Facebook: A Platform Marketers Cannot Ignore

Success Criteria For Facebook Page Marketing

1. Set Community Expectations
2. Provide Cohesive Branding
3. Be Up To Date
4. Live Authenticity
5. Participate In Dialog
6. Enable Peer-To-Peer Interactions
7. Foster Advocacy
8. Solicit A Call To Action

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Neworking sites top in billing rates

Last week, the Harvard Business Review published a long interview with Howard Schultz. The Starbucks CEO talked about the coffee company’s many moves to win back customers and battle against the ill winds of the recession. As evidence of Starbucks’ rebound, Schultz pointed to the biggest of the social networking sites out there. “We’re the number one brand on Facebook,” he boasted.

Starbucks, in fact, was the first brand to top the 10 million-fan mark. Just to put this in perspective, that’s more fans than the entire population of New York City (8.2 million) and all but seven states in the US. That’s more Facebook fans than its closest rival, Coca-Cola (8.3 million fans) and way more than other large global brands.

McDonald’s has 2.5 million fans. Target has 1.43 million, Abercrombie and Fitch 1.37 million, and the trendy teen clothier Forever 21 totals 1.27 million. Among high-end food and food-related brands, Ben and Jerry’s has 1.35 million Facebook fans with Whole Foods lagging behind with just 296,152 fans.

The other day, my Facebook page (I have 302 friends) told me that many people who like Barack Obama also like Starbucks. Turns out the president is one of Starbucks few Facebook rivals. He has 10.9 million fans, a few more than Starbucks. But Starbucks still has more fans than Sarah Palin (1.93 million), Mitt Romney (460,832), and Bill Clinton (353,583) combined.

Most pop culture figures don’t reach Starbucks’ level of fans either. Apart from Facebook leader Michael Jackson (16.6 million) and Lady Gaga (12.9 million), the coffee giant has more online backers than Bruce Springsteen (880,459), Adam Sandler (5.44 million), and even teen idol Justin Bieber (7.88 million).

When it comes to coffee companies, there is no contest. Starbucks’ closest competitor (in terms of its number of cafes across the US) Caribou has 154,754 fans. Peet’s has 45,497. Not long ago, Time Magazine wondered if the famed Portland, Oregon independent roaster Stumptown might be the next Starbucks. Not on Facebook. It has only 10,780 fans.

From the business side — and from the side of studying culture — what do all of these numbers mean? Clearly, brands and personalities have turned to Facebook to market their products, enhance their image, and communicate with their customers. But beyond that what does this new form of fandom mean, beyond a sort of crude measure of popularity?

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tech/social-media/Neworking-sites-top-in-billing-rates/articleshow/6232505.cms

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Facebook launches online safety page

SAN FRANCISCO: Facebook has launched a Web page devoted to staying safe on the Internet.

The “Safety Page” will highlight news and initiatives focused on ways people can keep data secure at the world’s leading online social-networking community, Joe Sullivan of Facebook said in a blog post.

The new page was intended to augment a virtual Safety Center that Facebook introduced in April and was based on a “security page” that boasted more than 2.2 million “fans”.

“Online safety is a shared responsibility,” Sullivan said. “We’ll continue to think of innovative ways to promote safety on our service and elsewhere on the Web.”

The number of people using Facebook topped the 500 million mark last week, meaning one in every 14 people on the planet has now signed up to the social netowork.

The launch of the Safety Page came in the wake of demands by privacy activists that Facebook give users of the booming social network more control over the use of their personal data.

A coalition of privacy groups, in an open letter to Facebook co-founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg last month, welcomed the social network’s recent overhaul of its privacy controls but said additional steps were needed.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tech/social-media/Facebook-launches-online-safety-page/articleshow/6222131.cms

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Facebook reaches 500 mn users

SAN FRANCISCO: Social networking site Facebook officially has 500 million users, the company has announced.

The milestone means that the six-year old website now reaches eight percent of the planet’s population, just 18 months after it passed the 150 million user mark.

Last month Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said there is a “good chance” that the social networking site could boast one billion users within three to five years.

Facebook has continued adding users at a record-setting pace despite growing concerns about the privacy policies of a site that has more data on its users than any other website.

Facebook marked the milestone with the launch of a special section in which users are encouraged to post their personal stories about how Facebook has affected them.

