Is Facebook killing applications altogether?

Posted: March 20th, 2010

The term ‘application’ is often used to refer to some sort of web-based software. Applications can do almost anything. Not all of them are based around growing animals, throwing sheep or engaging in wars with other mobs. Some are actually quite useful.

Building an application on the Facebook platform was initially attractive because the API gave developers easy access to news feeds. News feeds from friends you know offline give you valuable exposure for your application.

A Facebook Application developer builds an application and after testing they move it live for everyone to use. Once an application has a handful of users, Facebook approve it for the Application Directory. Applications could then pay Facebook to undergo an additional Verification Program. If approved as non-spammy and abiding by all Facebook Policy, the application would receive a huge boost in the amount of news feed displays.

News feeds help applications to find new users and remind existing users to come back. It’s like free advertising.
However, Facebook turned off the Verification Program on December 1st. Developers complained bitterly about the change. Some developers expanded their applications outside of Facebook. For others, the effects were so detrimental that some developers even gave up and closed their businesses.

Here’s a chart of traffic to one of our Facebook apps at Think!

Traffic for one of Think's Facebook Applications

The first arrow clearly shows the benefits of the boost in news feed displays that we received from Verification. Growth increased from 5-10 new users per day to 300-500 new users per day. The second arrow shows the point where Verification was turned off. Back we go to 10 new users per day.

The reason for axing verification is two-fold. Firstly, application developers like Zynga have been making millions of dollars on the platform and Facebook wants (and arguably deserves) a slice of the pie. If you put a stop to the free advertising through news feeds, developers might pay for advertising to attract and retain users. Secondly, we (the Facebook community) were largely becoming deterred by applications taking over our Walls. To this end, Facebook also made changes to applications’ access to notifications and to the Wall itself to make posts more relevant.

At Think!, we have spent the last few months trialling solutions to increase our exposure. We have made many improvements to our applications to make them more appealing to users and to encourage communication through new channels. Facebook’s changes have been motivation to provide even better products and we now offer a range of applications that help Fan Pages to offer something engaging to their fans.

In the end, everybody wins. Facebook protects its user experience by reducing news feeds from games like Farmville and Mafia Wars while also increasing revenue to support its platform. Users engage more with the site because there are more interesting things to see and we’ve become more useful to our clients.

Does anyone miss having sheep thrown at them?

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Posted in Facebook | No Comments »

FACEBOOK DOWN FOR A WEEK!

Posted: March 18th, 2010

Got your attention didn’t it?

This is purely a hypothetical scenario. It’s also an experiment in dual-blogging (think bloggers meet dual-pianists in Vegas). William Bakker and I are going to be hypothesizing about the effects of Facebook shutting down for a week. Instead of commenting on each other’s blogs, we’re going to be posting our responses as a blog.

[WB] Day 1. The Facebook URL stops responding. First thing that happens is an insane amount of activity on Twitter reporting the news. After that all hell breaks loose in the tech blogosphere; Mashable, Inside Facebook, All Facebook, Techcrunch, Techmeme et all just go crazy over the news. Traditional media follows a few hours behind.

[RP] Day 2. Facebook led last night’s evening news and is splashed across the front page of newspapers worldwide. Twitter traffic has more-than-doubled overnight with almost every tweet referencing #Facebook. Tweets have largely replaced status updates. New account registrations have grown significantly. The ‘Twitter Whale’ is displayed frequently to show that Twitter is slow and overwhelmed with traffic. Cell-phone carriers and email providers see a noticeable increase in messages. Blogs are filled with stories guessing at what’s going on.

[WB] Day 3. Everybody who threw a party and used Facebook Events to organize the party is ticketed off because nobody showed up. The first “Life without Facebook” t-shirts are starting to appear. ‘Experts’ on the news networks make suggestions about how to deal with Facebook detox. Facebook is scheduling a new conference for the next day.

[RP] Day 4. People realize that life A.F. (after Facebook) isn’t too scary. Facebook isn’t a matter of life-and-death like internet banking or email. It’s just a convenient social tool. Productivity at offices has surprisingly decreased slightly because many people can’t focus on one task without some distraction. Employees who had learned to collaborate using Facebook messages and Facebook chat are now forced to return to slower methods of communication.

[WB] Day 5. Facebook promises the network will be back up soon. Some businesses complain drops in sales because of a reliance on Fanpages and Facebook ads. Legal action is discussed. Flickr reports an increase in new accounts and uploaded photos. Some kids fear their Farmville animals will die.

