On the 22nd of September Facebook held its annual conference in San Francisco. Hundreds of developers on tenterhooks attended and Facebook fanatics around the world tuned in to hear Mark Zuckerberg’s big plans.

So was the event as much of an anti-climax as the launch of the non-existent iPhone5? What exactly was announced? And most importantly what does this mean for us as users and marketeers?

In summary there are four significant changes on Facebook:

Timelines
By now you’ve probably seen an example of the lovely new timeline. Big images and top stories from over the years brought to the surface for all to see. Great for those with a pretty history…not so great for those who thought their skeletons were firmly in the closet!

Smart Lists
Hot on the heels of Google+, Facebook will allow you to create lists of your friends….colleagues, family, close friends, enemies etc. This means you can share posts with specific lists only rather than sharing every status update with all 500 of your friends. It also means you can easily opt out of getting news updates from certain people.

Ticker
Like Smart Lists, the Ticker has already been launched and you will now see The Ticker in the right corner of your screen continuously feeding you real time updates of what your friends are up to –what they are liking, comments they are making etc. The main real estate of the page is now reserved for the big stuff - your friends’ posts, status updates, pictures etc.

Open Graph
Previously Facebook was about ‘Social Graph’ connecting people. Now it’s become ‘Open Graph’ connecting everything else. Rather than simply being able to ‘Like’ something, you can now share exactly what you are doing online - what you are ‘Reading’, ‘Listening to’, ‘Watching’ etc. And this is where it gets really interesting…

While Timelines are a significant change for users, nobody is really sure how, or indeed if, they are going to affect brands Pages. Facebook didn’t make any specific announcements around Pages but a spokesperson has said “we hope to make Pages more consistent with the new Timeline in the future.” This could suggest that brands need to start building up the history of their business on Facebook, giving them a richer timeline with information on heritage, growth and testimonials, supported by photos and videos. But although this will change how brands are presented on Facebook and hopefully mean more emotional connection and loyalty, it isn’t really going to affect how brands use Facebook or how users interact with them.

Smart lists and the Ticker are of more concern to brands. They allow users to filter what they see in both their main news feed and in the Ticker, which is great if you make the cut, but not so great if you don’t. No longer can a brand think “I’ve got 50,000 likes so I know my posts are appearing in 50,000 news feeds”. People are effectively filtering out brands and business from their Facebook experience. As quickly as Facebook gave us the ability to connect with 800,000,000 people, it’s making it just as easy for them to disconnect from us.

So what does that mean for marketeers? Well essentially this means that it’s more crucial than ever to stimulate and engage your Facebook fans - 1) to keep yourself interesting enough to make the shortlist and 2) to keep yourself visible in the both the Ticker and, more importantly, the news feed. Facebook describes the content for the Ticker as lightweight so you need to ensure that you are a heavyweight with valuable content, photos and videos for example. Since users now have more control over their news feeds, brands with boring or irrelevant updates will have lower visibility and the aim of the game is no longer to simply get your ‘Likes’ up.

Then this brings us on to the beast that is Open Graph or ‘frictionless sharing’ as MZ pitched it. Once you have ‘accepted’ a website it can now post details of your visit or consumption of its content onto Facebook automatically, without any prompt or acceptance. App developers can also define exactly how this interaction is reported – their users don’t have to just ‘Like’ their content they can now ‘Eat’, ‘Sleep’ and ‘Breathe’ it…..or whatever you want them to.

So, for example, you may have noticed in your new Ticker some handy updates like “John is listening to S Club 7 on Spotify”. So my questions are 1) does John want me to know he’s listening to S Club7 and 2) what are the implications of this next level of Big Brother surveillance?

There is some debate about how much Facebook is actually tracking you online. Some believe that every time you visit a webpage that displays the ‘Like’ button Facebook tracks that visit, whether or not you actually ‘Like’ the page. And now if you accept an App it will post this information to your wall, sharing the details about your visit. So for example, if I accepted the Guardian Facebook App (which got 198,000 users in 3 days after the Open Graph announcement!) because I was reading an interesting article I thought my friends might like and then the next week I went on and read an article about how to get rid of smelly feet, before I knew it all my Facebook friends would know I have smelly feet (totally hypothetical of course…)!

From a marketing perspective this opens up a whole new world of possibilities. Facebook is allowing your customers to publicise their interactions with your brand. It means deep personalisation with immense customer intelligence and the opportunity to amplify brand engagement. But it also means another ‘currency’ in which consumers are paying for content and services online. Rather than asking us to pay to watch videos, read articles etc., companies are going to start asking us to accept open graph. We allow them to find out everything about us, and promote their brand and in return they will grant us access to more content.