“Half a billion is a nice number but the number isn’t what really matters here. What matters are all of the stories we hear from all of you about the impact your connections have had on your lives,” Zuckerberg said in a video message.

“Instead of focusing on numbers, we want to help people around the world hear about these stories for themselves, and we want to let you tell your own story.”

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tech/news/internet/Facebook-reaches-500-mn-users-/articleshow/6199866.cms

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3 Hottest Tips for Lawyers using Social Media Marketing

Some helpful tips to lawyers using social media marketing to develop brand recognition.

Social media marketing is a fantastic way for your law practice to be noticed and to grow. It allows for potential clients and others to form “personal” online relationships with staff who may be blogging, tweeting or posting information online for others to see. This aids in developing brand recognition and in bringing a larger clientele through your firm’s doors; however, when using social media in a professional capacity there are a few things that should always be kept in mind

1. Don’t treat these communications any different from typical client communications – always maintain your professional integrity.

2. Assume that anything you say in an e-communication will be disseminated and read widely, so ensure you govern yourself accordingly.

3. Remember it is no more acceptable to discuss and disclose a client’s business online that it is anywhere else.

Source: http://www.fastpitchnetworking.com/pressrelease.cfm?PRID=44100

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7 Things to never do on Facebook

Over the last few years, Facebook has emerged as the most popular online destination. The world’s no.1 social network is almost essentially a part of most Netizens virtual life.

Whether its a birthday, recent holiday or any other important occasion (at times not-so important one too), everything is shared on social networks these days. It is also a medium to get in touch with friends, express your views on various happenings and solicit support for any cause or issue.

However, there are things that we should never be doing on Facebook. ConsumerReports.org recently listed 7 things that are a complete no-no on Facebook.

Using a weak password

The first thing that one should never have in Facebook is a weak password. With so much of your personal information at stake it is essential to have a strong password. Avoid names or words that can be found in a dictionary.

Give your complete birth date in your profile

Another thing that you should never do on Facebook is give your full date of birth in your profile. Your complete date of birth is just what identity thieves may require to potentially gain access to your bank or credit card account.

In case you have already done it, here’s how to edit the info: Go to your profile page and click on the Info tab, then on Edit Information. Under the Basic Information section, choose to show only the month and day or no birthday at all.

Overlooking useful privacy controls

It is imperative to restrict access for almost everything on Facebook. It is critical to provide restricted access to your personal info (including religious views and family information) and photos to only your family and friends. Also, avoid giving contact information like phone number and address.

Putting your child’s name in a caption

Another complete `no-no’ on Facebook is to give your child’s name in a caption. Also, don’t use your kid’s name in photo tags. In case someone else has tagged your kid, ask them to remove it.

Announcing that you’ll be away from home

This again can be dangerous and is akin to putting `no one’s home’ signboard on your door. Wait till you are back home to share details about your wonderful holiday. Also, be always vague about your trip dates.

Don’t let Search Engines find you

It’s easy to find details about anyone these days, courtesy Search engines. Make sure you don’t reveal yourself to everyone through these Search engines.

To make sure strangers can’t access your page, go to the Search section on Facebook’s privacy controls and select Only Friends for Facebook search results. Also, make sure that the box for public search results is not checked.

Allowing small children to use Facebook unsupervised

Facebook has limited its membership to ages 13 and above. However, children younger than this can do it, as there is no foolproof way on the site to detect someone’s age.

In case your youngone or younger sibling is on Facebook, become their online friend. This can be one of the best way to superwise them. You can also use your e-mail address as the contact for their account so that you receive their notifications.

Similarly, a child who posts the comment “Dad will be home soon, I need to get back to finish my homework” every day at the same time may inadvertently revealing too much about the parents’ regular comings and goings.

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Approach could help software learn how to identify fake accounts with less honorable intentions.

By Tom Simonite

It’s not unusual to have user profiles on multiple social networks, or even separate accounts on sites like Twitter–one for work and one for play. But Kyumin Lee at Texas A&M University has 60 Twitter accounts, and not because he’s popular.

Lee’s accounts are “honeypots,” designed to attract the attention of the spammers that increasingly use social networks to spread links to malware and phishing Web sites. Software developed by Lee monitors messages sent to the honeypot accounts to learn the tactics used by spammers.

