Methodical Madness

Facebook burnout: Have we finally had enough?

Innovative new sites are springing up to accommodate Facebook-weary social networkers

We speculated in a previous post about whether or not Facebook users were getting fed up, and it seems as though the sentiment has only grown since then. In the past few weeks, stories have been popping up around the web about users growing tired of the social media goliath and the new sites that are looking to capitalize by giving users a better option. 

Teens in particular are increasingly abandoning Facebook. The reason is largely that they’ve simply lost interest and are looking to other sites for amusement. Privacy issues are a relatively easy problem to address with fixes in site functionality – mass malaise is far more daunting and difficult to turn around.  

Which isn’t to say privacy issues aren’t a major reason people are getting fed up with Facebook. A Mashable survey showed 30% of respondents intended to leave Facebook because they’re uncomfortable with the accessibility of their private information. 

With the scent of blood in the water, many players have jumped into the game to try to create “the new Facebook.” The leader of the pack is the soon to be launched Diaspora. Without specifically mentioning Facebook, they make it clear they are the privacy focused alternative to the social networking giant. Investors are certainly convinced there is opportunity for a new social network to take off as Diaspora exceeded its fundraising goal – 20 times over. 

They aren’t the only ones creating Facebook alternatives. Check out this article from ReadWriteWeb for a rundown of the new social networking sites that are coming soon and how they are trying to solve the specific gripes users have with Facebook. 

Despite growing user apathy and the rise of exciting new options, Facebook’s growth continues unabated. Perhaps Facebook is so fundamentally baked into our day-to-day lives that these new rivals will all ultimately fail to make a dent in its dominance. Or maybe one site will succeed in recapturing the spirit of fun and novelty that we all got caught up in during Facebook’s early days. 

What do you think: are you considering dropping Facebook in favor of one of the new players?

Jason Ross is a copywriter for The Duffy Agency. He loves working on both traditional and social media projects and speculating on the future of the ad industry.

 

 

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5 ways businesses can use Facebook Places

Location based services just hit the mainstream. Here’s how you can capitalize on it.

Foursquare was doing very well for itself. It was marching along at the head of the location based services (LBS) trend with almost three million users having fun by “checking in” to restaurants, stores and other places via their mobile phones. Yesterday, a bombshell dropped on the LBS movement as Facebook gave its 500 million users a similar service. Foursquare may live on, but it’s suddenly dropped into a distant second after being the long time leader.

If its users take to it, Facebook Places will vault LBS into the mainstream. As marketers, we couldn’t be happier because this unleashes a new array of creative possibilities for brands to get in touch with fans and have fun doing it. Here are 5 ways you can use Places to get your audience involved. Bear in mind that some of these depend on future developments of Places and just how open Facebook are with its information. Knowing Facebook, it’ll be pretty open.

Reward users for check-ins and loyalty
Foursquare’s major advantage over Places is its reward system where users get badges, points and “mayorships” for their checkins. But there’s nothing stopping you from creating your own rewards for users who checkin to your location, which isn’t that difficult to track as each Place has its own page. This can also be real world rewards where users take their phones to locations like shops and restaurants and show their Facebook stats to get free stuff. This is a big draw as it essentially turns day-to-day life into a game where ordinary tasks become accomplishments.

Reach out through your Place Page
Speaking of each Place having its own page, you can go into Facebook and claim your business’s location as your own by uploading proof in the form of a business license or the such. You can then send messages to the people who “like” the page with updates, offers and contests. You can get users to talk to each other about their experiences and provide reviews. If they’re positive, they can be extremely effective.

Networking
When you go to conferences and events you can checkin and see who else is attending. You can then check out their profiles and decide which ones are worth reaching out to. You can also keep an eye on what competitors are up to by seeing what events they attend. 

Create checkin based apps
Facebook has opened up the Places API, which means you can create apps that use the checkin data gathered from Places. This has the potential to bring together and reward people at events by checking in through the app. You can also create location based games or contests like scavenger hunts that send people around cities to find specific locations and complete tasks. An app could also come with auto-notifications that send a message when a user nears a specific location. There are loads of possibilities with this one.

