Author Archives: Michele Warther

Why Marketers Need to Focus on Facebook

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Citizens in the United States are driving the global adoption of social media services such as Twitter and Facebook, according to research conducted by the Pew Research Center in December with over 46% engaged in social networking. Last month they released statistics from another internet snapshot with that number now closer to 59% in the US.

The sites that make up “social networking” do vary a bit by country. For example Orkut (by Google) leads the way in Brazil with 8 in 10 people, as a recent comScore study showed. It was also noted that Twitter.com reached 23% of the entire Brazilian online population, making it the highest penetration in the world (the US is about 8%)

In May of this year a research report from Nielsen showed Facebook in the clear lead across all web brands and commenting that “Facebook has become synonymous not only with social media, but with the Web…” The report showed users spend 23% of their time online across the top 10 social networks.

And how is that different from recent years? Citi Investment Research shows us how time spent online has changed from Q3 2006 to Q3 2011. Google and Yahoo – watch out!

Community is where your customers or potential customers are and it’s not necessarily the site you’ve built. Knowing that – what does your Facebook marketing strategy look like?

Facebook Crowdsourcing to Improve Accuracy in Local Search

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One of the biggest problems in local search is the sparseness and inaccuracy of location data. (Okay, I guess that’s two problems.) Google uses the algorithmic route to determine when there are duplicate listings, but a computer can only do so much. Enter Facebook with their ability to put their 750 million users to work.

Sometimes, you just need a human to tell you the answer. In the case of local, the majority of information about a location is stored in the brains of humans and not stored in yellow page listings, websites, directory services, and other entities that a machine could sort through.

Historically, the local listings services have put up walls to ensure accuracy– for example, Bing’s version. While making it harder to get your listing approved (via long required forms and/or arduous verification) it will provide more complete data but discourages the entry to begin with, further exacerbating the local information problem.

Has Facebook stumbled onto the key to ensure accurate search results by gamifying user-generated content?

About the Guest Author:  Dennis Yu is Chief Executive Officer of BlitzLocal, an agency that builds social media dashboards to measure brand engagement and ROI, specializing in the intersection of Facebook and local advertising.

How to Get The New Facebook Timeline Profile with a Walk-though

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Today at F8  Facebook announced Timeline an upcoming change in the way your profile looks. Think digital scrapbook, complete with “cover photo” of your life or at least the story of your life so so far on Facebook.

Right now it’s just available for developers but if you’re comfortable playing around try this how-to from TechCrunch and get it today. Here’s the new features from the intro tour:

Cover – Your cover appears above your profile picture, and it’s the first thing people see when they visit your timeline. I chose a picture of my daughter from a vacation earlier this year, you can change the cover separate from your profile pic and as often as you’d like.

Views -These are mostly familiar with the new addition of map which is a combination of check-in data and pictures with the category of life events, photos, entertainment, public places and restaurants.

Map – The map feature plots check-in’s and photos across the globe. Also include the new “life events” so you can tag yourself on your honeymoon or the first baby picture at the hospital. The suggest following the tour was to tag your life events, at initial launch I had 19 populated.

Activities -This is private to you and used for changing permissions for sharing. It’s neat reminder of events/posts and you can view by year and month.

Stories – Enjoyed scrolling through this and feeling old as I saw some of my younger nieces and nephew “was born” events.

Star or Hide – You can go through each post and star to be featured or hide from your profile. Here’s a featured post of a must see movie. Starring the post has it take up the entire width of the page but it’s definitely not going to be missed.

So I took the leap and published the page (it was set to do it automatically 9/29) but during the developer release, only other developers will be able to see my new timeline. Everyone else will see my old profile.

I’ll be interested to see both how users begin to do some creative things with the new profile as well as deciding whether or not to move older pictures into the timeline to fill it out. Personally I’ve got 14+ years of information on my blog but who knows I might move over some of the life events, but aren’t I just recreating my site?

Can’t wait to see when/if this is rolled out for businesses to use on pages and how that might look. What are you excited to see?

Updating Your Facebook Apps for Secure Browsing

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Earlier this year, Facebook announced the availability of secure browsing to further protect the privacy of their users. Once an opt-in feature in your account settings, secure browsing has become much more common as Facebook has promoted the feature more heavily in recent weeks.

If you are using secure browsing you may have noticed that you are now being prompted to browse Facebook pages in secure mode by default which means converting from HTTP URLs to HTTPS. Enabling secure browsing for an account ensures that data cannot be monitored by other users of the network or the ISP. That’s especially useful when public computers or networks are used to connect to Facebook.The apps you build as a Facebook developer also have security options and can deter your users if they are prompted with a security warning when trying to use your apps.

How to update your Apps

At the current time Facebook does not allow API control of these fields, requiring them to be populated manually. This needs to be set within Facebook via the following steps:

  • Go to your Apps in your Facebook Developer account
  • Log into Facebook with the user account that was used to publish the app.
  • Click on the app on the left side of the screen.
  • Click the Edit Settings link on the right.
  • Click the Facebook Integration tab on the left.
  • Copy the URL in the Canvas URL field and paste it into the Secure Canvas URL field.
  • Copy the URL in the Tab URL field and paste it into the Secure Tab URL field.
  • In the Secure Canvas URL field and the Secure Tab URL field, change ‘http’ to ‘https’.
  • Click Save Changes.

If the Tab URL field is blank, copy the Canvas URL and simply append ‘/tab’ to the end and ensure that it does not end with a slash /. For example ‘https://social.webtrends.com/transponder/deploy/facebook/xxxx/tab’.

Have you updated your apps yet?

Webtrends Customer Story – National Grid

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This customer spotlight is on National Grid – UK’s biggest utility company is also the second largest in the US. More than six million people in the Northeast get their power from National Grid, making it one of the world’s largest shareholder-owned utilities. With electricity and gas rates highly regulated, National Grid is always looking to cut costs.The company wants to bump investor returns for US operations, and is looking to cut $200 million in spending annually. One of many ways they’re trimming costs is to encourage energy efficiency (a natural money-saver for utilities) and switching to electronic statements. Getting customers to switch from paper statements isn’t just eco-hip: e-bills cost $0.40 less per month to produce.

National wanted to measure and improve these campaigns and how visitors used its site overall. But that meant getting many customers registered online first, dealing with IT changes from its recent restructuring, and keeping training time and new equipment purchases to a minimum. National also needed to see how visitors navigated through entire transactions. It wanted to increase site registrations, put energy efficiency information where it would get the best response, and push push push electronic billing.

To learn more about National Grid story – see their full case study here.

Interested in other stories? Read more success stories from our customers each will give you a small, personal glimpse into how we help provide mobile, social and web insights and digital marketing optimization to leading organizations.