Facebook’s Redesign Will Affect Your Brand

by maewow on March 19, 2013

Mark Zuckerberg promises a better user experience with the upcoming newsfeed changes, but what should brands expect?

The Problem the Redesign Solves For

Facebook wants to improve the user experience while scaling their ad business. As a marketer who has begged my Facebook rep on more than one occasion “Please tell me how to spend more money on your platform!!!” (And really, who ever hears that in business?) It was clear that Facebook had a scaling problem. Ad performance was great, but I couldn’t get through my budget without a ton of work. At the same time, users are complaining that they are being served too many ads and threaten to leave.

In order for Facebook to make more money, they need to ramp up the quantity of ads shown in the newsfeed. How to do this without causing users to revolt seems to be a daunting proposition. This new design is their solution.

Scaling ads (I’m using ads and Promoted Posts interchangeably) only works if users don’t rebel against the ad’s presence, so they need to look nice and interest the user. As a brand, you need to make your ads more engaging and look prettier.

Facebook’s example of stunning visual content.

Tell Me A Story (And Pay A Lot)

This redesign puts the onus on the brand to create compelling ads that people interact with, or to pay a premium to have boring ads continue to appear in a person’s main newsfeed.

See all the changes in detail here.

Facebook positions “telling stories” and ” visuals bring your Newsfeed to life” as the new criteria for getting into the main newsfeed. The new redesign will make the newsfeed into front page real estate of “your personalized newspaper” (Zuckerberg’s words) so you should expect to pay a lot to get there.

If you don’t want to pay, and no one in your network is interacting with your posts, your page posts are tucked away into to another feed: the “Following” feed. If the way users interact with brand page tabs is any indication, users will never check this feed. It’s akin to users willfully navigating to a webpage of solely display ads.

It should be noted that there is an opportunity for brands to be seen in the Photos feed. Based on the popularity of Instagram, people will check this feed. So, start posting some quality photos to Facebook!

The Need For Quality Content

Brands need to churn out visually appealing content to remain in the newsfeed and the photo feed. Otherwise the brand is relying on the user to check in on it’s page. It’s not going to happen – unless a brand is adding so much value that users really wants to seek them out.

When would that maybe happen? This example come to mind: Nike’s workout of the day from Serena Williams on the Nike Women’s Facebook page. This Nike page post is already Facebook’s dream scenario of a branded ad; visually interesting, relevant content that the brand is also paying to promote.

Needless to say, making campaigns like Nike’s is way more work, and take a totally different expertise, than A/B testing different display ad creative on your standard ad network. If your brand can’t produce then you’ll need to pay up to be seen.

My two big questions about the newsfeed redesign:

Will users actually be more tolerant of ads in this format?
Will marketers become more savvy in their ability to advertise on the platform?

5 Ways to Get Brands on Vine

by maewow on March 8, 2013

I really like Vine. But it’s hard!

Here are 5 ways that it could be much easier. You’d get more users on Vine and the bleeding edge brands would begin testing out the platform.

1. Drafts

The most frustrating thing is capturing the perfect sequence in six seconds and then losing your wifi connection – a vine destroying move. Having a way to create drafts and upload when your connection is better would be a huge improvement. Also, I could splice together a vine filmed in different parts of NYC and be able to take the subway without fear of losing my work. Vines could get more ambitious with this feature – and brands love that.

2. Use Video Already on Your Phone

Just as you can “choose existing photo” with Instagram. It would be great for Vine to have this feature so you can use existing video you already have stored on your phone. I rarely open Instagram to take a photo in the app itself. I just open my camera and capture several versions of the same scene. Being able to do this for video would make for higher quality vines. You don’t have to be quite as deliberate as you are now when filming. Also from a brand perspective, you could share video through email or text between team members and then upload to Vine once everyone has signed off. Right now it’s a huge responsibility to be the person in control of a brand’s Vine account – there is no oversight or ability to collaborate.

3. Give us more ways to view and discover vines

Vine should build some cool tools, or incentivize others to do so. Whatevervine.com shows you the most recent vines for any hash tag, in a Brady Bunch style lay out.