This is fine for companies whose products are consumed online, but isn’t it harder for everyone else? At the moment restaurants, bars etc. rely on check-ins for Facebook users to help spread the word, but check-ins are prompted not automatic based on online consumption. One would presume that this is the next step; soon we will automatically be checked-in to places without confirming that we want to. Therefore my main concern with this whole ‘frictionless sharing’ thing is… how am I supposed to pull a sickie when I’ve automatically been checked in at a bar at 3am...?!

This week the world’s favourite micro-blogging site Twitter announced that it’s crossed the 100 Million users mark. Quite an achievement for any online business and let us not forget that Twitter is a business. Their most recent round of venture capital funding will leave their value at 8 Billion dollars, but where’s the money coming from to justify that value?

Well as we all know, Twitter currently makes no money, it’s free to users and is a bottomless pit for the aforementioned funding. So what are the market speculators valuing at 8 Billion dollars? The site and all its posts? The technology behind the service itself? No, of course not. That myriad of information (purely narcissistic, or otherwise) although interesting is worth nothing, even the news reported on Twitter is usually a short version of what exists elsewhere in a much more readable form. Even the infrastructure itself over the years of R&D and redesign is probably worth somewhere from a few hundred thousand to a few million at the most (although the 24/7 running costs must be remarkable).

So what’s worth 8 Billion US Dollars to the many investors who keep Twitter running? You.
Quick calculation $8,000,000,000 ÷ 100,000,000 = $80

That’s pretty reasonable! Each user being worth $80 is a great deal, for it is you that they own. Unlike Facebook, to date Twitter seems to remain relatively unscathed in this regard. Facebook has come under plenty of fire for user privacy issues in the last 12 months. Mostly this is because Facebook is very clear that the user is their particular commodity, but people don’t like being seen this way. Facebook knows all about you, what you like, where you go, who you talk to.

Twitter is no different. It knows who you follow and therefore what you like. It knows who you tweet to and even where you are when you tweet. The reason it has escaped criticism is largely because it hasn’t taken advantage of this. Yet! But at some point the investors will want their $8 Billion back. Thus the conversation has been sparked, how long will it be until Twitter introduces advertising to their service?

On a wider level this has happened on similar services and successfully too. Google for example saturate you in advertising throughout all their services. They are so good at it though, the advertising itself is so subtle and so well targeted, that users rarely find it irritating. However, they achieve this in much the same way as Facebook, that being collection of personal data. Google know all about you, it’s just not as obvious as Facebook, who are recently the whipping boy for privacy issue gripes.

In fact, when Google bought out YouTube for close to $1.7 Billion in late 2006 they began the process of heavily commercialising the site. At first this resulted in the usual condemnation of any change but has been largely embraced and accepted by the sites users. And no doubt it’s this advertising that brings in the much needed running capital to ensure a site as complex as YouTube keeps going.

The fact is social media companies treat the user as a product, that’s just an underlying principle of online business. If you (the consumer) appear to be getting something for free, then you are the product. Overall, we have to recognise that this is a trend which is prevalent online now, the long game is king.

As members of this industry the strategy of these companies should be obvious to us, find a niche and populate that niche with great content for free. This will draw thousands, millions or even hundreds of millions of users to you. Once traction is that high, sell these users (or at least access to their prefrontal cortex’s) to the highest bidders.

Sounds horrific, doesn’t it but it’s actually not always a bad thing. The reason Facebook came under such scrutiny was their willingness to share user’s details with partners by default. If user’s have the ability to control what’s shared then bad press can be easily prevented, unfortunately Facebook learned this the hard way. That said, the other usage of our information by Facebook was internal, Facebook’s servers simply determined which, of their myriad of available adverts, were relevant to us. This actually works and personally I find it’s always showing me things I’m genuinely interested in. Google’s extensive algorithms seem to do much the same, with plenty of advertising, but all of it related to the searches I’ve made and hence, things I’m interested in.

We can only hope that lessons learned by others are taken into account when Twitter inevitably begins leveraging their huge user base for something more profitable. If adverts appear in my feeds which are relevant to me I should be happy, right? It’s a balance of course; most users accept that adverts are needed to support their favourite sites and services. This is still a learning period and both sides need to forge some tolerance. Users need to understand that who they are and what they like is up for grabs and online services need to understand there’s a limit to this, users will only tolerate being owned by their favourite service if that trust isn’t abused.

