Google Events for Business

Google is opening Facebook to the web. In a race between the two eGiants to dominate the web socially, Google has opened Facebook's event to the world. Websites can now bring people together more than ever with the launch of their new event gadget. 

The function is simple, by installing the gadget on a web page, you can promote your event without having any web page programming knowledge and allow people to RSVP to your event online easily, as well as allowing other people to see who is attending the event. Google is making it easier for Social Media Marketing to complement event marketing.

What this means for your business or organization :

1. You have more control on your branding because rather than creating a Facebook event, thus having to be restricted to a small logo and a dull format controlled by Facebook, you create the page the way that you want and insert the gadget in. 
   
2. You can measure, with web analytic tools such as Google Analytics, you can find out how many people have visited your page, where they come from and by the amount of people attending, you can calculate the conversion rate and determine your efficiency.
3. You can reach a non Facebook audience. As attractive as Facebook's population is, not all of your target market (eg: decision makers) is on Facebook. However, anybody can connect with their Google, AIM, Yahoo or Open ID account.
4. Set up a poll on the page or in the future for feedback to learn more about your target market and why they did not attend your event. Learn from the comments and do it better the next time around.
5. Use a URL shortener like Bit.ly to promote the event online in emails, Facebook page, Youtube or Twitter and offline through word of mouth or promotional products easily eg: bit.ly/myevent.

What else do you think Google Friend Connect's new event gagdet can do for a business?

Google's official video explaining how to use the event gadget:

Facebook - SMS Service for Pages

Great Facebook news for both online and offline marketers today. People can now become a Facebook fan without even having a smart phone or be on their computer. You can do it while standing in the mall! Inside Facebook reports:

“Imagine the scenarios- you can ask 10 people in a Board room to take their phone out and become Fans, or 100 people at a rally to become political supporters, or 30,000 people at a concert or ballpark to become fans via mobile device,” wrote Dave Kerpen at theKbuzz, who discovered the new feature earlier today.

Very powerful tool. Unfortunately, I can't see how it applies to the employment field yet. The tool is there and it is great. The challenge and creative part, which can be both fun and frustrating, is to figure out how I can use it in my industry: employement. I can definately see how it can be used for bands and multinational corporations in any of their promotional events though.

This can be a great step into social media marketing for retail and for their brand to get more brain share. They can set up a Facebook fan page for their store and whenever clients walk in, have an anouncement that they have Facebook they can become a fan by texting xxxxx and be the first to be notified about their sales, specials or new collections. Great way to be in touch with your market and have them buy clothes at your store first.

Read more on SMS Service for Facebook Pages at Inside Facebook.

photo by: jamesbt

Facebook Likes This

I am dedicating a whole blog post to the simple Facebook feature "Like". It isn't an innovative feature, it has been done by many websites  in many context (such as Friendfeed for instance) but I think Facebook hits it on the head when it introduced this social action and I think there is a future in Facebook marketing with this feature.

Let's face it, we are lazy. Or in good marketing terms, we need to make everything as easy as possible for the users.  

The easier we make things for the users, the higher engagement level we will get out of them.

I have to admit that I catch myself surfing the web and tell myself, I like this but only to not see a "like" social action to fulfill my need to give approval to the content creator. I think the brilliance of this Facebook feature is in its simplicity. I will not dive into my sociological, psychological and/or critical communication studies analysis of why this social action is a success.

What I want to discuss is what I think Facebook can or should do with this feature. The Facebook Like feature is no different from tagging. In fact, it is a specific type of tag that we attribute to information. I think Facebook needs to go further than "Alphonse Hà likes this" and reporting this information in the News Feed. If the word "Digg.com" popped in your head, you know where I am going. 

Facebook should allow Facebook users to find out what content is popular within their Networks. I would be very interested to know what is the most "liked" content created by my friends whether it be status updates, photos, shared links, videos, you name it. This report can also get categorized by who "liked" the content.  Do I want to know what was liked by everybody or perhaps filter it by only the amount of people within my Facebook friends who liked it? X number of people "like this" versus X number of your friends "like this". I will most likely be more interested in knowing what my circle of friends are enjoying rather than their circle of friends or in the case of Fan pages, what strangers are enjoying. However, it does not mean that I wouldn't be curious to see what is popular on Facebook today or in the past week or all time (hint, hint, Facebook - Youtube might be able to give you a few tips here).

