After attending f8 2011 in San Francisco, I am excited about the impending changes in Facebook and the News Feed is just the tip of the iceberg.
There is one change, however, that was overshadowed by the Timeline and Custom Open Graph announcements and that is the introduction of Graph Rank. Graph Rank will help determine how, when and where individuals see your content and actions. Since the conference, I have read a handful of articles that do not address the "why" of Graph Rank's existence, with one article stating that Graph Rank will replace EdgeRank. This could not be further from the truth. After talking to"Boz" (Andrew Bosworth, director of product) along with members of Facebook's development team, it became apparent that Graph Rank will be the more transparent side of EdgeRank. Graph Rank makes a set of information available that represents how your community and Facebook perceiveyour content. This translates into reputation and ultimately affects how visible your brand messages become. If you think this sounds a bit like the sender reputations that occurred in the email world, then you're spot on. To be clear, Graph Rank is a subset of EdgeRank and will allow Facebook as well as marketers to gather social signals. What are social signals, you ask? They are the ways people interact with your brand's activity. A "Like" is a positive signal while reporting content as spam or hiding it from a News Feed is a negative signal. There are many other examples yet Facebook will not share exactly how they decide which activities to show nor what causes these rankings to improve or decline. The good news is that Graph Rank is going to be be composed of several quantifiable metrics. It will help determine how well your content is received by the community and what signals to keep an eye on. By following your Graph Rank, expect to receive more insight into what activities your community craves and what turns them off. The result for your brand is increased relevancy and engagement from the people you want to interact with most.
Here are a few interesting items that were talked about….
Ticker is the light-weight News Feed.
Facebook hits milestone with 500,000,000 users in one day in the first half of Sept.
Zuckerberg's law states that people share 2X more information every year.
Timeline represents your profile and was inspired by the question: "What would an annual report for a person look like?"
Zuckerberg said he has been using Timeline personally for less than a year.
Timeline is currently only available for profiles but will appear on Pages in the future.
A "New Class of Apps" refers to improved abilities around easier sharing and realtime interactions.
Within the social media efforts it is inevitable that an executive, fellow employee or consultant will ask you about the number of Fans, Followers or Subscribers you have. While this is a number to consider and analyze it, more often than not, serves as an ego booster rather than a real gauge for your social media success.
Facebook is leading this charge with its EdgeRank algorithm and as a result has resulted in as much accolades as criticism. EdgeRank analyzes Affinity, Weight and Time to determine what posts/content are shown in your news feed. For an expanded description and a working example of how EdgeRank functions take a look at these informative articles (Everything You Need To Know About Facebook's EdgeRank and Cracking the Facebook Code). Other networks like Twitter and LinkedIn don't force this on users and let it happen organically. However Facebook's argument is that the more relevant content you present to users the more they will use Facebook and the more advertisers and brands will pay for its services. We agree that engagement is the real currency here. We all have, or know someone who has, thousands of fans/followers. We also know that fan/follower base contains such a small percentage of people who consume or care about their content. The bottom line is that only people who care enough about your products and services will consume your content. It's not rocket science just common sense. When building your social media strategies and measurement metrics, move past the ego of followers and focus on measuring and increasing engagement.
Many of us have social media initiatives that produce results that can, and should, be thought of as Intellectual Property. If you don't think so, or haven't thought about it, Intellectual Property (IP) is defined as "distinct types of creations of the mind for which a set of exclusive rights are recognized". This applies to the strategies, business process and original content you and your organization are creating. Today this IP manifests itself more and more on social networks because we are allowing employees and partners to utilize (strategies + processes) and distribute (content).
The powerful part is that the IP you are using is generating a less recognized, but just as impactful Intellectual Property. Think of all the fans, followers and subscribers you have accumulated as well as the SEO that has been built. All just as valuable as the original content you created. For more on the SEO aspect see this recent article on SEOmoz.
Now to my point. Many organization have opted to allow their sales force, employees and partners to use their brand in social media outlets. Some allow this directly via policies and others allow this indirectly by ignoring or not implementing a policy. In an alarming amount of cases the Pages, Profiles, Channels, Accounts, etc (Assets) are not owned by the brand directly, but by their employees & partners. This becomes a problem when the employee leaves the company or a partner's interests change. All the content, SEO and other IP that has been built up is lost or goes to work for someone else. When you have helped these employees and partners create meaningful content and helped build this IP that can be devastating to the program and your success metrics.
When creating your strategy be sure to factor in how you want to handle the intellectual property your generating.
There was a post that went around on AllFacebook regarding a post on Mari Smith's Facebook Page, plus various other Social outlets that alluded to the fact that Facebook was hiding posts from 3rd party applications. Being the provider of a 3rd party application I of course wanted to research this more and understand what was really happening. What we found was that Facebook is hiding posts by 3rd party apps but could not be interpreted as hurting or helping. So one thing is true Facebook is consolidating Posts from the same application when they appear within the Top News or Most Recent view of the News Feed.
The interesting part is that the application that published this is only one of the considerations. The other side of this has to do with the Pages you like. The feed only consolidates the posts from an application but if you have liked different pages that use this application, then they get consolidated too. In the example below there are several other pages that MessageMaker application for One to One Global publishes to but they are not shown because I have not Liked those pages.
