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!

Social Media Marketing in the Music Industry.

Lately, I have been addicted to Jason Mraz' song "I'm Yours". I decided to "Youtube" the song's video clip and it hit me how social media is powerful and how under utilized it is.

Jason Mraz has a great thing going on right now, a lot of people are making covers of his song and posting the videos on Youtube. Why aren't the marketing team behind him utilize that, appropriate it and build on it?  It's FREE!!! It is also much more powerful than displaying print ads about the album.  People can actually experience the song.

A quick look at Jason Mraz' official website, show that they are aware that social media exist, they have a Youtube channel and I like their idea of the Polaroid book and their idea with the cell phones, Jason Mraz details in a photo, but that is barely a decent effort. They get a B for effort and A for creativity but come on. How did you have the great idea of using your public and engage them in participation by allowing them to display their (low quality) pictures on the screen but aggregate them so poorly?  A quick google search for these pictures doesn't show up in the first pages...

Let's focus on Youtube for this blog post.  The marketing team should embed all the best covers his fans are doing on Youtube and leave a text comments on the respective Youtube clips to thank the fans and let them know how great it is that they are doing covers then link to the jasonmraz.com media section of the website where all the clips can be aggregated, that will drive even more traffic to the websites.  This will create a much bigger following and will also strengthen the exposure of Jason Mraz.  The website is Jason's home on the Internet, it is a controlled environment where the marketing team can expose their best marketing messages.  Drive the traffic there! Bring them into your home.

Set up a contest! Encourage your audience to submit their best cover over Youtube, supply them with the instrumental. Ask visitors to vote for the best cover and have the winner win tickets to his next show with a VIP pass, an autographed CD whatever.  How many of these cover artists' friends do you think will go to the website and support their friends?  The bigger the exposure, the more chances these visitors will want to attend Jason's next show in town.  

Have Jason Mraz make one quick webcam clip to comment and thank all the covers out there and have them linked to the covers as a response to these youtube cover clips.  Chances are, these artists have a Myspace page.  Friend them up!

That's it for now, I will add more in another blog post.

Here are a few of these great Youtube Covers:

Notice the great annotations.  Unless the marketing team is behind it, you have free advertising.  The fan is a free postergirl and encouraging viewers to buy the album.  How great is that?  Capitalize on it!  The video has been viewed over a million times.  That is over a million hits that could of been driven to the controlled marketing environment web site.

Here is a list to all the covers of Jason Mraz - I'm Yours song on Youtube.  Anybody knows how I can embed a list of related videos from Youtube?

Suivez votre instinct - Youtube Interactif

Samsung a lancé un vidéo sur Youtube le 25 Juillet 2008 pour leur iPhone Killer : Instinct… et alors? Le vidéo est intéractif. Oui, oui, je suis le héros de ma propre histoire Youtube! Tout come les histoires dont vous êtes le héros, à la fin de chaque vidéo, vous avez le choix de faire X ou de « suivre votre instinct ».

Génial comme concept marketing, je suis épaté! Le coté production des vidéos est minable et le contenu est très « friandise » (aucune substance, mais agréable). Le vidéo est tourné style point de vue alors ça veux donner une impression de vivre l’histoire. J’ai choisis de « suivre mon instinct » (C’est ça que j’ai fait!) et j’ai eu la chance de «frencher» une belle fille et même de me retrouver avec deux beautés bisexuelles ou du moins, bicurieuse! Donc, comme vous pouvez voir, j’ai bien rigolé car c’était un vidéo dans l’univers d’une pub de bières.

Vous pouvez construire votre propre histoire en commençant avec le premier vidéo.

Le concept de pouvoir cliquer dans un vidéo Youtube est nouveau pour moi mais pas pour Youtube, l’annotation Youtube existe depuis Juin 2008. Cette technologie est géniale et donne un grand pouvoir à la pub et au marketing. Imaginez le futur de la pub vidéo (je ne veux pas dire télé parce que je ne serais pas surpris si l’Internet remplacerait la télé dans quelques années. Le monde écoute déjà de moins en moins la télé).

Que pensez-vous du vidéo Youtube de Samsung pour l’Instinct?

Qu’est-ce que vous pensez du pouvoir de l’annotation Youtube pour le futur du Web, de la pub et le marketing? ou tout simplement de sont impact pour le Web 2.0?

Sales 2.0

What People Aren't Saying About Social Media

Great article by Jennifer Horowitz

Social media helps you connect and establish trust. Any one social media activity may not lead directly to
a sale in any given moment, but it helps you establish a presence online; and in your prospects mind. If you
get yourself out there and share information, you will improve your following and have a base of people that
trust you that you can market to.

I think the more the Web 2.0 develops the more selling will be about conversations. Rather than "pitching" to the public, effective sales and marketing will be the ones who take the time to establish a connection and that will be done via conversations. Isn't it the basics of sales anyway?

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.