I believe aggregating or reporting "Most Liked" will become a great viral marketing tool and will push marketers and the corporate world to produce quality content for people to enjoy. This should also apply to Facebook ads. While we are there looking at what our Facebook friends like the most, why don't you take this opportunity to show us what Facebook ads were liked the most by our friends? This gives more exposure to your clients and increases the chances of the ads going viral. Great way to give a viral marketing boost to the corporations' advertising.

Do you have Facebook? I welcome you to add me as a friend!

Photo by: 365mayhem

Best Facebook Marketing Mix Strategy

The best use of Facebook's tools I have seen so far integrated the power of pictures, photo tagging, comments and Facebook events.  In this case report, I will analyze and explain why the campaign was brilliant from a Facebook marketing perspective and provide my (two or three? :P) readers with a great Facebook Viral Marketing Campaign strategy.

The marketing gem was created last May 2009 by Julie Séguin, a communications student at Ottawa University, who participated in the "Jeux de la Communication" (oh yeah!).  

So what was it?  It was an "Old visual arts projects SILENT AUCTION!". What did Julie do?

• First, she created a Facebook event.
  
• She then uploaded pictures of her art work in the Event's photo section.
  
• She added the title, dimensions, medium and minimum pricing bid in each of the photo's description.
  
• She used the Facebook event's invite function to invite all of her friends.
  
• She used the Facebook event's description to inform the invitees of the procedures:
  

"RULE #1 : You must bid in the photo comments so I can see who was the last person to bid on the last day at the last hour"

I am not sure Julie realized it, but this campaign was genius.  Here is why:

Julie properly used the media and social functions of Facebook.

I see this auction as a marketing campaign and this campaign combined photos, the media aspect of Facebook, and events, the social aspect of Facebook. The combination of the two allowed the campaign to reacch multiple members at once harmoniously because it did not disrupt how Facebook was meant to be used, it was not spammy.

Julie hi-jacked thousands of Facebook member's News Feed.

Beyond the obvious sharing nature of a Facebook event through invites, this Facebook silent auction had the capacity to take over my news feed, as well as any of Julie's friends, and friends of her friends' news feed. The viral nature of Facebook comes from the News Feed  and the best way to show up in a News Feed (barring custom settings) are through pictures: Photo tags, Photo uploads and Photo comments. Any actions related with photos will physically take more space in the News Feed and on a person's wall, thus drawing much more attention. Accordingly, by asking to leave your price in the photo's comments, these comments will show up in their friend's news feed and since it is a bid, there are two advantages:

1. there are chances that multiple people will leave a comment, thus showing up in more member's News Feed.  I also think that the more comments a picture has, the more chance it will appear in your News Feed. 
   
2. the same member might post more than one comment, thus increasing the visibility of 1.

What I would of done differently/more.

In order to use Facebook to its fullest, I would of instructed interested bidders to tag themselves in the pictures they bid.  From a marketing perspective, the reason is clear, I want my event/campaign to show up in more news feed and get more attention but it also displays a bigger commitment from my bidders so that I can filter who are more serious than others.  Moreover, if you are not friends with the person that uploaded the photo, you cannot leave a comment, however if you are tagged you can.  Thus, in order to leave a bid for the members outside of the event creator's network, they can tag themselves.

I would take advantage of the invite functions and encourage my friends to invite their friends as well or encourage my friends to tag friends who they really think would enjoy the bidded product.  If the person does not want to be tagged, they can easily untag themselves anyway.

Thoughts.

I think the silent auction itself was quite creative but I think the brilliance of the campaign was not intended and that is what I wanted to point out: how to use photos, photo tagging and photos comments for Facebook marketing.

The reason why Facebook is so popular is because they, as opposed to MySpace at the time, offer unlimited uploads of pictures.  Moreover, they allowed comments on the pictures as well at tagging.  Tagging is simply a link.  A link to another person's profile, which essentially is a person's webpage.  Think of Facebook as a mini Internet.  It is no different from a website about product X linking to another website about a product in common with product X.  The difference is that Facebook does it with people.

This genius use of Facebook was not the idea of a six figure communication or advertising/marketing firm, nor was the event created for a large corporation.  It was neither created by a group of so called social media or web marketing experts with 10 or 20 years of experience.  The event was created to simply get rid of some of  her art work and make a few dollars (to pay rent? ;)).