Create a friend for fans to hang out with
I’m not sure this feature will be around forever as it has loads of potential for blowback, but why not have fun with it while it lasts? You can tag friends when you check into a place, and said friend may or may not actually be with you. Creating a humorous brand profile that people can check into locations with could be a fun way to get people to interact with you to earn rewards and status, while giving you greater exposure as your profile shows up in news feeds.

Those were a few of our initial ideas. Any lightbulbs going off over your head? Let us know. Here are some more thoughts on the future of location based advertising through Facebook from eMarketer.

Jason Ross is a copywriter for The Duffy Agency. He loves working on both traditional and social media projects and speculating on the future of the ad industry.

 

 

 

 

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The Summer of Memes

Internet memes come and go so quickly that sometimes they’re old news just as you’re hearing about them (Sad Keanu Reeves I miss you). At any given moment there are several memes floating around. This summer has seen great blending of brands and quirky fads.

Sweeping college campuses this spring, Bros Icing Bros blends Smirnoff ICE with an impromptu drinking game. The game involves giving someone a hot Smirnoff ICE and upon receiving the bottle, the person must drop to one knee and chug it. Some of the best have included plastic-wrapped inside a toilet and  wrapped around a friends pet. The site is now defunct but that doesn’t mean that the concept is dead. Blending the red hot campaign of the Old Spice ad with Bros Icing Bros comes Bros Spicing Bros. If you’re sick of the Old Spice guy, it's another fun use of the brand and expands its exposure is way up. The brand is seeing a resurgence and sales are way up.

Thanks to I Can Haz Cheeseburger, cats have been internet meme fodder for quite some time. Cats are everywhere these days. The meme tracking site, urlesque.com, created a fight bracket that pits one furry internet meme against another. Around 40,000 people voted and Maru emerged victorious. The feline sensation has over 55 million page views on it’s YouTube channel and over 150 videos. It’s hard to be cuter than that.

 

No summer internet meme list would be complete without the inclusion of the meme of the moment, Antoine Dodson. After stopping a man from attacking his sister, the local North Alabama NBC affiliate interviewed Antoine Dodson. He became an overnight Internet sensation. Antoine is rather colorful in his interview and The Gregory Brothers remixed the interview and created an amazing dance track.

 

It’s so catchy that YouTube commentator, DeStorm TV, decided to do his own version of the song.

 

Facebook works it’s way into the meme world. Not because the mega-site has done anything interesting but because of the movie, The Social Network, about Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.  Here is the original trailer.

 

 

And of course, cats come back into play, with a parody of the making of LOLCats.

 

While Internet memes come and go quickly, they can be a brands best friend. In the case of "The Social Network", the more parody videos that are created, the more people will seek out the original trailer, increasing hype and exposure. Antoine has created a cottage industry selling copies of the song on iTunes along with other merchandise, and Old Spice is on a roll that doesn't look to end any time soon. Internet memes and viral campaigns are only going to become more popular. If your brand isn't looking to branching out into online video, now is the time to start.

What are your favorite memes?

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Google Wave may come back with Google Me

It should come as no surprise that Google Wave is being shuttered by the end of the year. It’s another in a long line of failed efforts from the search giant. Sure, Wave was pretty much set up to fail as Google didn’t clearly explain how it should be used and made early adoption difficult as people clamored to get an invite.  Buzz was a victim of Google’s model of throwing things against the wall and seeing what sticks. Wave was doomed from the beginning and follows long line of failed projects such as Jaiku, Dodgeball, Google Video and Lively. 

According to Google:“But despite these wins, and numerous loyal fans, Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked. We don’t plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product, but we will maintain the site at least through the end of the year and extend the technology for use in other Google projects. The central parts of the code, as well as the protocols that have driven many of Wave’s innovations, like drag-and-drop and character-by-character live typing, are already available as open source, so customers and partners can continue the innovation we began. In addition, we will work on tools so that users can easily “liberate” their content from Wave.”

From Google’s statements, it appears they never intended to support Wave long term. Instead they wanted to work out the kinks so it can be used in another manner. Wave is revolutionary in that it gives you the ability to share photos, videos and comment on them in real time. Could Wave return as built in feature of the Google OS or their Facebook challenger, Google Me? 

