Author Archive for toby

12 leading marketing tools for Facebook Fan Pages

Published
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toby
on July 19, 2010
in Uncategorized
. 0 Comments
A helpful list of some of the more well known third party Social Media Marketing and Monitoring (“SoMeMaMo”) tools available for running marketing campaigns on Facebook:
  1. Awareness -  broad social media marketing tool
  2. Buddy Media - complete package including apps for tabs
  3. Clearspring - container app for brand content
  4. Context Optional –  Complete package including apps for tabs
  5. Conversocial - fan page moderation
  6. Gigya – container app for flash content
  7. Involver - tab apps and amp campaign management hub
  8. Liveworld -  ”discussion forum” moderation tool now offering moderation on Facebook walls
  9. Sendible – publishing platform
  10. SocialTalk - Syncapse’s enterprise publishing tool with tracking
  11. Spredfast - publishing platform
  12. Wildfire - brand promotions app
It’s still too early to point to a runaway winner but I hope this list helps you in your own search for a great tool to run your marketing campaign.
At Nudge we can either integrate your campaign with one of the tools above or  create a bespoke solution. Bespoke solutions, like a dedicated CMS, while more expensive, offer better integration into a companies processes and allow greater campaign  flexibility.
Feel free to suggest further packages  in the comments below.

What to expect on the Google Games platform?

Published
by
toby
on July 15, 2010
in Gaming and Social Media
. 1 Comment

Ok, so the rumour mill has a mega social games platform launch coming soon Google Games with a Zynga inspired.

It’s hard to see where Google will be able to add value over Facebook but I suspect they will have a few new tricks up their sleeve.

What can we expect to see:

- Google Buzz for game status updates (Toby is now a Senior Executive on Powerbrands)

- Google Waves within gameplay - integrating with Wave might spawn new types of Mafia Wars style collaborative social games, i.e. planning a mob raid using a Wave

- Google Chat / Voice / Gmail for friend to friend notifications (”You’ve been sent a chicken on Farmville”)

- Using your Google ID to log in - time to dust off that old gmail account!

Well the future is as ever uncertain. But one thing is for sure, this is big competition for Facebook itself, in a very hot vertical.

Contact me direct if you’d like to work with us to get on the launch list.

Nudge win London Hackathon as judged by Mark Zuckerberg

Published
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toby
on July 15, 2010
in Uncategorized
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Toby, Mark, Iskandar and Geoff at the Facebook Garage London

Ever tried to go to a Facebook party and found the tube lines were down? Our entry in the recent Facebook Developer Garage London Hackathon saves you the pain.

The hackathon gave us 5 hours to write a cool Facebook app that used the new Open Graph API Facebook recently unveiled.

TubeWarning (http://www.tubewarning.com) checks your Facebook events and two hours before an event checks the tube lines for you.  If they are down you get a nice email telling you what the problems are. Nice, simple and it just works.

Mark Zuckerberg said to me the next day “I told David Cameron about your app this morning, and he thought it was pretty cool!”.

Cool indeed. Thanks Mark!

Toby presents on stage

Tube Warning in action - thanks to the winning team which consisted of Pankaj Naug, Rafal Wieczorek and Steve Folkes.

A day spent on Nudge marketed products

Published
by
toby
on July 9, 2010
in Nudge News and Social Media
. 0 Comments

So I wondered what would a day be like in a world where Nudge projects dictated all I did?

I woke up to the cool sounds of Theory of a Dead Man’s song I Hate My Life, not the best start so I put on my Last.fm radio play list and felt much better.  Breakfast was a Caffe Americano care of Dolce Gusto, and a some chocolaty MIkado’s.

I left for the office, using the London Tube, Tube Warning told me it would be okay to travel today. On the way I enjoyed a Geisha chocolate bar from a friend in Sweden.

At work as an RAF Careers officer, I found I had a bit of downtime so I got out my PlayStation for a game of God of War and a bit of Little Big Planet thrown in. Lunch time was a rush so we headed out to the local TenPin for some bowling with the lads and I used my Mastercard to pay for the food. I shared the photos on Facebook and stored the high res version for printing out later on Photobox using Super Photos.

