time to share your thoughts in the comments of this post and on the Guardian’s Flickr gallery.

Social Media in 2011: Year in Review

On an average day in 2011, 250 million photos were uploaded to Facebook, 8 years of video content were added to YouTube and 140 million tweets were sent.

Social media plays a big role in our lives in 2011, but what is it that we are talking about? As the year comes to a close many social networks are giving us summary data of trends of use. Here is a run-down of our year online according to the social networks so far:

Facebook “Memology 2011”

 

Twitter “Year in Review”

 

LinkedIn “The Most Popular Stories on LinkedIn in 2011″

Google “Zeitgeist 2011: Year In Review”

YouTube “Year in Review” / “Rewind”

Flickr “Year in Photos 2011”

 

Storify “2011 Storify of the Year”

 

Instagram “Year in Review”

 

StumbleUpon – “Best of StumbleUpon 2011″

 

Which is your favorite? Share in the comments

If there are any reviews made after the time of posting, please note them in the comments and I will add them. Statistics cited here have been sourced directly from the social networks to which they refer (Sources: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube).

Google Zeitgeist 2011: Great Digital Storytelling

Google has released their year-end collection of data for 2011 and it is beautiful.

They have done an excellent job of not only presenting us with great data but also creating a fantastic video that has hit at the core of digital storytelling: emotions.

They are replicating an emotional world of experiences and positioning themselves and their products at the heart of it (with Google+ featuring very obviously). This is brilliant advertising.

What did you think?

This is the first in a series of blog posts on Digital Storytelling, check back in a few days for more or subscribe to my blog using the widget below.