Google’s other big project, the supposed Twitter killer Buzz, launched to great fanfare and criticism earlier this year.  Unlike Wave, where you had to get an invite to use it, by having a Google account, you already had an active account. Most people, including myself, weren’t happy with this new feature openly sharing content without the users permission.  Since it’s launch adoption has been slow and it’s impact isn’t as strong as Twitter, Digg or Reddit. Because Buzz hasn’t seen the hype and promotion that Wave had, it makes you question Google’s commitment to the project and if we’ll the axe fall on it next year.

The question now becomes, what does this mean for Google Me. If they stick true to form, Google Me will launch out of Gmail. This means that everyone that has a Gmail account will see it magically transformed into a Google Me profile. Rumors are flying about what features will be a part of the site. I would expect Wave to be a big part of that along with a retooled version of Dodgeball, Jaiku, and Buzz. 

Whatever comes out, expect it have to full support of Google. They want to cripple Facebook and only a major push can have any hope of putting a dent in Facebook's 500 million users. Working in Google's favor is Facebook fatigue. Users of the world's largest social network are starting to look for new sites to join and Google Me could be in the perfect position to exploit that need. While Google has been tight lipped about the Me project, expect details to start trickling out soon. 

Stefan Halley is the Digital Project Leader for The Duffy Agency. He loves to talk about social media.

Facebook Credits could be our new universal currency

Facebook is on the verge of finding the elusive answer of how to fully cash in on its 500 million users scattered across the globe. Banner advertising has made them a chunk of change, but hasn’t generated much relative to the size of its audience, especially outside the US. Already in place in testing markets, the new Facebook Credits system could change that dramatically. 

Credits, said to be launching in September, works by filling an account with cash and then using your credits to buy goods within games and apps with one click. There are already individual systems that do this across all the different developers' platforms, but Credits will create one universal system that can be used with any affiliated developer or company’s goods.

You’re probably thinking that’s great and all, but there can’t be that many people paying for virtual goods instead of using their money for actual goods. In the US alone, $1.6 billion was spent on virtual goods in the past year. That number is rapidly growing. And with a new system in place that takes away the need to fill out new forms for every purchase, the barriers to buying are significantly lowered and spending will almost certainly increase even faster.

It’s not only virtual goods that Credits has can be used for. With wide scale adoption, it could create a whole new sales channel. Here are some ideas on how you might be using Facebook in the not too distant future.

 

Bridging advertainment into sales
Creating entertaining advertising does not always lead to people rushing out to buy your products. But if the advertising itself generates revenue, problem solved. Having a stock of Facebook credits makes users more likely to pay for games or apps. And once using your app, they can buy either virtual or real goods from you with a click. You can of course also simply jump onto the bandwagon of other games and apps where your target already is, selling sponsored items and bonuses within them. The ability to make instant purchases opens up a new realm of possibilities for connecting viral success with sales success.

Creating a one-click webshop on Facebook
You do have to give Facebook a 30% cut of your sales, but you don’t have to worry about setting up and running a payment system or dealing with security issues. Plus, you put your products for sale on a platform where it can be recommended among users and promoted without leaving the site, not to mention all the global sales data that would be at your fingertips. Purchases can be made much more spontaneously with there being virtually no effort required on the user’s part. This would also make running ads on Facebook more lucrative, leading users to buy those products with just a click. 

A leg up for the little guy
Many small business already exploit Facebook for all its worth in getting their name and offer out to consumers. With Credits, it could be both promotion and sales channel, giving them a quick way to get sales going that requires little investment – and a global market to tap into. So a tiny company in Laos with a brilliant idea could potentially rocket to success among consumers in the US thanks to one universal payment system.

The new PayPal
PayPal was once predicted to be the global currency of the future. The system proved more cumbersome than most were willing to put up with, leaving the door open for another player to step in and unify online purchasing. With Facebook Connect being implemented into more websites every day, Credits stands a real chance of becoming a universal currency. Imagine being able to make purchases on websites just by logging in through Facebook – it would be like having Amazon’s one click purchase option everywhere you go on the web. I’ll just give you a minute to ponder the tremendous (and frightening) implications of that. 