If any marketers want to leverage Facebook properly, they need to start with the pictures.  I can and hope to see in the future more innovative Facebook campaigns integrating brilliant photo tagging and photo comments.  I know I have been thinking a lot about it!

Economy, recession - Myspace will die.

The biggest social media will survive.  Plain and simple.  Youtube and Facebook are here to stay.  Personally, I don't even know why Myspace is still alive.  It looks to me that their numbers/stats are inflated.  Sure they have over 100 million users but how many of them are actually active?  Facebook has much more conversation going on than Myspace and that is why Facebook is a shoe-in to still be alive passed this recession.

I wouldn't be surprised to see Myspace die in the near future unless they start acting smart.  Improve interactions!!!  Let's be real, the reason why Facebook established itself as a powerhouse is due to its unlimited photo uploads and the ability to tag friends in these pictures.  Facebook is proactive, Myspace is reactive.  Oh! Facebook has unlimited photo uploads, let's do that too!  Let's also do tagging.  Too late.  

Myspace still has an advantage.  It has a good hold on the artistic/creative scene on the internet.  Myspace needs to capitalize on it and for the love of my eyes, do something about backgrounds.  It is nice to allow artistic expression but that doesn't mean that everybody can be artistic.  If a member's page is unreadable because it has the band's group picture at the back and the font is black, nobody will want to come back to the page often.  That is not good for the band and not good for Myspace.

The only way Myspace can prosper is by leveraging its community.  They are artistic, they are bands, give them tools to help promote their band, give the community's tool to connect and increase interaction.  Myspace is a junk social network filled with self promoting spammers.  Appropriate that community, give them tool to turn your social network where people will turn towards to learn more about artists and bands and their new shows.  The reality is that most Myspace friends are just part of a collection of strangers.  Well if that is the case, help strangers meet, help strangers interact!  

• Suggest "friends" to me because they are a great Hip-Hop band or an up and coming soul band and you, Myspace, know that from me because of the data in my profile, my listed interest,  the profile of my friends, etc.  
  
• Allow members to rate songs or bands or any art work.  
  
• Allow friends to share songs with other friends.  
  
• Leverage your video platform, you have a great one (especially compared to Facebook) leverage it, make it easier to share within the community and to share outside of the community.  
  
• Promote the fact that it can be shared in different ways.  
  
• Encourage your members to upload videos.  
  
• Inform them that it is a great way for their garage band to gain exposure.  
  

By the way, your news feed sucks.  Stop trying to copy Facebook.  Make your own news feed.

Survival of the fittest - Adapt or die.  Plain and simple.

Testing Blogging from Facebook

Testing Blog it created by Six Apart from my Facebook Account. Supposed to Update my friendfeed (I almost forgot I have that) as well as my twitter...

Let's see...

Will it show up on my newsfeed?

December 11, '08 updates:  

Blog It updated my news feed twice just because my Facebook status was changed.  I have my twitter set to change my Facebook status.  That is why I am guessing it duplicated the status change in my news feed.  Doesn't give much visibility.  As opposed to a share, photo upload/tag/comment and Blog It posted the same blog post on Blogger multiple times.  My guess is that because I selected to have the status sent to Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed and the blog post to Blogger, it looped the action and made Blogger repeat the same action (posting the blog post) multiple times.  Lame.  I am not impressed with Blog It at all.

Facebook 1 - LinkedIn 0

Jeff Pulver explique pourquoi il a décidé de concentrer tout son résautage professionnel sur Facebook plutôt que sur LinkedIn sur son blog.

Je suis conscient que le blog a été publié il y a plus d'un an mais j'aime pourquoi il dit qu'il favorise Facebook. D'après lui, Facebook offre un sens de communauté que LinkedIn n'a pas.

In LinkedIn, everything centers around establishing a connection. In
Facebook, connecting is just the beginning. Facebook is all about
community. And this can been seen by doing things like leaving messages
on users' walls, joining groups and having discussions, as well as some
of the more social applications built for Facebook.

Je suis d'accord qu'il est possible de mieux forger des liens sur Facebook que sur LinkedIn. Par contre je pense que Jeff Pulver, comme beaucoup d'autre monde, ne sait pas comment utiliser LinkedIn à son plein potentiel. LinkedIn n'est pas comme le Hi5 de 2003. Le but n'est pas seulement d'ajouter le plus de monde possible mais d'engager dans la communauté et démontrer votre expertise. La force de LinkedIn est dans sa section Réponses (Answer).