[RP] Day 6. You would have thought that with 450 million people addicted to social networking and gaming that a rival-site would rise to meteoric success. However, MySpace hasn’t seen too much of a bump in traffic, commentators think its because of the lack of privacy built into people’s social graph. People who log in to their old accounts find a social wasteland with no posts from legitimate friends and just a scattering of links leading to creepy websites. People are beginning to think that Facebook may never come back online. Google Buzz and Orkut are getting an increased trickle of new users but its just not the same, all of our photos and friends were on Facebook.

[WB] Day 7. Media has nothing left to talk about and tech bloggers are too busy with the latest Apple iSomething. People stop caring about it. Life goes on without Facebook although they wonder what their friends are up to. Facebook announces service will be restored tomorrow and blames a proprietary Microsoft product for causing the crash of it’s service.

[RP] Day 8. The reckoning is upon us. Zuckerberg flicks the switch and issues a press release to that affect which is picked up by every single news organization in the world. Facebook blows past its previous 30% of web traffic to attract over 50% of internet users. Facebook’s servers overload and go down for another hour or two. When they come back online, people connect again, pay-per-click ads resume, and Farmville animals are revived just in time… Life goes on.

[more to come; have something to contribute? Leave a comment]

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Posted in Facebook | No Comments »

Give us something interesting!

Posted: March 18th, 2010

You have to provide new content to grow and maintain your online audience.

Static websites and pages offer very little reason to come back or stay on your site. That applies to websites but is even more important to Facebook Fan pages. If you have hundreds of videos and photos to share with existing and potential clients, release them slowly over time to give people a reason to keep coming back. Every time they come back they will see your brand and hear your message.

Vancouver Kangaroo did this well during the olympics. Fresh and engaging content attracted new users. The Think! website gets a spike in traffic and growth in blog subscriptions from every new post. I’m sure you’ve noticed similar patterns in your own traffic. If you’re not at the top of the news feeds, nobody is hearing what you have to say. Think of it like a newspaper that printed the same thing every day or a TV station that played the same shows over and over.

Updating and sharing new content on Facebook is easy, that’s what the platform is designed for. A content management system (CMS) like wordpress makes it easy for you to do this on your website with zero programming knowledge.

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Posted in Facebook | 1 Comment »

Facebook overtakes Google

Posted: March 17th, 2010

Facebook’s US-based traffic has caught up to Google’s.

That graph comes from hitwise.com, although alexa.com is incosistent, ranking Google above Facebook. What is more important to your business is the trend. Google’s growth is much flatter than Facebook’s. There is a clear shift. The social graph is the fast becoming the center of the web, not search as was originally the case.

The amount of search traffic Facebook caters too has increased too though. This could be attributed to the lance round of product changes where they featured now that the search box front and center. Facebook has surpassed 450 million users and it’ll be very interesting to see statistics on average time spent on the site since the Log out button was hidden at the bottom of the Account tab.

I don’t think I’m alone when I say that chat is slowing down my Firefox browser. I think crippling is a much more accurate description. I’ve noticed a number of issues with Facebook since their last product update. These errors are also apparent on the application platform. Managing the scale of growth that Facebook is experiencing, not to mention the 450 million monthly users, must be a technical nightmare. Don’t overlook that Facebook is the largest photo sharing site in the world.

There is somewhere in the realm of 3 million Facebook Fan Pages in the USA. The platform can help organizations cost effectively achieve numerous marketing goals through advertising, viral campaigns and a unique presence. There’s solid evidence from a Rice University study that Fan Pages can increase sales. Facebook’s Open Graph updated is going to make the network even more relevant to businesses and external websites.

Privacy issues. Openness vs protection. Google buzz. Most importantly, reliability and platform stability. Chat is crashing Firefox regularly and I know I’m not the only person to complain about this problem. The developer platform is also frequently experiencing regular problems.

Facebook either are or are about to be running the largest website in the world. The site has to manage massive growth across every area of their platform. At the same time Facebook must juggle user-privacy with openness and competitive threats from sites like Google Buzz. It’ll be a fantastic challenge. Regardless, as of this writing, Facebook has the gravity and will have to make a huge mistake to lose now.

Posted in Facebook, Google | 5 Comments »

Doritos: Calculating ROI for Viral Campaigns in Social Media

Posted: March 15th, 2010

Doritos are running a viral video contest in Canada with a prize of up to $250,000. A number of insights can be drawn from this campaign.

Doritos have implicitly acknowledged that there is no recipe for a viral campaign. The traditional advertising agency process inherently places a limit on creativity. The ad-agency usually presents a number of options for the client to choose from. The client chooses one or maybe two of these options to implement. One video has a slim chance of viral success in social media because it is hard to predict what might be successful. The Doritos campaign is effectively crowd-sourcing creativity, with the added bonus of free implementation.