Jason Ross is a copywriter for The Duffy Agency. He loves working on both traditional and social media projects and speculating on the future of the ad industry.

And the winner is…

The American Days Photo Contest has found its champion

The polls have now closed on our first American Days Photo Contest and all the votes have been tallied. We asked you to send us your best photos that captured the American spirit and got some fantastic submissions in return. A huge thank you to everyone who participated, whether it was by sending in a photo or taking the time to vote for a winner. 

It was hotly contested for a while, but one entry charged ahead of the pack to win by more than a few lengths. Chalking up an impressive 184 votes, the winner of The American Days Photo Contest is…

Fedja Jakupovic

Congratulations, your photo of a gravity defying break dancer has won you an iPad from The Duffy Agency! 

Fedja is a project leader for a great local organization called Hela Malmö, which works to get children more involved in sports and other activities. Fedja’s winning photo is below, along with some other exceptional photos from the contest. Again, we’d like to give a great big thanks to all those who got involved. 

Photo by Fedja Jakupovic

Photo by Maisa Dabus

 Photo by Nicci Clayton 

Photo by Johan Jox Carlsson

Photo by Sarah Nilsson

Photo by Mats Tomas Söderberg

Win an iPad in The American Days Photo Contest!

Snap a photo. Win an iPad.

This American Days, The Duffy Agency is giving you the chance to take home Steve Jobs’ new baby – the one and only iPad. 

But what on Earth is American Days, you ask? It’s a three day event in Malmö, Sweden over the 4th of July weekend. The event celebrates some of America’s major cultural contributions including country music performances, Lindy Hop and Swing dancing, and classic muscle car exhibitions. But if you can’t make the event, sadly this contest does not apply to you.

If you can, the rules for entering the contest are simple:

1. Take a picture! Capture an image that expresses what you think of America. The photo must be taken at Jägersro Trav & Galoppbana during American Days, beginning July 2nd at 5 PM and ending July 4th at 5 PM. Only one entry per user.

2. Upload it! “Like” The Duffy Agency’s Facebook fan page at www.facebook.com/theduffyagency. Then simply post your photo on the Wall. You have until midnight on Tuesday, July 6th to enter. 

3. Get the most “likes”! The photo with the most “likes” will be declared the winner. So make it compelling and get everyone to vote for you before Friday, July 9th at midnight! The winner will be announced the following Monday.

You can learn more about the contest by following the link above to the The Duffy Agency fan page. 

Happy photo hunting!

The World Cup social media kit

The very best social media tools for getting the most out of the 2010 World Cup

When the World Cup rolled into Germany in 2006, YouTube was in its infancy, the iPhone didn’t exist and no one knew what a Twitter was. Things have changed a bit these past few years. 

Starting today, we will witness the crashing together of two behemoths: the world’s grandest sporting event and the world’s vast social networks. Prepare to have your Facebook, Twitter and every other kind of feed experience a noticeable shift in focus for the next three weeks as every football fan gets the chance to become a global sports reporter without leaving their living room.

There are loads of options for following the 64 games in painstaking detail, but we’ve sorted through them all and put together the top tools that deliver everything you need. 

Mobile: The ESPN World Cup App

There are lots of great apps dedicated to the World Cup, but ESPN’s is the cream of the crop and the only one you really need. You’ve got the full schedule, you can select which teams you want to follow to stay updated on breaking news, and stats and bios of every player for every team. You can even get a history lesson in the major events of tournaments past and interact with other fans by posting comments from within the app. If you’re willing to dole out $8, you gain access to radio broadcasts of every game, letting you follow matches no matter what you’re pretending to do at work. And to think a few years ago I was happy with cutting tournament brackets out of the newspaper. 

