Posts Tagged ‘Facebook’

It used to be that you could get away with just a website. Then you needed way to collect email addresses so that people could subscribe to it. Then those forward-looking social media pros started saying that RSS was the future of communications, then Twitter. Whatever the medium, its always been about making it easy for your audience to get updates from your website.

With that in mind, I set up a Facebook Page for BlogCampaigning. All it will really do is pull in posts from here, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t become a Fan.

-Parker

Did you watch the Brazil/North Korea game today? I caught part of it while I was eating a late lunch and thought that Maicon’s goal was amazing.

Nike agreed and (not a brand to miss a beat) did an excellent job of capitalizing on it by posting an image of Maicon with the caption “Know Your Angles. Write The Future.” on the Nike Football Facebook page.

No kind of planning or content calendar can take that into account. An update like that with a response of over 1500 “Likes” on Facebook and more than 300 comments means that Nike is in tune with its audience and able to deliver what will create conversation amongst them.

In short, Nike knows its angles.

Between this and the previous post I wrote about the Pitch Perfect series of mixes, you’re probably thinking I’ve gone a bit nuts for Nike.

The truth is that I’ve worn Nike shoes for years (they fit my feet well), and currently have about four active pairs (cleats, indoor soccer, running, casual). If they’re going to keep me entertained as well, what’s not to love?

-Parker

Well, I’ve gone and done it. I’ve installed a WordPress plug-in that adds a Like button to every post here on BlogCampaigning. (The plug-in is available via the WP directory, or via Studio Nash Vegas.)

Using the toolkit on the Facebook Developers site, I also added a Like button to the sidebar of this blog. It’s alright for now, but I think I might try one of the other options (creating a Facebook Page for BlogCampaigning, and including some code linking to that) in the next few days to see how those work out for me.

Although I’ve noticed that my “Likes” have shown up in the Recent Activity on my Facebook profile, I’ve yet to notice any “Likes” in my main Facebook news feed or on any of my friend’s profiles. Is this because it still isn’t widely used?

What do you think of the Like button? Does it even matter? Has it changed your Facebook or web experience? Have you seen any great uses of the Like button?

-Parker

PS: If you like this post, don’t forget to click the button below.

Talking with my friend Mike Kennedy recently, I realized that social media have invaded my job. My personal and professional lives are colliding!

Blogging and reading blogs have become part of my job description, and there are small Twitter and Facebook communities among my co-workers (including me) and higher-ups. I talk to my boss on Twitter—weird. These things used to be solely personal pursuits—stuff for friends and family. Now I do them at work? Yuck!?

I’m sure this is nothing new to many of BlogCampaigning’s readers, but it was a bit of a shock to me, and I’m still not sure how I feel about it. I’m happy that my company has started a blog and that I get to write for it. I think it’s great that we’re actively, if tentatively, pursuing a social media strategy. I’ve even written some posts on how social media affects the workplace (we’re in human resources publishing, so you know).

I think my surprise arises from an artificial barrier that I had built dividing The Internet and its Many Diversions and Modes of Communication including Social Media, from E-Mail and Proprietary Closed Systems and their Singular Purpose of Doing My Job. What I mean is that I previously thought The Internet was for leisure, and one only used it occasionally for work. But in an instant, I recognized that this was far from the truth, and I was thus in some sort of work-leisure limbo. (It’s clear now that this realization was building for some time.)

So what now!?

I don’t really have a problem with social media entering my job. In hindsight, that was clearly inevitable. This episode has just made me realize that I will now have to deal with all of the mixed-up things that come next: delineating work time from leisure; maintaining a professional web presence; managing the time I am working…

I guess the question is: does this situation even really change anything?

Sure, that barrier has fallen down, but does that mean my behaviour or life will change? I don’t know the answer to that yet.

— Update —

I think I might have figured it out. The thing is, I already spend a lot time at the computer; I don’t like that it has intruded into so many daily functions. If I want to read the news, I go to my computer. If I want to see what my friends are up to or talk to them, I go to my computer. If I want to listen to music or look at photos—computer. If I want to write—computer. Recipes, directions, phone calls, videos, communication… You can probably guess that I don’t have a Blackberry or iPhone or some other piece of fancy portable gear. Maybe that’s my trouble but I’m not sure.

