Nudge is a London based social media agency. We produce pages, utilities and games on social networks for brands, clients and digital agencies.
Media execs have been stressing for years over a way to charge for online content (that’s newspaper articles and video clips to you and me) on a per article basis – hence the term “micro-payments”.
Facebook credits looks set to change the game. Check out my opinion piece on this (and a rather fancy tour of my Happy Island) over at MediaTel
(fake Dave Cameron poster courtesy of AndyBarefoot.com)
Just as brands battle it out for audiences online – now so do political parties. Check out my opinion article (which doesn’t include fake posters I’m afraid) over at New Media Age.
My predictions were:
* Higher turn out
* Local issues increase in importance
* Key place to sway younger voters
What do you think?
Knowing what to measure matters
Simple question, as raised by Business week’s excellent Social Media Snake Oil article. If you run a social campaign with Nudge Social Media then you’ll be marketing direct to consumers (rather than the blogosphere) and we’ll be measuring the following:
Key Performance Indicators is often where the in-flight optimisation happens and this might include:
If you’d like to find out more about how a social media campaign can guarantee ROI results for your brand then do give me a call at Nudge on 0207 096 0146
It’s the age old question isn’t it. This Facebook thing, it’s just a phase hey? There was Friends Reunited and then here was Myspace and now Facebook, next it ‘ll be Twitter…
Er, not! Facebook is not just a trend, a glossy new brand that has somehow attracted 325m users. No, it’s a step change in technology.
Millions of tiny data items, akin to mini, structured emails, are now flying around Facebook at speed and scale (2bn photos uploaded per month, 2bn links shared per week to be precise).
Each has with it (“meta data” to use the technical term) interesting privacy information – we know who wrote what, which friends they want to share it with, when they created it, how they created it. It helps us know more about the relationship between two people, how close they are, what they talk about, what they like doing. That gives Facebook a massive technological advantage when it comes to filtering and providing a valuable start page for exploring the web.
If Facebook knows what and who I really like then why go elsewhere, why search for something else for that matter.
So, the answer to what comes after Facebook is probably more Facebook. Of course it may not be called Facebook, or even run by them, but under the tin it will be Facebook – tiny chunks of data accompanied by social meta data – filtered and processed to bring you the chunks of data you actually care about.
If Facebook is really represents a technical sea change, as I believe it is, then companies ignore integrating Facebook into their long term digital strategy at risk of going dinosaur, a little earlier than they might have expected.
Hey I know how you think – it’s a fragmented media landscape – I’ll save myself a shed load of rework if I tweet once and then republish many times on my Bebo, Myspace, Facebook page and anywhere else I can syndicate this.
How foolish you are. This means either you go down to the lowest common set of tools or you baffle social network friends with jargon that belongs to another social network paradigm.
If the latter then you fill up our Facebook news feeds with the unintelligible RT, hashtag and @username, if the former then you use neither twitter or Facebook to its full potential.
Don’t keep your tweets anodyne and your statuses samey! No change the tune and repurpose your content and publish twice, the increase in fans will reward your rework.
Much better to keep the tweets on twitter and the status updates on Facebook. That way you can really join the twitterverse, at the same time you can do your Facebook friends a favour by including @{their name} and autoposting to their wall.
It’s just a blog article, how can it save my brand? well listen up.
Facebook users don’t want to visit your brand page, they want your brand to visit them, on their home page, their Farm, their profile.
If they don’t like what you say, or you overload them then you’re gone in a single click. You can’t even spam them to ask “are you sure?”. You no longer control the consumer’s data – they do.
Brands are at the mercy of the consumer on Facebook anyway so why not go the whole hog and use the Nudge Social Media remix approach.
So what is the social remix approach?
Well, say your a loo roll manufacturer and your key brand value is “strong” then why not ask Facebook users to discuss strength with their friends – “who’s the strongest man, who has the strongest sense of smell, whose shelves stands the test of time”. We’ve migrated the brand value into its social context – how that brand relates to me and my friends.