I want to list off a few other cool tools that people have built to navigate Vine, but I can’t think of any others. There is an analytics one, but I’m not so interested in that yet, as the platform needs more creation and user engagement first.

Ideas for someone to run with:

What about a scoreboard of the most liked Vines (similar to favstar.com)
A mosaic app like picstitch for video instead of photos?

Or a way to create lists like “favorite comedians on Vine.”

4. Voice over technology!

I almost posted a vine that accidentally captured a friend going on a explicative filled joke in the background (it’s a funny story…). Most people forget that this app captures sound as well, and this can be problematic. Usually it just sounds awful, but that feature could allow for more creativity. Wouldn’t it be cool if you could layer over a sound track, or narrate the Vine after you’ve filmed it? Even adding wacky sound effects would be amusing.

5. Ability to Promote Your Vines

So maybe this is putting the cart before the horse, because you need brands to even accept the challenge of creating a Vine account before you talk about promoting their content in that new channel. Since it takes so much effort to make 6 seconds of video brand-ready, it could help sweeten the proposition if brands knew they could pay to be discovered by a larger group of people. I’m basically suggesting taking the Facebook Promoted Posts model and applying it to Vine.

My Appeal to Vine & co.

If Vine was easier for users, there would be a larger quantity of active users and hopefully increased activity from those users. This makes it more fun for everyone.

If there are more users who are more active, it presents more of a reason for brands to join the party.

And there are so many creative things brands could do with this platform if they weren’t so afraid of it. Because Vine is basically an open way for anyone to make a tiny commercial.

Facebook and Frito Lay

by maewow on March 4, 2013

I’m a little worried about Facebook. The company needs to think more about making you happy. They could take a page out of the Doritos playbook, applying a mathmatical fervor that is the driving force behind it’s products.

How much does Doritos care?

“Frito-Lay had a formidable research complex near Dallas, where nearly 500 chemists, psychologists and technicians conducted research that cost up to $30 million a year, and the science corps focused intense amounts of resources on questions of crunch, mouth feel and aroma for each of these items. Their tools included a $40,000 device that simulated a chewing mouth to test and perfect the chips, discovering things like the perfect break point: people like a chip that snaps with about four pounds of pressure per square inch.” -The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food by Michael Moss

This New York Times Magazine article documents the product development of junk food lines and their subsequent marketing campaigns. No font choice on packaging, or fraction of a percent of carbonation is overlooked.

Why?

Because their business hinges on the ability to make people chemically happy (or addicted, as the article argues). Facebook is in the same predicament, but they don’t have the research center. They seem to be flying by the seat of their pants trying out new ad models. That’s fine in some sense – it’s great for marketers right now- but Facebook can’t forget that they need to keep users happily addicted, “Bet you can’t have just one” style.

The concept of minimum viable product is an important one, but it becomes a lot riskier to test out a ton of changes when you have over 1 billion users.

What’s the “bliss point” of the newsfeed?

Facebook needs to figure this out as it introduces more ads to the newsfeed and as it simply becomes less fun. People could look for healthier social networking opportunities.

#BrainRealEstate

by maewow on January 13, 2013

What’s the ROI on a hashtag?

I don’t shy away from talking about campaigns in terms of ROI. There is a great deal of value in evaluating a campaign in these terms, and some of my most creative ideas came about by just focusing on increasing $$ spent through social channels. At the same time, it’s only a part of the larger, more ambiguous story.

Here is one such ambiguous story:

In 3 separate instances at work, people mentioned if I had seen the #UOxGIRLS instagram hash tag. These 3 people were all in different departments and didn’t spend on-the-clock time thinking about social media. So I was impressed by how well the campaign was doing.

This is a really rough breakdown of what had to happen in the brains of these 3 potential consumers:

Impression: eyeball scanning the hash tag →

Absorption of information →

Thought based on that information: “ Cool collab. I’m excited for the GIRLS season.” →

Categorization into one’s memory: social media, Urban Outfitters, GIRLS →

Recalling that bit of knowledge when someone who might be interested (i.e. Mae, Social Media Manager) is nearby →

Sharing that information with me.

