Monthly Archive for June, 2010

Take aways from the Facebook Developer Garage in London

Published
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guillaume
on June 24, 2010
in Facebook, Nudge News and Social Media
. 0 Comments

The Facebook Developer Garage held on Monday 21st June at the Barbican centre was probably the best one I have attended so far as Mark Zuckerberg and other senior figures from Facebook were present to give more information on where Facebook is heading and what their plans are for Europe.

So here is a list of the information we got throughout day:

Figures:

70% of Facebook users are not in the US, so Facebook has to start a real global push.

200 million gamers on Facebook playing 4 games on average per month

Now 26 million UK users (the UK is the second biggest market for Facebook)

300,00 websites have implemented the like button (50% are European websites)

More than 1 billion pieces of content are ‘liked’ every day

Social Gaming:

  • Facebook is the biggest gaming platform worldwide and had just launched the beginning of a revolution. As the CEO of Playfish said, we have only scratched the surface of social gaming.
  • Social gaming breaks down access barriers to the games people play, requiring nothing that a user doesn’t already have (e.g. Facebook account, mobile phone, and computer) - as opposed to a console: PS3/XBOX/Wii.
  • Facebook credits simplify micro-transactions, and there’s a social element too. Credits build trust so that when a user sees a payment request from an app they can see the friends that have trusted the service before.
  • Facebook credits are a key to profitability for the company. As Facebook takes a commission of 30% on any given transaction, it represents a strong revenue stream for the company.

Recommendations Features (Social Plugins):

  • Implement Amazon style recommendations on your website. The Recommendation Facebook social plugins offers new opportunities for brands to personalise the content of their website: it applies the Facebook engine to your website content (what everyone likes + what your friends like + what you liked before).

How Facebook Works as a Company:

  • First the great idea, then the monetisation plan. The company focuses on a great idea and monetisation will follow if it works, Facebook (even in its leaner days) didn’t think about monetisation until the idea had developed and succeeded on its own merits.
  • Facebook still perceives itself as a start up. Mark Zuckerberg kept saying that this was the beginning of the journey. And even when describing his company, he insisted they were still small, with a team of 30 engineers taking care of the platform and only one guy in charge of the chat function (which is the 2nd or 3rd biggest in the world).

Facebook in Europe:

  • Europe is a key territory for Facebook’s future expansion. As there are 140 millions Facebook users in Europe, it has become a market as vital as the US for the company. And as the penetration rate is lower, in the long run, Europe will overcome the US in terms of users. So by investing in Europe, it looks like Facebook plans to generate more revenue from here too.
  • Facebook is going to extend its European presence to strengthen its relationship with developers and agencies. It means more support for developers in Europe with engineers available on European time zones. This also involves more Facebook Developer Garages organised all over Europe.

Location Feature:

  • “Coming soon” was Mark Zuckerberg’s comment when the question was raised.

‘Liked’ by Everyone:

  • Everyone within the Nudge team liked Mark Zuckerberg. He is a lot more down to earth than he appears when he does public speaking.

What I found extremely interesting throughout the day was how Facebook CEOs insisted that what they have achieved so far it is just the beginning of the journey. So expect Facebook to become the social network of choice for 1 billion users, have one of the most demanded (virtual) currencies on the planet and be implemented on every website. Get used to it: Facebook will be the web.

The iPhone and Social Media

Published
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guillaume
on June 22, 2010
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The iPhone is one of the best smart phones on the market, and the fourth version of it will definitely bring it to a new level. However, the real interest lies in the integration with social media. The iPhone app store has not only made it easier to use social networks on the go, but has brought some much needed functionality.

So here is a review of what the iPhone has brought and will bring to social media:

  • Social Networks application: The Facebook iPhone app is the most downloaded and 25% of Facebook traffic comes from mobile phone.
  • Facebook Connect Implementation: Applications are using Facebook Connect to import user’s data in order to offer a richer experience. Have a look at some examples here.
  • Share on Facebook/Twitter: When using an application on the iPhone, users can share content with their friends by publishing it on their Facebook wall or sending a tweet.
  • Find your Facebook Friends: When an application integrates Facebook, it is easier for users to invite friends to sign up or to see who is already a member.
  • Export data from your social network to your iPhone: Applications such as Smart Sync for Facebook lets users export data from their Facebook account to their iPhone. For example, so they can see the Facebook profile picture of their contact in their telephone book
  • Improve functionality: Some applications offer features that you cannot find on official application. For example, the Facebook iPhone app does not offer any means to upload pictures from your phone to your Facebook profile, but the application VideoUp does enable you to do so.
  • Aggregation: Several applications are collection of your different social media accounts (Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, LinkedIn, etc), which is quite handy in order to manage so many outposts. Zensify is one of the few that do the job pretty well.

