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

How Can We Superpower Twitter?

Twitter is a powerful tool, but as a Montreal resident, I will tell you it is not the case here.  Quebec tends to be a little slow with internet trends and adoption, I think language is also an issue.  Facebook did not boom here until it translated their platform in French. 

After reading Jeremiah's How Bloggers Should Inspire Retweets and Mack Collier's Want to give your readers a way to tweet your posts? I'm thinking that the two ideas compliment each other quite well.  I think a way the twitter community can superpower Twitter is by bringing these ideas together and making it easy for readers, twitter users and (hopefully) future twitter users.

This is the part where I am slapping myself at the back of the head for quiting learning programming in grade 8. If we make things easy for people, adoption rate will be higher, which will increase the potential viralness of any content on the web.  This is just beneficial for everybody.

I like the copy that Jeremiah is suggesting because it doesn't only give the url, it also has room for an attractive copy to incite others to click or retweet.  I also like that the twitter username is used like in Mack's idea.

Jeremiah Owyang

If You Read This, Tweet This to your Followers:

How Bloggers Should Inspire Retweets http://snipurl.com/9ii28

Mack Collier

http://moblogsmoproblems.blogspot.com/2009/01/want-to-give-your-readers-way-to-tweet.html via @mackcollier's The Viral Garden

What I am suggesting:

My idea is that we can have a button/picture/icon that allows to tweet the post like Mack created, however it will tweet automatically rather than sending you to your twitter page.  The original idea from Mack and Jeremiah is mainly for blogs, but this button/icon can be used to share any content such as pictures or videos as well.

If you read this, tweet this to your followers:

Let's reduce the amount of clicks or copy paste to share content and create Twitter on Crack: http://tinyurl.com/twtcrk @alphonseha

Now Tweet this!

Ahhh, if only I didn't quit programming!

What are your thoughts on how we can superpower Twitter?

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!

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?

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)