Matt Singley | Social Media Optimization

I’m not at the F8 conference today, but I have been reading the news and keeping up with the announcements.  So far, the most exciting stories I have read have to do with Facebook Insights, the dashboard for page admins. If you run a fan page (now called a “like” page, I suppose) for a brand, agency or just for yourself, this is important information.

To date, the Insights have been underwhelming.  They have covered only the most basic information, and as somebody who works with big brands to engage and guide the community, I’ve got to say they have been less than helpful.  It seems that all of that changes today, however.  Facebook has announced “Facebook for Web Sites” and have already published full documentation about it.  The insight to user behavior should be interesting, as Facebook says:

“Once your app is up-and-running, you can get detailed analytics about the demographics of your users and how users are sharing from your application with Insights. (more…)

(UPDATE AT END OF POST)

Well, it’s finally happened.  Facebook has changed “Become A Fan” to “Like” on their fan pages.  People have been talking about this for a while, and speculating as to what the implications will be. Of course, when I say “people” I mean marketers and social media types…the other 99% of the world probably couldn’t care less.

I’ll wait to reserve commentary until I really see how it all plays out, but for now, here are the details of what you need to know, straight from the horse’s mouth. Of course, after you read this you should now go “like” my Facebook Fan Page.  Or is it now called a Facebook Like Page?

“Liking” a Page

Why did “Become a Fan” change to “Like”?

To improve your experience and promote consistency across the site, we’ve changed the language for Pages from “Fan” to “Like.” We believe this change offers you a more light-weight and standard way to connect with people, things and topics in which you are interested. http://www.facebook.com/help/?faq=17167

What does it mean to “Like” a Page?

When you click “Like” on a Page, you are making a connection to that Page. The Page will be displayed in your profile, and in turn, you will be displayed on the Page as a person who likes that Page. The Page will also be able to post content into your News Feed. http://www.facebook.com/help/?faq=17115 (more…)

Although I wasn’t at the infamous SXSW that saw the start of the whole mob, nor did I see Jack’s first tweet, I’ve been around long enough to feel like the old man in the Twitter neighborhood.  I know many of you feel the same way.  So here, submitted for your approval, is my list of how you know you’ve been around the digital neighborhood for a while.

You know you’re an old-school Twitter user if…

1. You still type “summize.com” in your browser to get to the Twitter Search page
2. You’ve felt ecstatic about Twitter being down less than half the day
3. You had to explain what a “tweet” was…at least 3 times a day
4. You remember when Kevin Rose had the most followers on Twitter, and you couldn’t believe that anybody could have over 30,000!
5. You know that the first big follower race was not between Ashton Kutcher and CNN, but Kevin Rose and Barack Obama!
6. You used to use the “TRACK” feature with Twitter via SMS to find out who mentioned you
7. You remember the nightly news when they used an anchor’s title, not their Twitter name
8. You referred to somebody in terms of Milliscobles
9. You happen to know that the original Twitter bird was stock art (seen below), and Twitter paid less than the price of a pizza to acquire it
10. When you heard the news that Oprah was going to talk about Twitter,you just knew that the service had jumped the shark
11. You remember the day you heard the Twitter whale art was named “Failwhale“

I could go on and on…but those are the first 10 that come to mind.  What would you add? Leave a comment, or ping me on Twitter with your sweetest old school Twitter memory.

It’s Foursquare day, what are you going to do to celebrate? No, not the super awesome kids’ game that you played when you were younger, but rather an ad hoc celebration of the geo-location social media platform.

If you aren’t familiar with Foursquare, it’s a service that sprung up last year and has really hit the scene (at least the geek/tech scene) with fervor this year.  I’ve been a fan of it for some time, going as far as to call it the “next” social network way back in October 2009. So today is a day of virtual celebration for all of the mayors, checker-inners and social media geeks, it’s April 16th! (Get it? Four squared is 16….4/16…..)

There are a few things that make today that special day, but one of them is a new badge, just for this occasion.  Today only, when you check in to your favorite local haunt, make sure you give a shout out to Foursquare Day and include the hashtag #4sqday…you’ll be rewarded by unlocking the cool new badge that tells the world you are an uber-geek. (more…)

This morning I watched the new spot from Nike that features Tiger Woods, just in time for his return to golf at The Masters. When I first viewed it, the page had already been viewed 600k+ times on YouTube. As of this writing, it’s over 1.1MM; it’s obviously getting a lot of attention. I’ve been thinking about this video all day, going back and forth about how I feel about it.  The video is embedded below, and it’s worth watching.  Let me summarize what you see:

It’s a :30 spot in black and white, with Tiger Woods standing still.  He says nothing.  He blinks.  The voice over is of his father, Earl Woods, who passed away in 2006. He is talking to his son, and says, “Tiger…I am more prone to be inquisitive; to promote discussion.  I want to find out what your thinking was, I want to find out what your feelings are, and…did you learn anything?” It flashes to a black background and the simple, iconic Nike swoosh. (more…)

As somebody that develops strategy for large corporate brands, I often work with different types of brand advocates in various social media channels.  A common tactic of many marketers and PR professionals is to try to go after “influencers” to get them to talk about their product.  Sometimes these influencers are individuals, sometimes they are communities, but a common denominator is that they have substantial audience sizes. The typical way of approaching these people or groups is to ship them a sample of your product and include a note that says something like, “Hope you enjoy this, please blog about it”.  I think this is a good shotgun approach to communities, it’s a good step up from a press release and it gets your product information out to a lot of people very quickly.  For individuals, I think we have to look at a more measured and personal approach.