The next big step regarding social media and the iPhone would be to integrate Facebook features straight into the Operating System of the smart phone, such as contact and event synchronisation. This is probably the first step towards what could become the ‘Facebook phone’.

Facebook Developer Garage Hackathon

Published
by
steve
on June 21, 2010
in Facebook and Nudge News
. 1 Comment

A different way to spend a Sunday - yesterday saw Facebook executives and senior members of the Facebook development team stopping by the Facebook Developer Garage Hackathon in central London. The aim of a ‘hackathon’ is to bash out a complete Facebook application in one afternoon (or one afternoon and a full night for those with the stamina), mirroring an exercise Facebook carries out internally to generate platform ideas.


Steve from Nudge talking through an idea with Mark Zuckerberg

Teams presented their entries to a panel of high-profile judges including Mr Mark Zuckerberg himself, with three winning teams going on to present their hacks to attendees and the general press at Monday’s special edition of the Facebook Developer Garage.

Nudge scored a great result, with a team headed up by Toby being chosen as one of the three winners. The app, titled “Tube Warning”, pairs Facebook Event data with the freshly released London Underground API to create a mashup that warns users of impending travel problems before they leave for their specific event.

A good (long) day was had by all - as well as some great idea’s being presented, it was also a great opportunity to chat face to face with Zuckerberg about Facebook’s intentions regarding Open Graph and Facebook for websites.

See more photos over at the Nudge Facebook Page

Decode the Facebook Insignia

Published
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guillaume
on June 18, 2010
in Facebook
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In case you haven’t heard yet, Mark Zuckerberg had a bit of a Nixon moment when he was sweating during an interview at the D8 conference. But more embarrassing than this was when he took off his hoody and everyone discovered a mysterious insignia on the inside of it.

The insignia tells us a lot about the direction the company is taking:

  • The unofficial mission of Facebook as a company is to “Make the world open and connected”.
  • 2010 appears as an important milestones for the company as it now has three pillars:

1. The stream that aggregates and displays users’ content.

2. The platform that enables brands to engage customers through bespoke applications.

3. The open graph that lets Facebook index the web and re-organise the information.

  • Facebook’s use of user data, represented by the blue ring, is the cement of their strategy, used to sustain the three pillars and enable further expansion.

So what do you think of this insignia? Do you find it useful to explain Facebook’s strategy? Does it scare you? Or do you just think its cheesy and completely geeky?

The True Value of a Facebook Fan

Published
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guillaume
on June 15, 2010
in Facebook
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Syncapse has compiled a fantastic empirical review to determine the value of a Facebook fan to a brand. The study was run in the US and is based on 20 mega brands including Nike, McDonald’s and Sony PlayStation.

Here are the highlights of the study:

  • Fans were reported to spend on average $71.84 per year more than respondents who were not fans.
  • Fans are not created equal: if the average value of a fan is $136.38, the fan value can reach up to $270.77 in the best case, or go down to $0.
  • The most valuable fans are those of McDonald’s who present an annual value of $508.16.
  • Facebook fans are 20% more likely to continue using a brand than non-fan consumers.
  • 68% of Facebook fans indicated that they are very likely to recommend a product compared to only 28% for non-fans.
  • 34% of respondents are more likely to become a fan of the brand if they see that one of their Facebook friends is already a fan.
  • 36% of respondents are more likely to try a product if one of their Facebook friends became a fan
  • 81% of fans feel a connection/empathy with the brand, compared to 39% of non-fans.

As Syncapse states it in its report, “It is important to note that this audience would still have value without Facebook, although arguably much less discernable value”.