Posez des questions et répondez aux questions. C'est comme ça que vous pouvez établir des connections. Les gens ont aussi la possibilité de voter sur la qualité de vos réponses, donc le plus de réponses que vous recevez un grand nombre de qualité le plus de crédibilité vous présentez à la communauté.

Je me demande si Jeff Pulver est encore dans le camp de Facebook plutôt que LinkedIn (pour son réseautage professionnel) après un an...


Mise à jour: 15 Août, 14:43.

30 minutes après mon blog. Monsieur Pulver me réponds:

I never look back. And I have rarely used LinkedIn during the past year.

Je lui ai envoyé un message Facebook après avoir répondu à son blog et en moins de 30 minutes, il me réponds.

Vive les média sociaux!

Tendances intéressantes des média sociaux au Québec (Google Trends)

Facebook : bleu, Myspace : rouge, Youtube : orange, LinkedIn: vert

Comme vous pouvez remarquer, d'après les recherches Google au Québec:

• Youtube et Facebook sont très populaire au Québec
• Myspace est en train de crever
• LinkedIn est mort
• Facebook est plus populaire en Anglais que Youtube et en francais c'est le contraire.
• Myspace semble être présent plus à Montréal, Trois-Rivières et Québec que dans les autres villes québecoises (presque nul).

Je n'ai pas les images mais d'après la même recherche, savez vous qu'au Rouyn-Noranda ses recherches sont plus populaire qu'à Montréal (Mtl est 3e derrière Hull)?

C'est intéressant de voir comment populaire sont les sites internet au monde, mais à l'échelle nationale/locale, c'est pas toujours la même histoire et en tant que Montréalais je trouve qu'il n'y a pas assez d'attention porté vers ce qui se passe sur le Web au Québec.

Je trouve aussi intéressant que Facebook était plus populaire que Youtube en Avril au Québec... je ne suis pas sur pourquoi. Est-ce que quelqu'un sait?

How many Facebook Profiles does it take to...

The professional vs personal profile on the Internet is becoming quite popular. I think it is logical that with the expansion of the Internet, there are more ways one can be portrayed. Accordingly, in life (offline), our image is simply how we are portrayed as well. Thus, it is only a matter of time for offline and online personal image to clash.

I have a secret. Yes, I have two Facebook profiles. I did not want to make this public but I think this is a great opportunity for me to explain. I have my private profile (that I will not disclose) and I have my public profile: Alphonse Hà.

My comments on LinkedIn Evangelist Mario Sundar's blog: Marketing Nirvana regarding the issue of having 2 online social networking personas vs just one promted this blog.

Here are my comments to his post (I must admit that I am quite happy to see that he created a new post to draw more attention to my comments!):

I have just graduated from college and I have been on Facebook for over 2 years now. When I was in college it didn’t really matter to me what pictures were tagged of me. However, now that I have a job in Marketing in a small placement Agency, I had to create another Facebook profile because I refused to use my personal Facebook profile for testing different recruiting methods on Facebook. This new profile is great because it allowed me to add over 100 people I knew (and counting) that I did not want on my personal profile because they are acquaintances and I did not want their updates to trump the updates of my friends I wanted to know about. However, having an empty profile (no tagged pictures or any other activity besides adding friends) is not beneficial to the recruiting I want to do. So I ended up having to spend time to develop that profile as well and I have to say that is quite time consuming.

Moreover, I am now in a silly dilemna, there are a category of people that I know that I don’t know if I want them on my professional profile or on my personal profile and I must admit that it is quite a waste of brain space. I think that Mark’s idea of having one social networking website that allows different faces would be a great idea and I also agree that whatever is on the Internet stays on the Internet however the Internet is so large that certain things tends to get lost and that could be a good thing.

The reason I created two profiles was mainly for work, I am testing how to recruit on Facebook (I will get into that some other time) and since social networks such as Facebook are based on transparency, having an empty profiles with no wall posts, no pictures and no friends (basically no activity) will not be beneficial to what I want to accomplish. So with time I saw that this profile was great because it allowed me to add a bunch of acquaintances that I did not want on my private profile because I did not want their news in my news feed to take over the news of the people I really want to know, the ones who are close to me. However, the professional or public profile allowed me to reconnect with a lot of people from high school or to keep in touch with classmates from university. We all just graduated or on the verge to graduate thus it is nice to know what they are doing and it is also great for networking.