Twitter: The official World Cup aggregator 

Sure you can try to follow cluttered, hectic hashtags (like #wc2010 or #worldcup), but Twitter has done you a favor and created a World Cup headquarters themselves. They’ve done a great job of it, too. On the homepage, you’ve got a flow of the top tweets, which is superior to hashtags because it doesn’t just pull in the latest World Cup tweets, but uses an algorithm to select the most interesting ones. You can also see what matches are coming up and jump to a page for tweets about each particular game where you can easily follow and join in the banter. On the flip slide, the constant flow of information on Twitter is guaranteed to contain spoilers, so if you’re recording games to watch later, it’s probably best to abandon Twitter for a while. 

Facebook: The Visa Match Planner 

Visa has put together a great solution for following your favorite teams via Facebook. When you choose to follow teams and matches, you can invite friends to an event page where your customized group shares comments and media. And of course you’ve got the full day-by-day schedule with live updates, as well as a video of the “worldwide goal cheer.” As an expat the event function is particularly appealing, as it’s a great way for me to root for the (former) home team with friends despite the distance. 

Fantasy tournament: FIFA World Cup Fantasy

When they aren’t busy filing ridiculous lawsuits, FIFA (sponsored by McDonalds) is running one of the best fantasy tournaments. You’ve got 140 credits in the bank and all the players in the tournament to choose from. Put your squad together and compete for your piece of the glory. 

Bonus! The World Cup Trivia Challenge App 

Do a little competing of your own with this fun football trivia app. In a creative twist on the regular old trivia contest, with this app you take the role of a team on the road to World Cup glory, advancing as you get questions right. It’s the perfect way to overcome halftime boredom and learn a thing or two about the tournament at the same time. 

If you’ve got any other favorites that you’re horrified I missed, give a shout below. 

Jason Ross is a copywriter for The Duffy Agency. He loves working on both traditional and social media projects and speculating on the future of the ad industry.

Twitter and Facebook continue to push boundaries of private vs. public

Twitter and Facebook are growing up and dragging the Internet with them. On June 30, 2010, Twitter will shut off basic authentication in favor of the much more secure OAuth. They’ve launched a website with a countdown clock in anticipation of the change. At the same time, Facebook is changing from Facebook Connect to their new “Open Graph API” and “Like” system. Mashable has created a nice guide to help you understand what the Open Graph API is.

The change for Twitter makes connecting to third party applications more secure and should reduce the occurrence of people having their accounts hacked. This is a very smart move for Twitter since, if they want to grow and offer more services, they have to deal with their security issues. There will still be basic authorization for streaming API for apps that need realtime access to Twitter, as these will take longer to switch over to the new system.

The Facebook change is being made to create a larger sphere of influence and to track users’ web habits when they aren’t on Facebook so they can offer new content for them to enjoy. Websites can add a “like” button which, when clicked by a visitor, sends a link back to their Facebook page. This is a big deal for websites as it lets their visitors share content on a more personal level and will boost their traffic. The new system looks to ultimately become a mixture of Delicious, StumbleUpon and Reddit all at once. Basically, a mix of the best of social media sharing sites.

These changes should be great for both Twitter and Facebook, giving them more control of the user experience and allowing for a higher degree of customization. Privacy experts are, of course, up in arms. Both companies can now track your online activity and sell that data to marketers and businesses. The new face of the Internet is user data-mining and Twitter and Facebook are only doing what Google has been doing for years. As we rush to share our common experiences online, we give up some of our privacy. That’s the trade off, if you want your friends and family to know what you’re doing, you have to be willing to give up a piece of yourself. 

These changes aren’t as Orwellian as critics would have you believe. It’s another service that these mega sites believe will provide a more customized and unique experience. Is this a step in the right direction or are we headed to a day when our every move online will be tracked and sold to the highest bidder?

Stefan Halley is the Digital Project Leader for The Duffy Agency. He loves to talk about social media.

The limitations of growing a social media campaign

A look at the technical restrictions we discovered during our last social media campaign

We ended 2009 with an eight week social media campaign for a client. The client wanted a Facebook page, a Twitter account and a YouTube channel to drive traffic to and raise awareness of their campaign site. They wanted to cover their target market on both a personal and professional level, as well as attract people interested in their cause. Starting at zero, we wanted to create as aggressive a social media campaign as possible over the eight weeks. What we discovered is that there are ceilings and lots of unwritten rules that must be followed.