“The concept of a honeypot is well established at the network level,” says Lee. Usually it takes the form of unprotected computers used to monitor spam e-mail or network-based attacks. “We decided to apply it at a higher level to learn about spam in social networks.” Lee is carrying out the project with A&M colleagues James Caverlee and Brian David Eoff, and with Steve Webb at Georgia Tech University. The work is partially supported by a research award from Google.

The honeypot accounts, like this one, automatically post updates drawn from a collection of 120,000 real tweets harvested from Twitter. The team has also deployed honeypots on MySpace, and created software that uses dummy profiles on both networks to learn about spammer tactics. “We have a bot monitor who contacts our profiles, ” says Lee. “It looks at what they put in their messages and also accesses their profile to see their demographic information and past updates.”

So far, Lee says, “our 61 honeypots tempted and collected 30,867 spammers on Twitter.” The data gathered by those bots can also be used to train “classifier” algorithms to identify spammers that haven’t yet contacted a honeypot. A classifier trained using the Twitter honeypots proved capable of correctly identifying spam profiles more than 80 percent of the time. A public Web service is being built from the trained model that will allow people to look up which accounts it considers spam, and submit corrections for any that are misidentified, says Lee.

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A real-time auction system will create even more targeted ads

By Erica Naone

The real dream of any advertiser is to grab the attention of the right person at the right time. A new approach to online advertising, known as real-time bidding, could help make that vision easier to achieve.

Real-time bidding involves auctioning off the opportunity to show an online display advertisement to a specific type of user at a precise moment. A San Francisco-based startup called Triggit recently scored $4.2 million in funding from two venture capital firms, Foundry Group and Spark Capital, based on the promise of its real-time bidding platform.

“Every person has a different value to different advertisers,” says Zach Coelius, Triggit’s CEO. He points to the advertising auction system used by Google for search keyword. People searching for particular keywords are bracketed together as likely having similar intentions. With display advertising, he says, the interests of the person visiting a page is less clear, and it’s more difficult to match an ad to the ideal user. It is increasingly possible to gather information about a user by looking at her browser’s cookies–tiny files that show which sites she has visited. But matching this information to advertising is a still relatively crude process.

Real-time bidding lets advertisers bid against each other to show advertising users based on different pieces of information about that person and their behavior. Bids and counter-bids are made in the microseconds before the winning ad is served up on a page.

Triggit’s technology processes about 15 billion Web impressions a day. The company works with 10 companies that provide data on Web users’ demographics and interests based on tracking the sites they visit online, and offers inventory from nine online ad exchanges.

When setting the price for a particular advertising opportunity, Triggit considers the user’s browsing history, the type of site currently being visited, and other details. The company then works out how much money the ads on a particular website are worth, and sets a price. An ad is automatically auctioned quickly enough to serve the ad to the user without perceived delay.

Coelius says his company has developed intellectual property in several areas: algorithms that deal with large-scale data and extract insights from it, technology that allows Triggit to process billions of impressions per day, and its user interface for advertisers. The company began to build its current technology in 2009. It received some of its initial funding from founders of Urchin, a company that was acquired by Google.

Coelius says real-time bidding helps advertisers deliver ads more effectively and drives up the prices that publishers can command for their ad inventory.

Seth Levine, a technology investor and managing director at Foundry Group, which recently invested in Triggit, says that real-time bidding is a new technology, and its potential impact isn’t yet clear. However, he believes that it promises “pretty groundbreaking” benefits to publishers and advertisers, particularly in cases when publishers have good data on the users of their sites alongside high-value content.

Levine was attracted to investing in Triggit because of the company’s ability to scale its technology to process a very large number of advertising impressions. “I don’t think all demand-side platforms are created equal, with the same ability to handle the firehose,” he says.

“We’re getting closer to buying people rather than buying dumb impressions,” says Marissa Gluck, founder and managing partner of the Los Angeles-based consulting firm Radar Research. She sees companies like Triggit as part of a growing trend, but adds that real-time bidding requires clever technology to work effectively and efficiently.

Gluck believes that advertisers and publishers will welcome real-time bidding. But while the benefits are clear for advertisers, she says, “the larger question is how they affect publishers.” Though companies like Triggit claim to help publishers by increasing their ability to sell inventory that might otherwise go unused, Gluck believes it’s too soon to say for sure whether real-time bidding will help publishers make more money.

Source: http://www.technologyreview.com/business/25773/page2/

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The online encyclopedia is exploring ways to embrace the semantic Web.

