ramblings of a creative developer
The August edition of Business 2.0 lists out other types of Facebook Social Networks: China’s Xiaoneiwang, France’s Skyrock, Germany’s StudiVZ, India’s Minglebox, Israel’s Mekusharim, Mexico’s Vostu, Netherlands’ Hyves, Russia’s V Kontakte, and Turkey’s Qiraz.
Thanks to Jeremiah Owyang
On a different note, the Cadbury Wispa will be revived this autumn thanks to the petitions of 14,000 people across dozens of different Facebook user groups. Manufacturer Cadbury Schweppes said it was the first time “that the power of the Internet played such an intrinsic role in the return of a Cadbury brand.”
If this is truly a grassroots, nostalgia-driven effort (Cadbury insists it is), then the company has a unique opportunity to parlay that revival interest into strong customer ownership: hand over levels of brand management to a dedicated Facebook community.
But mad.co.uk make Publicis the ring-leader and here.
The bottom line is that what Cadbury’s and Publicis have done well is Listen. Facebook is the new and trendy Social Media tool at the moment, just as blogs were before it. The rules of success are still the same though. Listen to the Conversation and then Engage in the discussions.
Previously Walmart built a MySpace clone on the corporate website which was pathetically closed after a mere 10 weeks. Having learned their lesson to consider joining existing communities before building their own they’ve saddled up for more social networking. Today, Wal-Mart’s sponsored group in Facebook is aimed at dorm-bound students who need to pimp out their pads –sadly, after 2 weeks in, there’s little to brag about – just read some of the Wall posts…
Is this program salvageable? Absolutely.
The battering of the brand continues on for the next 100 wall posts, and it will likely continue, this is expected. I’ve analyzed all the comments and there’s only a few students and a handful of folks that admit to actually shopping there –they’ve not reached the college segment.
This sponsored group doesn’t have discussion forums, I’d recommend they turn those on, and try to segment the conversations about going back to school, and even consider keeping folks on topic. Continue to allow critics (you can’t stop it anyways) but try to use the forums to guide a discussion about school. I’m not sure why Wal-Mart has not chosen to turn on it’s marketing engines and point people here from their corporate site, using a cross-promotion tactic would certainly drive more folks over to the group.
What’s the great thing about all this? Wal-Mart’s still here, was bold enough to try it again, and hasn’t pulled the site down. I highly recommend that Wal-Mart consider trying a community strategy using a transparent and authentic blog or video blog series that addresses the very brand issues that they are getting slammed on. I took at look online for a “Walmart blog” and didn’t see any from the company, why is this? It’s going to be very difficult to try a community marketing strategy with eCommerce hooks without first addressing the brand detractors.
What Walmart desperately need is an evangelist and a blogging platform on which to counter the comments being made.
More here:
Can Wal-Mart’s Facebook campaign survive transparency?
Sponsored Wal-Mart page on Facebook creates “Enlightning Conversation” amongst members
Jeremiah covers some very interesting points in his round-up on social networking
More and more of our clients are beginning to ask questions about what to do in the Social Networking space. It baffles and befuddles them. They just don’t get it.
Mainly this is to do with not having a conherent ROI in place since the phenomenon of Social Networking – particularly for brands and corporations – is so new, but also it feels to me as if they don’t get it because they haven’t even tried to.
What’s particularly intesresting is the number of white branded solutions out there Here, here and here. The solutions are starting to differentiate. There are a few White Label Social Networks that are offering their product based on a ‘vertical’. Some are offering to be the best Social Network for sports communities, municipals, education, government, and any other industry segment.
What’s been clear so far with brands who’ve attempted to enter the Social Networking space is that they still aren’t using social media to know their audiences. Instead they’re using it as another way to increase sales.
This is a fundamental issue with brands and Social Networking. Social Networking is not about increasing sales, but about increasing brand affinity, trust and loyalty with customers. It’s the increase in these things that will increase sales – not the current ‘hot offer’.
Shel Isreal emailed Facebook’s corporate communications group to get some accurate numbers. Here’s what he uncovered:
More on this over on Jeremiah’s site. He’s just joined Forrester research as a Senior Analyst covering social media.
Rory Sutherland, Ogilvy Creative Director, has written an article on Brand Republic’s website about Facebook and brands.
Rory describes Facebook’s newsfeed and status Twitter-like functionality as ‘semi-addressable’, where ‘the message is not addressed to specifically named individuals.’
I prefer to describe this form of communication as Ambient Intimacy, as coined by Leisa Reichelt on her blog back in March.
In and of itself, a single Twitter feed is meaningless and mundane, but as a continuous ambient trickle of statements about a person’s daily life it can be initimate, personal and insightful. It’s one of the main reasons everyone had such an affinity to Princess Diana. So many column inches were filled with her daily life that we all felt we knew her and had an affinity towards her despite never having physically met her.
This level of communication will become very important, but only as part of a larger set of social communication tools. Were you to have an important sporting event such as a tennis Grand Slam, and have a selection of athletes taking part in the event utilizing Ambient Intimacy in the run up to it, you’d get a very personal view of those people’s fears and hopes which would generate interest into the lead up to that bigger event and an affinity with those athletes.
There have been a number of conversations concerning Attention, Engagement, Influence and Social Media measurement in general. I wrote about one here.
Sixty Second View has attempted to measure your social media footprint via the Social Media Index and it’s another good effort with some reasonable assumptions. Whilst there’s no golden bullet at present – much like search – there’s a set of criteria of sorts to measure against and then the 5% that’s human perception.
As Jeremiah Owyang notes:
“Facebook is a closed garden with one-way doors.
This means that data comes in, but it’s not coming out – yet.”
The Inside Facebook blog suggests that Google is not relevant to Facebook since it has it’s own news and feed ranking indexes and systems, its own search tool and its own social network to find information:
“Future information finding systems will evolve to use data from your social network, yielding results based upon your trusted peers” – Inside Facebook, NFO (News Feed Optimization) is the new SEO.
This concept of ‘trust’ is tied to identity and also to the belief that word of mouth advice between friends, families and colleagues is by far the strongest form of marketing around – crucially, it also flies in the face of Google’s current search algorithm which is based on popularity, not accuracy or trust.
If search evolves, will we rely on personal social network features (what do my friends think and recommend) over search? Will we evolve to smaller network based searches?
In many ways, this is what Mahalo was trying to overcome, the problem with that is that I don’t know (and therefore don’t trust) the editors creating the Mahalo data. This is why so many thought leaders are already thinking about their Facebook strategy.
Although Google continues to evolve it’s AI to build better search tools, trust continues to be the leading factor in finding information. Google’s search results have much to be desired: popular is not the same as correct.
The future of search will contain human elements in addition to algorithms.
Capture the Conversation is a great dource of information and tutorials on setting up and maintaining various Internet social media and search visibility tools such as Digg, NewsGator, Google Reader. The copany won a Gold Peak award in the Social Media category in this year’s American Marketing Awards.
Have a dig around, there’s an enormous amount of info…I found loads of it really useful, particularly in terms of getting started, subscribing to feeds and joining the conversations that are being started.
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Nice piece of online marketing – It’s desireable and well executed. Go get it!