Look at the Tango Head Masher or Buzz! The Friend Quiz. In Tango’s case we took the brand message “unknown side effects” to let users mash their friend’s heads in photos and the side effect of an unknown head appears instead (a horse, a cat, a pufferfish or even a slice of ham…). Very funny you cry but important nonetheless.
We’ve not even mentioned the fizzy drink or provided a link to buy one, yet research showed a 37% likelihood to buy as a result of the social remix. This compares favourably with 25% achieved on previous television, radio and billboard campaigns.
Hmm maybe brands should be on Facebook after all, it’s just how you portray yourself in the social world that changes…
Rupert and Wendi Murdoch at a recent film premiere
MySpace, wow it’s a crazy social network that one. Ads galore I feel like I’ve stepped back in time each time I use it. I got a similar feeling last week when I tried out Skyrock, kind of an earlier social web.
Where was the clean, utilitarian, streamlined Facebook I’ve come to love. The platform that gets out of the way as soon as my friends start talking.
But where is MySpace going? If it’s no longer competing head to head with Facebook (recent FT news article) then that means it needs, long term, to integrate with it.
I give MySpace 6 months before they integrate Facebook Connect and maybe 18 months before you can access your MySpace account from within Facebook itself, whatever it looks like then.
Wouldn’t that be wonderful – single sign on, privacy and newsfeed, all handled by Facebook, yet with the liveliness and music activism of Myspace. The only problem for MySpace is can they swallow their pride (and some of their ad revenue).
If they don’t then I wouldn’t be surprised if Facebook based competitor Ilike matures (it already has 50m users) to break out new bands instead.
Buzz! comes to Facebook
Hey! if you thought we were a bit quiet – now we can say the reason why – we’ve just launched the awesome Buzz! The Friend Quiz for our client SONY Playstation.
It’s a unique Nudge social remix for Facebook of Buzz! the game which creates a TV quiz experience for you and your friends on Playstation.
Our Facebook version lets you play Buzz! with your Facebook friends, the twist is that the questions are all about your friends – lost photo captions, photos mixed together, who said what, and who made what comments – you play with mutual friends to see who knows who best.
Try it: http://www.buzzthefriendquiz.com/facebook
Toby Beresford (left) and Iskandar Najmuddin get up close to Buzz at SONY HQ.
So, I’ve dived in and grabbed a T-mobile G2 (also known as the HTC Hero) that runs Android and I’m completely addicted.
It’s all designed around the idea of real time – twitter suddenly makes more sense, Facebook status updates appear next to the person’s phone number, their latest profile photo appears when they phone. Friends in Singapore who start a google chat come straight through to the phone, all makes me wonder when I will have time to turn it off.
You only have to try the awesome layar app or even just the ’stars at night’ to realise augmented reality is super cool. A kind of ’sat nav meets the Wii’ interface to hyper local data.
Android will win over iPhone in the end for the same reason Windows beat Apple last time round. It’s cross platform stupid.
Now to make some apps. If only I could put the phone down long enough to do so!
Ben Ayers at the Facebook Developer Garage London
ITV loves Facebook it seems, digital manager Ben Ayers told the Favcebook Garage in London tonight.
They found 1.2 million visitors to their site were coming via Facebook, echoing Facebook’s own discovery as the sharing site of choice for most of the internet.
They’ve been busy amassing 600,000 fans of their shows and have found that over half of their own ITV.com users are also on Facebook.
It seems a major UK channel is waking up on the need to integrate their own content experience with conversations on Facebook.
Especially the “two screen” experience, “people watching TV wihile chatting, reading live feeds and consuming other related content during our shows”. For shows like This Morning two-screen is now a major part of the viewing experience.
Facebook’s live stream social widget and public profiles offer other channels and shows the ability to tap into this growing consumer way of watching social TV.
Archive for toby.