I have two problems with spending so much time at my computer: guilt and headaches. On the one hand, it just doesn’t feel right staring at a digital screen for as long as I do each day; on the other, I feel unhealthy doing it. You could say, “Get a Wii Fit!” But I’m pretty sure that’s missing the point. I want to do all of those leisure activities, but I don’t want to sit in one spot all day, staring into the bright light, to do them. I want to leave my house!

So I wonder, what is the solution? Am I just waiting for the right technology to come along to allow me to do all of the things I want to without feeling like I’m attached to a machine? Do I want to give up technology altogether? Let me tell you when summer comes around.

The preface:

The claim resurfaces regularly. I’ve written about it; others have written about it: in terms of internet and social media, Germany lags behind.

ReadWriteWeb just published an interview with Marcel Weiß, the editor of Netzwertig.com—one of Germany’s most popular blogs—in which he explains that Germany is at least five years behind the U.S. when it comes to social media and its adoption by a larger part of society. Blogs are still considered to be suspect by a large part of the German public and have very little influence, and social news sites and aggregators attract very little attention.

He goes on to explain that

[B]logging and social media adoption in Germany is far behind similar trends in the U.S. and elsewhere in the world. Blogs are still considered suspect and have almost no influence over local or national politics. The mainstream media still likes to describe the Internet as a dangerous place, full of malware, porn, and scammers. While regular newspapers in Germany have also started to feel the pressure from the Internet (and every major German paper has a web site), the absence of a successful Craigslist-type site in the country has given the newspapers a longer lease on life than in America.

The reasons for this are very deeply ingrained in German society. Felix Salmon offers a short and comprehensible (yet also stereotyped) overview: basically, Germany’s culture is the antithesis of what blogging is all about.

The blogosphere is fundamentally egalitarian, to the point at which the young and even the completely anonymous can become A-listers. At the same time, highly respected professors and experts often find themselves ignored, perhaps because they hedge themselves too much or are simply too boring to pay attention to. Germany, by contrast, is fundamentally hierarchical.

A bit of a generalization, but he’s close to the point. I’d say this statement rather applies to culture. The use of mass culture in Germany is quite hierarchical as it reflects power structures. I will spare you the sociology behind it (see my post about Bourdieu and social media). Just this much: in contrast to American discourses, which embrace the internet as a genuinely democratic and—thus specifically American—cultural practice, in Germany this egalitarian appeal and integrative potential is perceived as a threat to milieus (and media) which still perpetuate restricted high cultural traditions (or the “right” use of pop culture) in order to gain social capital.

Also: Germany experienced its greatest push towards modernity under the Nazis, the first party to embrace mass media for propaganda purposes in a kind of reactionary modernism, which makes the whole field… suspect.

Anyway, the result of all this is: Germany indeed does lag behind.

My Problem:

I was confronted with this fact very recently when an old high school friend of mine asked me to help him promote a movie he produced, by means of social media. The movie is in English (in fact it’s supposed to take place in the U.S.), and aims at an international audience. Here, two mindsets collided.

It had to explain what a Facebook fan page was, why we want to get a Twitter and a Flickr account, etc. Once everything was set up, the next step was to explain how everything worked. It was a social media crash course.

I suppose Twitter alone would warrant a whole night of instructions (if the other person has no idea at all): What are the basics? How do I contact people? How, why and when do I send direct messages? Wait, I can change the background? I woke up to ICQ (yes, ICQ) messages asking me why a # was in front of a tweet. And what the hell is Follow Friday?

At this stage, we didn’t even discuss the “proper” use of Twitter yet: engage in conversations, be nice and say thank you, look for Twitter users or bloggers who are interested in the romantic horror comedy splatter genre and get them to cover you… If someone does an interview or writes a review, see if the person has a Twitter account and add them… A sample conversation: “One of the singers from the soundtrack is following us.” “Did you follow her back?” “Why?”