It's the Third Thursday of the month and we are both in the office!

A focus group for our Clever Kids iPad Puzzle Game

Other links referenced...

• Our 'Responsive' Learn Apps Website
• Clever Kids First Puzzles Learning Game
• Building Trust Online - Airbnb User Safety
• Tuborg Promotion with 4Music
• We are seeking a Project Manager - know anyone good?

Our clients at Youth Music are always coming up with new and innovative ways to get young people involved with music and this summer's Youth Music Box is no exception.

Based at the Southbank Centre for the next 6 weeks Youth Music Box is an 'interactive musical experience', allowing you to create your own unique track and video in under 10 minutes.

You can then go onto the website, find your video, tag yourself against it and share it with your friends. For those that can't make it to the Southbank Centre there is also an online version where you can create and record your own music. We are currently working on integration of the site with Facebook to help spread the joyous sounds even further afield.

So after a hard weeks work getting the site ready for launch last Thursday, we felt it was only right to pop along and try it out for ourselves. Our verdict - great fun for everyone but remember... you are being filmed!

www.youthmusicbox.co.uk »

"It is not that the internet is a particularly recent invention. It has even had its very own economic crisis. So why are companies still struggling to engage with it?

Of course, every company worth its salt has a website, not least those who have sent their executives to the World Economic Forum in Davos.

But the discussions here suggest that many companies are still struggling to move beyond having a colourful website towards really using the internet to their advantage.

And to make things worse, hardly any company knows how to cope with the rise of social media - the Facebooks, Twitters, blogs and YouTubes of the digital world."

The above comes from an article on BBC News written by Tim Weber during the World Economic Forum. Weber reports that most companies simply haven't got a clue about social media, and either bore, ignore or upset their potential audiences. Even if there are some great examples to prove to the contrary - Zappos on Twitter, Blendtec on Youtube, MyStarbucksIdea to get consumer feedback or Southwest Airlines on Facebook - I agree with Weber that most companies are struggling to enter the social media world and are not properly using the power of the network to gain opportunities and build relationships.

Does your company really get what social media is all about?

Social Media is people having conversations online. These may be your customers, employees or investors. It is the shift from a broadcast and unidirectional mechanic to a many-to-many model. Conversations are facilitated by online tools that people use to share content, stories, opinions, insights, experiences. These tools include blogging, social networking, micro-blogging, video-sharing, bookmarking, photo sharing, wikis...

Social Media is empowering people. They are now able to create, select, share and converse on any topic they like. As already discussed in a previous article, there is nothing you can do about these conversations happening online. You don’t have control anymore! However, you can certainly participate and engage with people using these Social Media tools. The key is to start now.

Well, that being said, you might be one of those who don’t know where to begin to join the conversation. That’s not a problem at all; it is never too late to connect. What you do need are some guidelines. The thoughts and links below will help you have a better idea about where to start.

You may have already started to enter the social world. After all it is shiny, new and so many people are using it. It’s the ideal channel for advertising! But that is the wrong purpose, you need some direction! Why don’t you read on as well?

Fundamentals of a Social Media Strategy

"We need to be on Twitter", "Oh, and we want a blog" Don't jump into social media just because everyone else is doing it. Take a step back and take a closer look at the POST method invented by Forrester’s analysts Josh Bernoff and Charlene Li authors of Groundswell, one of the most important books on the phenomenon of Social Media. POST stands for People, Objectives, Strategy and Technologies. It’s a four-step process for social strategy which will help you define the appropriate tools to implement in order to get the most of Social Media.

Firstly, People. Know your customers and assess their social activities. You should already have a rough idea of who you are targeting but most importantly you should identify how they use social media technologies. The Forrester’s Social Technographics™ Ladder classifies consumers into six overlapping levels of participation: Creators, Critics, Collectors, Joiners, Spectators and Inactives.



If you are not sure how to profile your customers, you can use the Social Technology Profile Tool. This free tool will allow you to define your audience’s social computing behaviour. Just select age, country and gender to see the result.

Beyond Forrester’s Social Technographics™ Ladder it is highly recommended to listen and monitor the good, the bad and the ugly. The list below offers some great FREE tools to listen and learn what your consumers are saying about your brand, how they participate, the tone of voice they employ, the information they are looking for etc. The only advice I could give is to be prepared for what you might discover.