All this to say that basically, I strongly believe now that having two profiles is nothing to hide. Just like I have a public life and a private life. What I do in my private life is none of your business unless I decide to divulge it to you and if you are unhappy about that then that is not my problem. I have the right to decide who I allow in my private life just as much as you do.

PS: If it bothers you so much that somebody does not allow you in their private life, connect with them. If it doesn't click then it just doesn't click!

Exposed: Digital camera blonde who became Facebook phenomenon is an X-rated model

Viral Facebook Marketing

This is hilarious, definitely a must read. A porn web site developped a very clever way to gain members.

The porn site has admitted that it was all a "clever viral marketing campaign".
The Facebook plea read: "We are trying to track down the lovely lass in these photos so she can be reunited with her lost digital camera. She certainly knows how to use it!

However, the funniest things about this story are the responses from the men around the world responding to the plea/buying into the campaign:

Men up and down the country posted messages of support.
Yu-San Chan, from Birmingham, wrote: "This is probably the most wanted woman in the country right now."

And Martin Farrell, from London, said: "I thought I saw her today in Chiswick but it was a false alarm, the hunt continues."

Another Londoner, Darren Gormley, commented: "Poor girl, I hate losing things. Not surprising she lost it though - no pockets!"

but even more hilarious are the response from the readers of the post:

They certainly are getting more sneaky. You can tell from the poses though that she's a professional and not some amateur. We all just have to beware the little ploys they keep throwing at the public.

- Zach, Los Lunas, USA, 05/9/2007 19:09

Come on now, was this guy born yesterday? There are plenty of non professional girls who pose that way. With the price drops of digital cameras and all the websites where you can post your pictures online such as Facebook, Flickr, Myspace, Hi5, Hotornot, Ratemybody ect. People, girls specifically, learn how to pose quite quickly. Give a girl who likes attention a camera and a hotornot.com account and see how quickly she learns to pose!

Here is a photo gallery for your eye's pleasure:

Wendy's photogallery
(Safe for work pictures)

Why do you like Facebook?

Just a quick quote:

Facebook users love to be informed about where their friends are and what they’re up to

Isn't that the truth? A lot of people around me are saying they do not buy into the hype of Facebook but the reason why it is so popular is because it helps us keep updates about our friends' life.

On the other hand, you have people who just adds everybody and everybody's grandmother and gets upset that you don't accept their friend request. I don't want to know about your life just as much as you don't really want to know about mine!

I will admit that having 98 friend requests is flattering but I know as much as the next Joe that it is almost meaningless.

I think I am going to go delete some facebook friends now...
:P

University work with PR firm to create a Facebook Application

Facebook Application for College Recruiting

“It is a nice, sort of low-risk, reasonably low-cost ... way to reach out to those audiences,” said Jim Sciancalepore, Media Logic’s senior creative director.

Good read, the University worked with a PR firm to create a Facebook application to create a viral effect within Facebook rather than going through the Advertising route which does not evoke a lot of trust in the target audience.

It is kind of cool but also frustrating in many ways to see all my ideas have been done in one way or another. I guess the good news is that as long as they are not mainstream, I can still execute my ideas.

Réseaux sociaux : des audiences différentes selon les continents

Réseaux sociaux : des audiences différentes selon les continents


Intéressant de voir comment le monde utilise des réseaux social différent...

Je me demande qu'est-ce qui fait qu'un réseaux social est plus populaire dans différente culture...

J'ai un ami au Brésil et quand je lui ai convaincu de joindre Facebook mais en retour je devais me joindre à Orkut. Je ne pense pas avoir plus qu'un ami sur ce réseau (lui) et je ne pense pas avoir été sur ce site une fois depuis l'automne dernier... (En fait je ne me rappelle meme plus c'etait quand la derniere fois que j'était sur le site).

Qu'est-ce qui fait que Facebook est populaire en Amérique du Nord mais qu'en Amérique du Sud c'est Orkut? Pourquoi que différentes communauté sociale "offline" se joignent à différente communauté en ligne? D'apres une recherche rapide, Orkut est à Google et à été créé par un Turk... Est-ce le marketing? Je suis curieux de savoir la raison du déclenchement d'un réseau social sur l'Internet.