On the way back I popped in to Carphone Warehouse to enquire about a new O2 contract and came out with a PSP fully loaded with all my favourite Comics.  I shared out a few Mikado sticks with friends at the office while we shared a refreshing Cornetto ice cream to cool off in the sun.  One of my colleagues is running the Marathon so I gave him some money via JustGiving on Facebook and checked into Reckitt Benckiser’s PowerBrands game to improve my score.

At home it was Domino’s Pizza time watching Flash Forward with a delicious Baileys on ice. Time for some breath freshening Tic Tacs while catching up on the days activity on Sky News and checking CNN too. Creating a few Modnation racer tracks for friends meant I could just check my score on Nudge Social Value Index to see how I’d been doing on my Facebook score.

Not a bad day all in all.

Facebook Credits will be everywhere… how to get your business ready!

Published
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toby
on July 7, 2010
in Uncategorized
. 0 Comments

Kids can soon update Facebook credits at Coinstar machines thanks to Rixty

Facebook Credits, the virtual cash associated with your Facebook account, has that frightening 3 m’s mix we see in the biggest technology hits:

  1. momentum, it’s hardly even out of R&D (still available only to beta partners) but companies like Rixty are building it into Coinstar machines for kids to gain virtual credit with real pocket money.
  2. monopoly, you can’t compete with it – it’s an easy extension of Facebook’s 500 million user near monopoly of the social graph.  No other payment platform could build that many users so quickly.
  3. meliority, it’s better than the rest. The smooth payment system (a few clicks) contrasts sharply with the “leave the shop, pay at the bank, return to the shop” payment experience we’ve come to expect. Some early adopters like Crowdstar have seen an ARPU jump of 50% despite the 30% transaction fee Facebook charge.

So what should we do to be ready you cry? Well you might want to start by requesting a copy of Nudge’s white paper on “the next online payment revolution – how Facebook credits will affect your business and how you can be prepared”.

Enterprise software for social media marketing

Published
by
toby
on July 1, 2010
in Social Media and twitter
. 0 Comments

The SoMeMa (Social Media Marketing) enterprise tool space is set to erupt over the next few months. Otherwise “acronym-ified” as SMMS, (that’s a great looking ETLA you got there -Ed. ) there’s a nice list here on Jerimiah Owyang’s blog.

Pretty comprehensive, but it misses out local player, Conversocial, which is a neat moderators solution for Facebook walls.

Nudge has been meeting with suppliers and evaluating all the technologies to identify the best in class and we’re skilled up to be able to integrate these tools into client business processes and systems.

Most tools take a channel agnostic approach ensuring they will continue to be of value whether messages are being pushed on a Facebook wall, twitter account or even a Foursquare tip.

So, whether it is

  • ensuring new posts follow an internal approval process,
  • moderating customer comments on a Facebook wall or
  • simply measuring social media marketing activity more precisely,

…these tools look to give early adopters breathing space in their busy and frenetic channels.

Nudge attends DMA Social Media Strategic Working Group

Published
by
toby
on June 10, 2010
in Social Media
. 0 Comments

I attended my first meeting of the DMA Social Media Strategic Working Group this morning.  Nudge is joining up with the DMA in order to ensure  best practice is used across the social media marketing industry.

Finding the right trade organisation for Nudge and Social Media has been tricky but I’m pleased with the potential of the DMA. They have a clear framework and history of experience in tricky data protection issues where much of the public pressure on social media is coming from. The three areas to focus on are:

  • developing legal approaches and best practice,
  • research and benchmarking for ROI
  • communications and market development.

There is also a lobbying role for a trade body and as Nudge we will be pushing to ensure:

  • right to and defence of your online identity (eg. your Facebook account, your business twitter profile)
  • maintainence of adequate privacy controls (eg. opt-in social marketing, using social and behaviour data appropriately)
  • access to platforms (eg. No shutting down of Youtube and Facebook as happened in Pakistan last month)

We will also be pressing for US, European and global advocacy around  social media specific issues which arise from the global nature of social media platforms.

No doubt you will be hearing more on this initiative in due course.

Open Graph Explained

Published
by
toby
on June 1, 2010
in Uncategorized
. 1 Comment
Could the web be better? That’s a question we technology people keep asking.
The answer is invariably yes.
For each tech company “better” means something different.
If you’re Google then knowing where you are (“geolocation”) will allow them to give you better search results – “Pizza” for example brings you your local Pizza shop rather than Domino’s in San Francisco.