…not to mention on both occasions we were in a larger group of people – which led to a larger conversation about GIRLS, Lena Dunham, Urban, the horribly photoshopped Interview cover and Instagram. Successfully branded conversation right there.

That is a lot of thought activity around one campaign. How do you quantify that?

It’s so much more than an impression or click through on an article. No one has purchased anything from UrbanOutfitters.com, and if and when they do it could be through email or google or a promoted Facebook post. They could wander by the store on Broadway and be 45% more likely to go in. I don’t know, no one does. (If you do, please say “hi” in the comments!)

I often wonder that when it comes to Instagram contests. How much is it worth to Gilt City that people are actively taking photos of a beautiful cityscapes or snapping a pic of their brunch, and then they have the thought to tag this photo with a Gilt City hashtag? Will this connection pay off? It certainly seems like a good thing to claim that brain real estate.

Photo by @ericaschaffer

While I can’t tell you the AOV on these Instagram users, I can tell you that they are actively connecting the brand to fun urban moments and picturesque cityscapes. Then sharing that with their network.

I’ve been researching how ROI is calculated for billboard advertising and how and why people think different campaigns are effective. It’s all based on the absorption and retention of the sign → Marketing to Memory. This deserves it’s own post. But there is a parallel here in that you can calculate ROI in some form, but you’re only getting a very limited view.

The real value comes from the real estate that is taken up with this connection between brand and theme. But like an undiscovered Brooklyn neighborhood, we don’t know how much that real estate is worth – yet.

Kids

by maewow on December 30, 2012

I read this piece by @joshm and had 4 thoughts simultaneously:

1.Social media marketing is going to look a lot different very soon, and it’s going to be a really fun challenge for brands to get in front of these kids.

2. I need more high school friends. I’m cool, hang out with me!

3. 1 to 1 communication is an untapped opportunity from a brand perspective – other than the call center. Like a brand on SnapChat or Kek? That could get crazy fast.

4. How much does your brand think about visual content as an identity tool? Probably somewhat, but definitely not enough, especially in social.

I’m going to go research top marketers to this age group. More later.

Say Yes

by maewow on December 20, 2012

“There are two types of people in the world, those whose default response is ‘Yes,’ and those whose default is ‘No.’” – Mom

Childhood take away; Try to say yes to life. Go on adventures, take the right risks, meet more interesting people and learn from them.

It’s great advice, and one I try to live by. it’s also the reason I’m overcommitted… and why I’m hanging out with a fire dance troupe in Bushwick next week (don’t tell Mom that one.)

This outlook is perfect for creating campaigns in social media at the present time.

Find a way to say “Yes” when no one else has yet, and you’re on your way to a great idea.

It might take a lot of creative thinking about the given platform, and it may take a few hours of your developer’s time. But that’s more than OK, that’s work.

-Can we randomly give people their order for free if they tweet out what they buy?
-Yes. We can figure out a way to do that.

-Can we feature users’ Instagram photos on our site and in email?
-Yes, I bet we can do that in a really fun way.

-Contest on Pinterest without any tracking tools?
-There’s got to be at least one way to track this.

In each of these instances there are reasons to shelve that idea or to wait for someone to build tools that would make it easier. But once you do that, someone has already swooped in, done it first, and reaped the attention. And o much of social is about attention. Without that buzzworthy idea, there is no reason for anyone to share your campaign unless you have the largest prize ever or you are going have Boo break the free fall record.

Since all Social Campaigns Live and Die by the Retweet

1. You have to be first
or
2. You have to be a very close second
3. You have to have a huge prize, or celebrity factor
4. You have to be somewhat crazy (see: Felix Baumgartner)
5. You have to be controversial

You have to get creative. You have to say “Yes” more often than not.

One Last App

by maewow on September 4, 2012

Three years ago my high school friend visited from Hong Kong, crashing on my couch after a night out. She fell asleep clutching her blackberry, so that in the darkness the notification light would cast a faint red glow on her face every 60 seconds. I distinctly remember this and wondering; was this an HK thing? An investment banker thing? What did this mean for humanity? (jokingly…sort of)

6 months later I had started to sleep-check my email, waking with vague recollections of correspondences with clients. HK time had caught up with me, and now I am just as plugged in around the clock as she was then.