Nudge attends DMA Social Media Strategic Working Group

Published
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toby
on June 10, 2010
in Social Media
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I attended my first meeting of the DMA Social Media Strategic Working Group this morning.  Nudge is joining up with the DMA in order to ensure  best practice is used across the social media marketing industry.

Finding the right trade organisation for Nudge and Social Media has been tricky but I’m pleased with the potential of the DMA. They have a clear framework and history of experience in tricky data protection issues where much of the public pressure on social media is coming from. The three areas to focus on are:

  • developing legal approaches and best practice,
  • research and benchmarking for ROI
  • communications and market development.

There is also a lobbying role for a trade body and as Nudge we will be pushing to ensure:

  • right to and defence of your online identity (eg. your Facebook account, your business twitter profile)
  • maintainence of adequate privacy controls (eg. opt-in social marketing, using social and behaviour data appropriately)
  • access to platforms (eg. No shutting down of Youtube and Facebook as happened in Pakistan last month)

We will also be pressing for US, European and global advocacy around  social media specific issues which arise from the global nature of social media platforms.

No doubt you will be hearing more on this initiative in due course.

Lost in Translation on Facebook

Published
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guillaume
on June 10, 2010
in Facebook
. 0 Comments

Semantically speaking, Facebook fan pages have always been weird. They are officially called ‘Public Profiles’, but as you were used to ‘Becoming a fan’ of them, they were called by the marketing industry and Facebook users a ‘fan page’ - an easier to understand and more funky name than the official one.

However, now that you ‘like’ a page, the question is: ‘What should you call them?’ Well based on what happened before, we should probably call them ‘Like pages’ and so the people that liked them are ‘Likers’ and not ‘fans’.

It doesn’t sound terribly exciting, which might explain why Facebook and everyone else have kept the previous name. So now I’m wondering what would happen if Facebook changed the ‘Like’ to ‘Awesome’ instead? Users that like a page would be ‘Awesome users’ and brands would have ‘Awesome pages’. Now we have a name that rocks!

Open Graph Explained

Published
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toby
on June 1, 2010
in Uncategorized
. 1 Comment
Could the web be better? That’s a question we technology people keep asking.
The answer is invariably yes.
For each tech company “better” means something different.
If you’re Google then knowing where you are (“geolocation”) will allow them to give you better search results – “Pizza” for example brings you your local Pizza shop rather than Domino’s in San Francisco.

The Open Graph uses Facebook to connect you to more than just people

If you’re Apple then a better form factor to view web pages might help – so they bring us the Ipad.
And if you’re Facebook then the web might be better if it were more like Facebook… which brings us to “Open Graph“.
Graph is the term Facebook uses to describe our connections with each other – my relationship with you is one link in the “social graph”. But social relationships aren’t the only interesting links – what about between me and the companies I like (“brand graph”) or me and the films I like “movie graph” or even me and news articles “news graph” – in fact you could put just about any object in front of the word graph and it might be worth recording.
Of course this is something companies have been doing for a while – lovefilm tracks what films I like, Digg records the news articles I like. However what is new is Facebook’s centralisation of this information.
Any “open graph” information is centralised in your Facebook account. And this is why the Facebook privacy debate just got hotter – it’s becoming more than just my social life at stake when someone looks at my Facebook account data.
Each time I “like” a movie at IMDB, like a restaurant on Yelp, or even like a news article on the Nudge blog a consequent story appears on my Facebook wall. Toby just liked Iron Man 2 for example.

Open graph Likes appear on your Facebook wall for friends to see

Friends will see the story in their news feeds and click on the link will be taken to the web page I was just on, whether it be IMDB, LoveFilm or the Iron Man website.
So for each of us, figuring out how to use open graph in our business should be an item at the top of our  agenda – what services or products will make good objects on the open graph? What will customers like to like? What does it mean for our objects to be connected to the graph? What messaging do we want to push to people who like our objects?
And what’s the end game for Facebook in all this – why all this bother in mapping the whole graph, not just the social one? I think it’s all about search.  Because, as Facebook have discovered, we’re more interested in what our friends think than what an arbitrary authority (eg. Yahoo’s web directory ) or other web pages (Google’s page rank) think would be the right answer.
Now when my friends search for the best film to see on Facebook they’ll discover that I liked Iron Man 2 and that might be all they need to tip them to go and see it.