By Tom Simonite

As a global resource built from the spare time of millions of volunteers, Wikipedia may be the epitome of Web 2.0. But the Wikimedia Foundation, a nonprofit organization that runs Wikipedia, among other projects, is now thinking about how to make it a linchpin of Web 3.0, or the semantic Web.

That means making some of the data on Wikipedia’s 15 million (and counting) articles understandable to computers as well as humans. This would allow software to know, for example, that the numbers shown in one of the columns in this table listing U.S. presidents are dates. That could, in turn, allow applications that draw on Wikipedia to automatically generate historical timelines or answer the kind of general knowledge questions that would usually entail a person finding and reading a relevant entry on the site.

At the 2010 Semantic Technology conference in San Francisco last month, the foundation’s deputy director, Erik Möller, and colleague Trevor Parscal, a user-experience developer for Wikimedia, showed some first steps taken by the foundation to explore how more semantic structure might be added to Wikipedia. They also appealed to the semantic Web community to help develop ways to make Wikipedia’s knowledge more accessible to computers and software.

“Semantic information already exists in Wikipedia, and people are already building on it,” says Möller. “Unfortunately, we’re not really helping, and they have to use extensive processing to do so.”

One example is DBPedia, a semantic database built using software collect data from the site’s pages, and maintained by the Free University of Berlin and the University of Leipzig, both in Germany. Another is Freebase, a for-profit knowledge database, much of which was also sourced by scraping Wikipedia. Freebase is the data source used by question-answering search engine PowerSet, which was acquired by Microsoft to be part of its Bing search engine.

The first targets for Möller and Parscal are the “infoboxes” that appear as summaries on many Wikipedia pages, and the tables in entries, such as this one showing the gross national product of all the countries in the world.

“Just being able to reuse that data within Wikipedia would be a big thing,” says Yaron Koren, who runs a consultancy that specializes in Semantic MediaWiki, an extension to the MediaWiki software used to build Wikipedia. “The manual work that goes into maintaining the many tables and lists today could be eliminated,” he adds. Instead, lists could be automatically generated from the infoboxes of other pages. It would also be possible to generate maps, using the location coordinates that feature on some pages, or automatically generate timelines to summarize periods in history covered by many other pages, says Möller.

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Rumor: Google to Challenge Facebook with “Google Me”

By: David Murphy

Is Google prepping to launch some kind of Facebook-killing service? That’s the rumor of the day, spawned by a brief Twitter update by Digg founder Kevin Rose.

According to Rose, the new service is going to be called “Google Me,” and it will—in some way—offer up a social profiling functionality that could rival Facebook’s.

If true, it wouldn’t be the first time that Google’s launched a new high-profile service to compete with an equally high-profile Web 2.0 entity. Remember Google Buzz?

It remains to be seen just how much of a mark Buzz has made in terms of dedicated users, however, one number in particular is rather telling: According to ReadWriteWeb, 90 percent of all content published on Buzz is just an automated rehash from an existing Twitter account or RSS feed.

So what, then, would the proposed “Google Me” really do? The only details thus far are sheer speculation. However, it appears that Google Me could fly in as an upgrade to the preexisting Google Profiles service that, itself, is almost like a mini-biographical profile page.

However, its unclear as to just how Google’s other user information feeds—Buzz, Wave, and even the company’s experience with the social networking site Orkut—would tie into the grand picture.

“Knowing that a Google account is required to use Orkut, and a Gmail account is required for Buzz, we can safely assume that we’re looking at roughly 200 million users to any service that would combine the two,” writes The Next Web’s Brad McCarty.

“It wouldn’t take much for Google to not only be a thorn, but to actually come knocking with a heavy hand on the door of Facebook,” he adds.

Adding more fuel to the fire, the site All Facebook reported earlier this week that Open-Graph-friendly Web pages were now showing up in search results on the social media site.

Open Graph, in a nutshell, connects Web elements to Facebook by allowing users to “like” elements of third-party sites—like a movie on a retail platform—which then becomes a part of one’s social experience on the site. Said movie would, in theory, be added to your list of favorite movies and, depending on how many others like the product, would be prioritized in your search results accordingly.

Open Graph represents the start of Facebook’s “social semantic search engine” and, as some have suggested, a direct shot across Google’s bow. With Facebook dipping its toes into search, and Google dipping its toes into social, it’s going to be quite a battleground for user interest over the next many months.

Source: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2365734,00.asp

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