I think of that behavioral shift whenever I try to predict the next big social media app. Because I feel I have room right now in my routine for One Last App.

No new social app has made a real play for this one empty spot in my routine. I feel like the next logical step in the evolution of checking text (twitter/SMS), location (foursquare) and photo (instagram) would be video, but I’m not totally there yet.

Keek is a cool idea, and only in the past few weeks have I begun to think “hey I could film that” when seeing something interesting unfold before me.

Funnily enough, every time I have had that urge to film and broadcast something, it had to do with music; a late night bonfire singalong, little kids dancing to a rendition of “Wagon Wheel” at a Labor Day cookout, Frank Ocean’s closing set at Lollapalooza… In each of these instances I settled for an instagram photo, but it felt lacking in that it obviously did not capture the performance.

We’ll see.

My one nagging doubt about video social networks on mobile can be summed up by Frank Ocean’s verse “My TV ain’t HD, that’s too real.”

Photos let you edit moments in a way that video currently does not. Maybe if they were bite sized like keek (36 seconds), that would solve that problem. Or maybe I’ll just get used to it, too.

I wonder if once I find this “one last app” I will then find space for just one more. Maybe I should fill those few extra seconds on my phone praying for my attention span instead.

UPDATE: turns out my friend did post a Youtube video to Facebook, and I was really happy he did. I’m starting to think that one last app should be “Instagram for Video” after all.

Insta-Popular

by maewow on August 23, 2012

You started instagramming because you wanted to see your friends’ low-fi filtered shenanigans from last night.

Somehow something changed, and the number of likes, comments and followers you receive is a statement on your artistic prowess. This app validates your eye towards beauty AND for conveying your personality through captured moments. (so I might have taken a lot of philosphy of art courses…)

Validation is important, so how do you get more of it?

1. Hash tags

Don’t like how hash tags mess up the perfect caption for your photo? Go back later and add new comments in which you add a lot of popular hash tags. This gets your photo out in front of people searching for specific words. You might be surprised by the different hash tags that are popular. Check them out here.

Go back and add #40likes #80likes, #sky #photooftheday etc. You could do this for hours.

http://www.justin.my/top-hashtags-on-instagram/

2. Comment on popular pics

Find popular photos from popular accounts and don’t just like them -no one is going to see one of 1,000 likes- but they will see a majority of comments. If your comment is relevant and somewhat witty most likely someone will click through to your profile and follow you.

3. Tag others

Like twitter, use the @ before someone’s name so that they see you’ve tagged them. This isn’t just for tagging people shown in the photo, it can also be used when you want to draw someone’s attention to one of your photos. Like with twitter, when someone @mentions you, it’s good form to respond. And you’ve building community, etc etc.

Good programs to use: ink361.com, statigram.com

4. Hook it up to facebook and twitter

If you have an active Facebook and twitter life, get your photos out through these channels. More eyeballs mean more chances for likes. I even linked my instagram to this blog –>

5. Take photos that raise questions and provoke comments

RKOI

I want to comment on this photo. What is going on? How cool is that? How did that happen? Who are you?! It’s the same sort of engagement as with twitter, though the question has to be asked through a photo. Or you can literally ask a photo in the caption (this works well usually, especially with brands).

6. Treat it like an art form and find your style

Get a niche or two and consistently take photos of certain content, or in a certain format. For example @catsofinstagram. Like with the great artists, someone should be able to tell when an Instagram photo is yours because of your unique perspective. Maybe this is a lofty goal for a simple app. But hey, reach for the Instagram stars.

You can follow me on instagram here.

The Socially Awkward Olympics

by maewow on August 15, 2012

Mckayla and I are not impressed.

Just because the Olympics acknowledged the existence of twitter and Facebook does not mean the Games were “social.” We shouldn’t award any medals for social innovation.