The above is not an issue under normal circumstances because the latest MessageMaker post is shown in the News Feed as you would expect. Until this latest post the other post would have appeared in the appropriate chronological location. In fact, I would argue that Facebook is helping promote my past MessageMaker posts by bringing them back up to the most recent and allowing them to be expanded and interacted with. Here is the view after I have liked those other pages.
The above is of course not ideal because it presents a scenario where ONLY the last page or profile, using the same application gets displayed, even though the content is different. Last in Wins! In the example below, which is the post from the original article, the second post was hidden because they are both using the same application.
This presents a HUGE problems for companies that use one application to post to all their various clients because they don't know who has liked other brands using the same application. Just to keep the record straight, we do not follow the one application for all our clients model. We create an application for each brand we work with and in some instances have created multiple apps within that same brand. This is definitely Facebook's way of cutting down on the clutter and I suspect it was put in place because Pages are spreading like wildfire with un-educated brands posting the EXACT same message to all the pages they have created. This posed problems previously when you and I would have Liked more than 1 of their pages. The same post would have shown up in our News Feed twice. By consolidating it to an application Facebook is saying we don't want you overwhelming users with duplicate content. Also it forces providers to be more thoughtful in their deployments and help their brands make better, more engaged connections.
There has been a lot of talk about Facebook's new Messaging system being an email killer. I blame this mostly on the need to over-hype subject lines so they get read. Any veteran email marketer or service provider can tell you about the countless EMAIL KILLERS in our time. Email is going nowhere and is still very effective today.
Since Facebook unveiled the system at the Web 2.0 Conference myself and the industry have been consuming as much information as we can get our hands on. While it won't kill email it is another endpoint that we will be taking seriously and developing solutions for. Everyone is definitely talking about how to get email positioned appropriately and that if you’re not a friend you appear in this "Other" location or get bounced. One of the items that I have not read in any articles yet is how this will affect the delivery format for non-email.
Facebook will now automatically route messages to the location most appropriate for the recipient. Currently this includes the Messages interface, chat & SMS. There is evidently a designation for SMS but no control other than that. This means we may have to radically change how we deliver marketing content to @facebook.com email addresses. It will be interesting to see how content from an email is converted into a chat or SMS message.
One scenario is that we advise marketers to send content more in a Post type of format. These types of messages would contain links that forwards recipients to landing page, shopping carts or other mechanisms that deliver the additional content needed.
Right now they have released a set of Read API's that let the industry start developing applications that can display your messages. Right now there is no way to inject messages into this system other than SMTP, SMPP or via SMS. Also understand that Facebook is notorious for launching features that can drastically change based on user feedback and usage patterns. This will certainly be one of the features that gets built upon and modified.
Are you planning on using Facebooks new Message system and if so How?
Let me get this out of the way up front. I LOVE APPLE PRODUCTS! I have used, owned and defended many apple products since my college days. Then it was Quadra's in school and my first purchase was a PowerMac 7100 AV. I currently own an AppleTV, iPad, iPod touch and 3 other versions of the iPod.
With that said let me talk about my reservations about Apple products long term, specifically in a post Steve Jobs Apple. Steve is a visionary that has brought apple back from the brink and really transformed it into a consumer devices and software company. They just also happen to sell those desktop and laptop computers still.
Working in the tech space it is interesting to glean tidbits of information through the various interviews. In several occasions I have heard of Steve being the guy that envisioned a product or technology. In his D8 interview he talks about the technology behind their iPhone, iPod and iPad devices and how he realized & envisioned the resulting product suite starting with the phone (see below). By the way this was all brought about by the want to produce a tablet that undoubtedly has roots in their early efforts of the newton.
Also in the Product Management book Inspired: How To Create Products Customers Love the author (Marty Cagan) sites Steve as being one of the most gifted Product Managers he has seen. There are many other references here to Steve being the GUY that dreams Apples' cool stuff up. This is really refreshing in a day and age of CEO's being the financial guy or the operations guy and even when they are strategy people they don't dream up the product that often.
This brings me to the question and possibly point. When Steve is no longer able to serve Apple, who will take the innovation reigns? Sure they can find a CEO but who will innovate and bring us these cool products. To date I have seen little of any successor. There are appearances by several VP's in their marketing videos with VP of iPhone Marketing, Senior VP of iOS Software, Senior VP of Hardware & Senior VP of Design (guy with the great British accent). With Steve's health issues a while back I'm sure Apple is aware and working on this but it doesn't make me warm and fuzzy inside that we haven't seen or heard of anything or anyone.
From the brink of no longer being in existence to a valuation higher than that of Microsoft, Apple has really done a great deal right in the last 10 years. I also love their products and the emotion I and my family get from using them (direct and indirect). I hope they can continue this not only in the short term but in the post Steve Jobs reality that is inevitable.
Great post on Coderoom that one of our developers sent out.
From a Product Manager standpoint however there are so many insights and truths in here that it's a worth while read. For instance, how many times have you heard one of your developers say "We can't do that because it's too labor intensive on the (blah) system". Well the people who matter most don't care. I'm not saying you shouldn't listen and performance bottlenecks definitely have to be considered. Just realize your users don't give ANY thought to if your DB has to work a little harder or your network's bandwidth needs to double. They just want to get their work done faster or better. That's what they pay you good money for.
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