Due to the tight deadlines we had and the brevity of the campaign, we mounted as aggressive a campaign as we could to push out the client's message. We don’t recommend using social media assets as aggressively as we did for this campaign. Social media growth should be paced and nurtured, not a quick grab for as many followers as you can attract. These sites should be used to develop a community and build brand loyalty. By being as aggressive as we were, our actions could have just as easily been deemed spam and our entire campaign could have collapsed as quickly as it started. Fortunately, that wasn’t the case. The following information is for general knowledge of what we learned from the campaign and not recommended as a best practice scenario. 

Before we even began, we did our research and targeted individuals that self-identified with our client’s cause. By doing extensive market research, we were able to propel the campaign forward and get the client’s message out to the people that would be most receptive to it. This step was the most important thing we did. Before any social media campaign begins, having a plan of attack and good research will make your efforts go much further.

Looking to reach as many people as quickly as possible, we used Twitter as our main tool. Twitter allowed us to grow the other assets and drive traffic to the site more than anything else we did in the beginning. Through it, we promoted the pages of the site we wanted people to pay attention to, alert people to the other social media campaigns and find new followers. The Twitter 2000 follower ceiling is well documented. You can’t follow 2000 more people than are following you. What is less known is how it applies to the first 2000 followers. Twitter doesn’t want individuals to create accounts and just go crazy following people. It created a problem in growing followers as we hit that ceiling. Here are the limits we found:

• You can’t follow more than 500 people in a day
• You can’t have 2000 more followings than followers
• Twitter will block you from following people if you are too aggressive 
• Once you reach the 2000 following limit, you can delete followers and add new people until your follower total catches up

We used Facebook as gathering place for people to allow them to self-identify with the campaign. With 350 million users, it’s the place to go to find people interested in any brand or cause. We created a Facebook fan page and a profile page based on the brand. The fan page was used to push our message and keep fans updated on what was happening with the campaign. The profile page was created to find people and directly interact with them in a way you can’t with a fan page. From the profile, we were able to find people and then invite them to join the page and the website. Through the profile page, we were also able to join other groups and leave comments on their walls. Facebook’s limits are more cryptic than Twitter’s and appear to be arbitrary. Here are a few of the limits we discovered:

• Sending out more than 50 friend requests will get your friending privileges revoked for a period
• You can’t post the same message on more than five wall’s 
• Slightly vary your message from wall to wall. It will take the Facebook algorithm time to discover your activity
• If you’re going to be aggressive in your Facebook activity, limit it to one day a week, then use the site on a slower level through the rest of the week to keep from getting flagged.

The campaign site focused heavily on a video component, which naturally brought YouTube into play. The site encouraged people to leave a video that would then be uploaded onto the YouTube channel. The more videos we uploaded, the more traffic the channel got. This is the one area that really took care of itself. There aren’t many limits with YouTube, but we did find a couple:

• You can only subscribe to 10 channels a day
• If you don’t upload your own videos, the analytics won’t work.

For the first half of the campaign, the social media effort was the only advertising that was used. We saw great initial site traffic, but once people saw our message, it was difficult to attract them back and site traffic trailed off. In week 6, we added Google AdWords and Facebook ads and saw our traffic more than double the projected total site traffic.

In the end, the social media campaign was successful. Our final numbers were:

Twitter: 2042 followers
Facebook: 324 fans
YouTube: 719 views

Given the limitations of the campaign (no initial advertising, almost zero awareness of the issue and creating all assets from the ground up), after eight weeks, we had 3.7 million targeted impressions and over 15 thousand people interacted with the brand. 

Five lessons learned:

1. The more planning you do up front, the easier it will be to connect to the right people.
2. Don’t try to outsmart the sites. It’s not worth the potential backlash you attract.
3. The more you don’t talk about yourself, the better people respond.
4. If you feel like you’re spamming people, you probably are.
5. It’s ok to be aggressive, just know the limits.

Stefan Halley is the Digital Project Leader for The Duffy Agency. He loves to talk about social media and won't shut up about Twitter.