The Open Graph uses Facebook to connect you to more than just people

If you’re Apple then a better form factor to view web pages might help – so they bring us the Ipad.
And if you’re Facebook then the web might be better if it were more like Facebook… which brings us to “Open Graph“.
Graph is the term Facebook uses to describe our connections with each other – my relationship with you is one link in the “social graph”. But social relationships aren’t the only interesting links – what about between me and the companies I like (“brand graph”) or me and the films I like “movie graph” or even me and news articles “news graph” – in fact you could put just about any object in front of the word graph and it might be worth recording.
Of course this is something companies have been doing for a while – lovefilm tracks what films I like, Digg records the news articles I like. However what is new is Facebook’s centralisation of this information.
Any “open graph” information is centralised in your Facebook account. And this is why the Facebook privacy debate just got hotter – it’s becoming more than just my social life at stake when someone looks at my Facebook account data.
Each time I “like” a movie at IMDB, like a restaurant on Yelp, or even like a news article on the Nudge blog a consequent story appears on my Facebook wall. Toby just liked Iron Man 2 for example.

Open graph Likes appear on your Facebook wall for friends to see

Friends will see the story in their news feeds and click on the link will be taken to the web page I was just on, whether it be IMDB, LoveFilm or the Iron Man website.
So for each of us, figuring out how to use open graph in our business should be an item at the top of our  agenda – what services or products will make good objects on the open graph? What will customers like to like? What does it mean for our objects to be connected to the graph? What messaging do we want to push to people who like our objects?
And what’s the end game for Facebook in all this – why all this bother in mapping the whole graph, not just the social one? I think it’s all about search.  Because, as Facebook have discovered, we’re more interested in what our friends think than what an arbitrary authority (eg. Yahoo’s web directory ) or other web pages (Google’s page rank) think would be the right answer.
Now when my friends search for the best film to see on Facebook they’ll discover that I liked Iron Man 2 and that might be all they need to tip them to go and see it.

Did Facebook just kill the “landing tab”?

Published
by
toby
on May 19, 2010
in Uncategorized
. 3 Comments
Now the only place you can direct new fans to is Wall or Info instead of any tab as before

I noted a round robin email from Rasmus in Copenhagen this morning, complaining that “landing tabs” – the feature that lets you decide what tab non-fans arrive at, seems to have disappeared from Facebook pages.  There’s been many posts on the blogs such as All Facebook and Mashable explaining how to make landing tabs and it is something we at Nudge have made quite a few of.

But as of today they are gone… perhaps never to return?

Wake up Britain! Look at the tip of the iceberg! The BNP might be winning the Facebook war.

Published
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toby
on April 14, 2010
in Uncategorized
. 0 Comments

I appreciate this is controversial post but in measuring social media success we measure fan engagement.

That means not just number of fans, but how active those fans are on a campaign page, in particular how much do they comment?

Lets take a look at the data.

If we rank the political party pages BNP, Conservative, DUP, Green, Labour, Liberal Democrats, Plaid  Cymru, SNP,  UKIP by fan page, a reassuring and expected ranking appears:

Facebook Fans of main UK Political Parties at 12:40pm on 14 April

The big three appear to be winning, the little parties are seemingly down where they “belong”.

However, if we count wall posts by fans in the last hour, the  picture is quite different:

Fan wall posts on main UK Political Party Facebook Pages at 12:40pm on 14 April

The data is startling – if we measure fan engagement – the amount Facebook users are commenting and engaging with a campaign – BNP emerges as a major contender for public opinion.

Despite that their 17 fan posts were generated by only 6 people, there is still cause for concern.

On their own page the BNP are driving a political message that is causing reaction and generating debate. Something the other smaller parties seem unable to do and the bigger parties only just manage. As we know on Facebook – the more social actions we can activate (whether positive or negative) the more a campaign message spreads automatically across the social media machine.

At one level, Facebook is an invisible platform, you can’t see the private debates being held between friends but the more user generated posts, the more the BNP related content is spreading across the platform. Think of fan posts as the “tip of the iceberg”….

We need to wake up and engage with the issues that are bringing BNP votes and provide real solutions that are not just papering over the cracks.

Facebook’s own Democracy UK page is a good place to start, maybe with the Ministry of Mates application:

The Ministry of Mates app creates socially remixed stories on Facebook