This raises questions about the definition of viral. Something that ‘goes viral’ is usually started by one and shared by many. Online tools have the power to significantly increase sharing capacity. The winning video in the Doritos competition is the video with the most views, positive ratings and social sharing points. An investigation of the terms of the competition shows how accurately a social media campaign can be measured.

Doritos are using a point-system to determine a winner. The creator of the video with the most Viralocity Points wins $100,000. 10 million+ viralocity points gets the winner another $150,000. What is a Viralocity Point?

1. Every time a new and unique person (as counted by YouTube) views a video, the winner gets 5 points.
2. 5 points every time someone watches a video on Facebook.
3. Entrants receive 5 points for each External Youtube Embed.
4. Every time the video is shared from the competition website entrants receive 1 point.
5. Unique referals receive 1 point.
6. Every time somebody Retweets the unique bit.ly link the video gets 1 point.
7. Every time somebody signs in and Favourites a video on YouTube or on DoritosViralocity.ca, you get 5 points.
8. Points betewen 1-5 are awarded for each star-rating a video receives on the 5-star rating system
9. Every time someone Diggs a video it receives 1 point.

The most interesting part of this competition for our purposes is how Doritos is measuring the results of these attempts at a viral campaign. The breakdown of what actions actually earn points provides an analysis of the relative value of different social tools. Pepsico, the owner of the Doritos brand, chose Youtube, Facebook, Twitter and Digg as the most important social platforms for a viral campaign. While Flickr is redundant next to Facebook’s own photo sharing application, Youtube and Facebook both have benefits for video sharing.

The competition rules, including the tie-breaking process, make it clear that Pepsico, and arguably many other large companies, value quality over quantity when it comes to viral campaigns. Total unique views is weighted heavily with the rating system and number of Diggs lowest.

The campaign provides an additional incentive for people to share their videos on Facebook. Facebook views are already included in the competition’s calculation of unique views. Facebook views are therefore weighted to receive double the points of an ordinary view of an entry video. This weighted is attributable to Facebook’s algorithm that controls news feed displays – the more people click – the more exposure Doritos’ brand receives.

The points-system used to find a winner also provides an excellent insight into the measurement of a viral campaign. You can see the entire competition rules here. Perhaps this will help you to start tracking ROI from social media in your organization.

This campaign should be taken as an acknowledgment of the transition towards advertising through social media. A viral video has the power to reach many millions of people online for relatively little expense. Credit is due to the ad agency for capitalizing on the opportunity that social media presents. Rather than continuing on the traditional path and releasing a single high-budget video, Doritos were able to encourage consumers do their creative work and implementation for them. It will be interesting to see if the winner receives more than 10 Million Doritos Viralocity Points.

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Posted in Digital Innovations and Marketing | 1 Comment »

Personal Social Media Styles

Posted: March 12th, 2010

I was invited to meet with the MBA Marketing Club after two guest lectures at some of Paul Cubbon’s e-marketing classes at the University of British Columbia. Over lunch we had a great conversation about our own personal social media use.

Somehow we arrived at a discussion of the different reasons we use social media. In my experience, people tend to clearly separate personal social media use from professional tools. I use Facebook for my social network. I’m very protective over my privacy settings. I don’t accept friend requests lightly. I use LinkedIn for my professional presence, I see it as my online resume. LinkedIn is Facebook for grown-ups. I use twitter almost entirely for business. Different platforms serve different purposes for different people. However, social media users are not homogeneous, especially when it comes to Twitter.

Regular Twitter use is usually motivated by self-interest. That seems like stating the obvious but think about it from a marketing perspective. People who truly use Twitter do so to receive regular updates. Keep this in mind when running a marketing campaign that relies on sharing information via Twitter. You won’t create a loyal following until you answer these two questions:

1. Who wants to hear from you or your organization regularly?
2. What information do you have that is beneficial to them?

Most people who were involved in today’s discussion use Twitter as a convenient way to sort information, much like an RSS feed. No one used Twitter to disseminate information themselves. I largely use Twitter as a business tool. I follow people in the social media space who regularly have something interesting links and information to share. I follow influencial people in Tourism. I use Twitter as a monitoring tool for our clients.

According to Twitter themselves, Twitter is without a doubt the best way to share and discover what is happening. The majority of users tend to be discovering rather than sharing – here’s a good study.

How do you use Twitter?

Posted in Social Media | 1 Comment »