And so it went on. I was the one who’s supposed to update the account. Andy, the director, attended the film’s premier in Montreal. Lot’s of potential there in terms of Twitter. But he had no idea about it either. So apparently it was up to me… (sitting at my office desk in Germany, writing my doctoral thesis, not really having the time to monitor any coverage of the movie). It was going to be a long way. I really hope my friend realized how to use Thwirl by now…

“BTW, it would be nice if Andy could take some pictures and could upload them on Flickr. I also installed a plug-in to display the latest Flickr uploads on the Facebook page” “Uh… he doesn’t know how to. And why do we need Flickr in the first place, I thought we could upload photos on Facebook!” “Yaaaaah, but…”

The problem was: my friend’s German mindset, not being acquainted with any social media or its principle at all, collided with the world out there.

But, to give credit were credit is due: he seemed to be learning—in terms of the basic idea at least.

While having a beer at a bar, the producer told me what kind of trailer they would produce and how they would introduce the people behind the movie in little clips; how he would ask the director to film movies with his mobile at festivals and put those on Facebook and Youtube—basically share the experience and engage people, let them become part of the project and involve them in the process of getting the whole thing started. Or as he put it “Keep zings reel!”

We were getting there. Slowly.

I invited all my friends on Facebook to become a fan of the movie, while my friend sent out an e-mail to the 150 people of the (German) movie team. All of a sudden 2/3s of our fan base came from Australia—apparently hardly anyone of the team was on Facebook!

In short: please become a fan of Must Love Death and follow us on Twitter!!

-Jens

That’s right, folks. CNW Group now has a Facebook page where you can show your love for Canada’s number one newswire or sign up to hear about upcoming events, like our Breakfast with the Media series.

I didn’t have much to do with this, but I know that CNW Group’s all-star Communications Coordinators Jessica Sine and Amanda Laird have great plans for it.

In the meantime, do you have any other great examples of brands/companies using Facebook pages?

-Parker

(as usual, this and all other posts on BlogCampaigning reflect the opinions of the author, and are not necessarily those of CNW Group)

The whole world uses Facebook, yet the social network still hasn’t found a way to properly monetize on that potential (or just hasn’t revealed these plans yet). Sure, they’ve got the ads but while Darren Barefoot was successfully guided to a cool band they were trying to sell me a fake Rolex the other day.

Facebook is probably not so desperate that they are going to try and earn their lunch money advertising fake watches from China, but this still left a bit of a bad aftertasete. Globally, counterfeit watches are estimated to cost the Swiss watch industry alone more than $600 million per year. I doubt Facebook wants to be known as a platform for this massive black market – it’s certainly not reputation enhancing.

-Jens

A friend of mine who’s a prospective movie producer asked me to act as music supervisor for his (yet to be finished) diploma project. He needed some authentic country and 50s old school rock’n'roll for the soundtrack. Unfortunately there wouldn’t be a budget – and he would need the worldwide rights for an indefinite amount of time for all kinds of media (DVD, television, cinema…).

Confronted with this task I of course turned to the web – to Last.fm and Myspace to be precise.

As I’m neither to familiar with country nor with 50s rock’n'roll Last FM’s function to look for similar artists came in handy (beginning with Johnny Cash seemed like a good idea…) as did Myspace’s search functions, the possibility to listen to several tracks and to contact the band. The seedy bottom of the internet seems to be good for something after all. In regards to  presenting and discovering music it still has quite an edge on Facebook.

In short: There’s a vast talent pool out there, pretty much all our needs were covered by (mostly) unsigned or young and upcoming bands.

All this – again – made me realize just how important these platforms became for music and which great chances they offer for both parties involved. Even though we didn’t have a budget for the soundtrack what we could offer was a worldwide DVD-release which surely comes in handy in terms of exposing music to new markets – we got great tunes and the bands a chance to introduce themselves to a new audience, all without a middle-man or complicated license agreements.

Another example, even though in a completely different league, are my Australian friends from Operator Please, whose career certainly owes a lot to Myspace. Just recently, they were nominated again for two Aria awards (in one category they’re up against Kylie!).

So keep on posting your stuff onto the web, you never know when some random German movie person wants you for the soundtrack of his flick.

-Jens

PS
Check out the trailer for my friend’s old movie “Die Schwarze Kolonne” (The Black Platoon), a spoof on comic adaptations with German soap actor Tim Sander.