Let’s take a look at some of the numbers found across the internet:

219.4 million network tv viewers
2 billion page views of NBC Olympic coverage
159 million video streams of coverage
8.8 million tickets sold to the Games
10,507 Olympic athletes

AND

150 million tweets

If you solely looked at the people who watched from seats at the Games, they would have to tweet about 17 times each to reach the total number of tweets. If I was sitting there, I’d tweet a heck of a lot more, but that doesn’t even factor in the 219.9 million TV viewers, or the 159 million online views.

Now factor in all the people that watched the Olympics on network TV and streaming video, that’s 2.5 tweets per viewer over two entire weeks. This doesn’t factor in the 2 billion page views to NBC’s site, or any of the other channels people found to see and talk about the games.

This is an extremely low number.

In comparison, the MTV Video Music Awards (the one in which Beyonce’s baby bump took top billing), garnered over 10 million tweets for 12 million viewers. That’s a social event!

The Olympics did nothing well to foster cool content about the games, there should’ve been more structure and a format for people to talk about their favorite events and athletes.. All conversation about social media dealt with the number of Twitter followers and Likes an athlete had. There was no conversation about what the athletes were actually saying.

And this is the point that makes me worried about social in general – there is a real lack of innovation to build interesting features and get people to communicate across the world about the games. More than just low numbers, a real opportunitiy was lost.

One Golden Idea: Photo Aggregation

There was a great interview with the photographer Chang Lee in the NYT that captures both the difficulty of his craft and the opportunity that exists for crowd participation.

Setting up for Usain Bolt’s race, it took: “about four hours. I had three cases of gear with me…There were nine runners, and out of them, seven were possible gold-medal winners. So, do I go tight on two or three? Or do I want to shoot a wider angle and have four or seven or nine? … You never know, and in a split-second decision, you can’t really get everything.”

This seems incredibly challenging, especially given the fact that there were over a hundred thousand amateur photographers (aka fans w/ phones) at the race. So wouldn’t it be great if there was an aggregator that took all photos from that one race and created a mosaic of the different angles and hundreds of different story lines that occurring at the same time?

It’s technologically possible, and way more engaging than putting all the pressure on a few professionals.

And these user photos just highlight the talent of photographers like Chang W. Lee. He would still capture moments like this:

I was also struck by his photos of the long tail sports. This is my once-in-every-four-year chance to watch world class handball.

Photos like these make me want to! So let me easily see more handball photos from people who are there.

Apparently the tape delay helps ratings. So wouldn’t it help ratings even more if Twitter was on fire with commentary throughout the day, providing a place for those less mainstream sports to be talked about as well?

We missed out on a truly global conversation. It’s time to return home and start training for 2016.

Skateboard Videos and Social Media

by maewow on July 23, 2012

While I learn so much from my twitterfeed, there is a certain monotony to reading brands’ tweets – even ones that are following today’s best practices.

They’re dealing with what I call “The Least Favorite Question.” Basically. “What’s your favorite pizza/trend/restaurant/musician/animal etc?” It begs a response, but there is a real threat of stale content. Stop asking me what my favorite things are!

Skateboard videos face the same constrains that tweets do (the analogy works, stick with me) the conventions are pretty set by now: great tricks, high energy music, practical jokes and high fives.

Just like tweets: general questions, links to blogs, canned sales-y language.

This leaves an opportunity for someone to come along and shatter the convention and make people take notice.

Taco Bell does this with their “I could give a chalupa attitude” on twitter and Sebastian Linda does this with his skate video “The Epic and the Beasts.”

Caveats before attempting to break conventions:

Have an abundance of talent.

Go all in.

The Epic & The Beasts from Sebastian Linda on Vimeo.

PS: I think that these twitter conventions are part of the reason why it’s hard to find great community managers. The field is so new that once a person masters tweeting and facebookin’, they want to move on to the bigger strategy and as far from the “least favorite question” as possible. This progression makes total sense, but I think there is a worthwhile conversation to be had about pushing the boundaries of the day to day tweets and status updates a brand puts out there. Doing it well takes a subtle creativity, an understanding of the desired brand perception, and endurance to do it everyday.