To truly be effective in social media with influencers, I think you need to build a relationship, not ship a press package. You also have to recognize and understand the different groups that exist in social media, so you know how to develop and target brand programs and exposure.  In case you fear that I’m starting to sound a little too professional and polished in this approach, I submit for your approval a hand drawn diagram in the picture to the left.  Fancy, isn’t it? I put this beauty up on our office white board this morning while talking through the concept with a client.

Before we discuss what to do with these various groups, let’s start by defining them. (more…)

What does this trailer for the upcoming movie “The A-Team” have to do with social media or marketing? Absolutely nothing beyond the fact you can find them on Facebook and Twitter.  But it has everything to do with being awesome…I grew up watching the original A-Team, and this looks like a worthy remake/upgrade! Video below.

I’m been looking over a new media aggregation site called Mediagazer.  My initial thought was, “great…another aggregator that will simply clutter up a lot of content and put it in a needle-in-the-haystack format”, but those thoughts were dismissed as soon as I really started looking at it closely.

Mediagazer is a new effort from the uber-popular tech sharing community Techmeme, and is their first news vertical in almost four years. It bills itself as a site, “which will focus on the content production and distribution business, organizing topics as wide as journalism, blogging, video production, e-books, and digital distribution technologies”, and sure enough it does all of that.  There are a lot of good content assimilation sites, but I think Mediagazer will stand out as a leader if it can get enough good press early to build momentum.

I really like it’s easy-to-share buttons, with the ability to send information linked to either Mediagazer directly, or the original source of the story.  I think that is a brave and noble feature, most aggregators are trying their very best to drive as much traffic as possible directly to their own site (increase in traffic = increase in ad revenue), so the ability to link directly out is a fairly cool and risky idea. They do have sponsored news aggregation prominently displayed in the right column and halfway down the main page with no signs of traditional banner and display ads…yet. I also like the sharing simplicity, obviously aimed at social networks as the only two options are Twitter and Facebook.  Honestly, those are the only two places I ever share news anyway. Naturally, Mediagazer is also on Twitter, although thus far it appears to simply be a feed from their headlines as opposed to an interactive, engaging account.

I like the navigation and sharing potential from this site, so I’ll give it a try as a news source for a couple of weeks to see if it makes it into my regular lineup.  If you try it out, let me know what you think: is Mediagazer just another news aggregator, or a useful service for finding and sharing information?

A big hat tip to @acmackie for sending this over…absolutely hilarious!  If you work in agency land, this requires no further explanation.  If you aren’t in agency land, let me set this video up for you.

An RFP is a “request for proposal”.  People at various levels of responsibility that work at marketing and creative agencies get a lot of these, and they are usually at the last minute.  When multiple agencies are working in unison to try to piece something together for a client, well…it gets a little crazy.  Countless hours of phone calls and a seemingly endless stream of emails begin, all trying to put together a presentation deck (a PowerPoint), taking up dozens or hundreds of labor hours.  As this video mentions at one point, it’s likely that the client won’t even open it. I love the computer-voice line ”we may only send you one idea, since the decks we send you, you never even open”, hahaha!

If you live in a world of RFPs, please take a moment from the current deck you are working on and watch this.  You’ll thank me.

I’ve been thinking about the ever-increasing blurry line between public and private lives now that social media is mainstream.  I’ve personally been opening myself up to the world for about a decade; I started blogging by developing my own (very basic) blogging platform before the term “blog” was popular…and I haven’t looked back since then.

There have been a couple of times that I was alarmed by what people are capable of thinking or doing.  A few years ago I started getting anonymous comments on various videos of my children, asking me to pose them in certain ways or have them do certain things.  Naturally I deleted all traces of the videos online (yes it is possible) and became very aware of what I was posting after that.  Although I was always careful to never name them or reveal the location of my children even before this incident, I became very protective after that and have been quite conscious of what I would and would not publish.  Over the years I have become more widely known because of my marketing and social media work, and although I’m certainly a small fish in a big pond, I do have a lot of connections with people that I’ve never met face to face.

Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t trade my social media life.  I’ve turned so many of my digital-first relationships into real-life relationships, and I love social media and the way it connects the world. But, and there is always a but… (more…)