Writes Techcrunch:

Facebook is starting to pursue social networks that have copied their design or features by suing German site StudiVZ. The Financial Times has reported that Facebook filed a suit in California against the German company for what it claims is an infringement of Facebook’s “look, feel, features and services”.

StudiVZ claims to have 10 million active members, and is the largest social network in the German-speaking world, covering Germany, Belgium, Austria and Switzerland. The network is actually comprised of three different sites, each one a separate social network aimed at different segments of the market. StudiVZ.net is the classic site for college-aged students, SchuelerVZ.net is for high school students and MeinVZ.net is for older adults (these three networks were very hard to decipher in German when I attempted to sign up).

As the German blog Netzwertig points out what Facebook basically admits with this is that studiVZ is the main hurdle for their expansion into the German market. Networking effects prevent studiVZ users from switching to the American competition and rumoured talks about a possible take over apparently didn’t lead to any result.

Netzwertig goes on to explain that after Facebook’s growth in the US, Great Britain and Scandinavia, regions where the service virally spread in an instant, slowed down it needs to exploit new markets. Consequently Facebook can’t ignore a tightly populated, affluent country like Germany.

Nevertheless: The launch in Germany was pretty half-assed, a minimum was spend on the localisation (which accordingly lacked quality) and marketing. The idea that new members turned up automatically didn’t work out. So now it’s time for plan B – sue the competition out of existence.

Netzwertig speculates that the chances of studiVZ still existing as an independent network in one year are marginal now that Facebook identified it as its nemesis. Eventually the outcome of this whole venture also very much depends on studiVZ’s current owners, the Holtzbrinck-Verlag, which acquired the service for 100 million Euros in 2007 but couldn’t capitalise on it yet.

Personally I think that there’s a reason that Mashable included studiVZ in their top 10 international Facebook clones list, pointing out that

StudiVZ is nearly identical to Facebook in terms of features, functionality, and interface.

As Anthony Barba explains studiVZ internally was even referred to as “project Fakebook”, a fact that was revealed later when error messages used the phrase “fakebook”.

The only reason I ever signed up for studiVZ was to stalk people I went to high school with (just as pretty much everyone else I know) – something I regretted immediately. Not only because I came across some characters of the past I’d rather forget, but also because of the absolute god awful functionality of this sorry, parochial excuse of a social network: Innovative developments towards a more comfortable service are virtually non-existent and I can’t connect with my English speaking friends abroad.

In short: The technology is just as sophisticated as one of the founder’s excuses:

One can’t confuse the platforms with each other. “The colours are different: studiVZ is red, Facebook is blue”

-Jens

Some more news from the social gaming world: Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has invested $3 million into user-generated casual gaming site Kongregate.

Says Kongregate founder Jim Greer:

He looked at it the way he looks at the Amazon seller business. Amazon is a better place to sell your stuff than on your own site, and Kongregate is a better place to host your games. Community is really important. He said you should really consider developers your customers to the same extent that you consider players your customers. That was his big emphasis.

It might not be all sunshine and lollipops for a developer who wants to sell their game through Kongregate though, the main problem being brand erosion. As Daniel Cook points out in his excellent Casual Game Manifesto on Gamasutra:

[Portals] are using disposable casual games to build a loyal community that they can continue to rely upon for years to come. This places an expensive integration burden on the casual game developers. It also increases the chance that customers will look to the portal for future purchases, not the developer of their favorite game.

All these issues reduce the developer’s bargaining power and their profit margin.

From a player’s perspective though it’s good to hear that Kongregate has a (in its deatils yet to be reveiled) Facebook strategy up its sleeve as it will start launching the most popular games as standalone Facebook apps: There’s no need to register oneself at another site, Facebook offers every possibility to create a socially rich community around the games, the shelf life of a successful social networked game is much higher due to its viral effect that helps it to keep momentum and if my girlfriend’s scrabble-addicted mum is anything to go by it potentially is a great portal to attract casual players.

Although: The question remains how smart it is to limit oneself to Facebook only. As Juan Gril in another Gamasutra piece points out:

But if you are a game developer and you tie your game to just one social network, you are shooting yourself in the foot, as you are losing a lot of the potential audience that uses the other networks. Your best bet is to see how can you create a web game that can be either be accessed from inside a social network and out of it, and make use of the features a social network has…

-Jens