Google Blog Search - Google's index of blog posts.
Google Trends - shows amount of searches and Google news stories.
TECHNORATI Search - search the blogosphere.
WhosTalkin - social media search tool that allows you to search for conversations surrounding the topics that you care about most.
SocialMention - social media search engine that searches user-generated content such as blogs, comments, bookmarks, events, news, videos, and microblogging services.
HowSociable? - provides a simple way for you to begin measuring your brand’s visibility on the social web across 22 metrics.
Twitter Search - Search keywords on Twitter which "self-refreshes".
TweetScan – search for words on Twitter.
Twitrratr - distinguish negative from positive tweets surrounding a brand, product, person or topic.
Twilert - Twitter application that lets you receive regular email updates of tweets containing your brand, product, service.
Hashtags - Realtime Tracking of Twitter Hashtags.
Friendfeed Search - Conversation tracker.

Objectives - Ask yourself what you want to accomplish. What are you trying to achieve with Social Media? No, getting rich is not the answer! Although an effective strategy should pay off financially in the long run with increased brand awareness and customer loyalty. So do you want to:

• Listen to your customers?
• Talk to them?
• Support them?
• Energize your best customers to evangelize others?
• Embrace them and their ideas?

If you don’t know where you want to go, how can you know the direction to take? Stop utilising Social Media because it’s cool, slick and popular and use it because it is effective in helping you to reach your goals. Deciding what you want from Social Media will directly determine the best strategy to adopt and the right tools to use.

Strategy - plan for how relationships with customers will change. Start figuring out what will be different after you have implemented the tools. Determine the strategy for achieving your objectives.

Technologies - Despite the impressive number of social media tools available, you should only join and participate in the platforms that matter to you, and make sure you don’t waste your time in the ones that don’t. (ie: Building a blog just because it's trendy and because your competitor has a blog) But honestly, if you have properly determined your people, objectives, and strategy, then you can easily decide what tools are appropriate to you: wikis, blogs, podcasts, content communities, micro-blogging, social networks...

Some final tips before you really join the conversation

• Always be yourself, real, human, transparent, helpful, and give more than you get.
• Try to humanise your brand as much as you can.
• To really see the result, invest time into it and to resource it properly. It takes time to develop relationships in the social media world. Finding your BBF (British Best Friend) in one tweet is exceptional. Think of Social Media as a long-term strategy!
• Remember that you’re not in control anymore. Members are.
• Relationships are the new currency in Social Media (see The Essential Guide to Social Media)
• Stay connected on a constant basis and be responsive.
• Don’t broadcast yourself, instead contribute to the conversation and provide something of value.
• Finally, keeping it simple is sometimes the best route.

At codegent we have been helping to develop our clients’ social media strategy as well as benchmarking them against their competitors and tracking their reach and results. Drop us an email if you would like to find out more.

I hope this post will give you a better idea on how to develop a successful Social Media strategy. Please feel free to share your own experience on entering the Social Media world.

Next time, we will look at how to measure your social media effort.

Illustration credit: Matt Hamm

When it comes to opinions, we've got plenty! And none so more than our creative director,  Mr. Matthew Jukes :)

Today New Media Age have published his diatribe sorry, whitepaper, on the declining numbers of facebook and the future of the social web. It's a genuinely interesting read and will certainly get you thinking, you can download it here.

We've just produced our first Facebook application for iFan. The good old game of keepy uppy is given a contemporary setting.

For us, we just wanted to see how you go about getting an application onto Facebook and be able to watch the viral effect, and for iFan it's a great tool for raising awareness and driving people to their site.

Check it out for yourself: the Facebook "iFan Football Ball Control" game

Forget about the battle of Facebook and mySpace. The next battle is for your kids, and is going to be fought between Club Penguin & Moshi Monster.

Moshi Monster lets you create and adopt a monster, then nurture it, and then interact with other people's monsters, and even play games. Think of it as a cross between Second Life and Tamagotchi.

Club Penguin was bought by Disney for an obscene amount of money a while back, when the entertainment giant decided it needed to be in the social network arena. It works much like Habbo Hotel, with you personalising a penguin, which you can then talk through with other penguins!

Intersting times afoot.

Fallout

Facebook is addictive genius... official!

Meet Fallout, David's 80s New Romantic/Punk(?!) band that sadly never was to hit the big time.

They had the look (thanks to plenty of hairspray and superb trouser collection - lace up zebra skin is just the tip of the iceberg). They allegedly had the songs and they certainly had the crowds of Sharnbrook Upper Sixth begging for more.

Join the Fallout group on Facebook and revel in the evocative photography and nostalgic comments from the guys, 20 years on. Surely we should start a campaign for the reunion tour?