October 10, 2010

Campaigning with Social Media

I’ve been watching the Mayoral campaign in Toronto with a lot interest this year, mainly because I wanted to see how the candidates used Social Media. In the Obama campaign in 2008 Social Media is often credited with having a great impact. With my own limited involvement watching the campaign from Canada I was impressed with how much the campaign engaged everyone. I registered for the Obama campaign, it recognized I was Canadian and asked me if I could contact American’s that I knew that were on the fence. Brillant…

Now in Toronto I really haven’t seen anything that engaging. I’m not going to try to compare campaign platforms or policies, I haven’t decided who I’m going vote for myself. All of the candidates have the Social Media basics, they all have Websites, E-Mail lists, Twitter and Facebook accounts. These alone are not that value, its really the content of these campaigns and I think right now the best messaging seems to be coming from Rob Ford campaign. In my opinion he’s doing the best job of engaging citizens, mainly because he’s not marketing to them. He’s just talking to them.

I joined his mailing list ( I joined all candidates lists and Facebook Pages ) and its very simple and engaging updates. The first email I got contained a survey to collect my opinion on the a variety of issues. He’s the only candidate who I’ve received a survey from. Yesterday it was the advanced polls are now open and I could avoid the rush by voting now. Very simple and concise, there has been no cheezy spin, or over the top creative like about mobsters, or crazy promises. I got invited to a Town Hall Call and he was genuinely answering questions from a large group of people.

In all the debates I’ve seen of him he’s pitching the same message, always on topic. Most of the other candidates either don’t present a plan or seem to change the plan to each group they’re talking too. I haven’t seen anyone who’s connecting well with Citizens.

Colin Smillie

December 7, 2009

Four Square and being Social Mobile…

I was reading Sebastien Provencher’s guest post this morning on the LeWeb’s blog about foursquare and comparing it to Twitter. I agree with Seb that fourSquare is not the next Twitter but I do think its a bit of a game changer in what its doing with in Social Mobile space.

foursquare gives users incentives to ‘check-in’ to different locations on their mobile phone. It uses the phone’s GPS location to provide a list of local and popular locations for the user to check-in or the user can quickly create a new location profile. The user can earn badges for each location they visit and it becomes a bit of a game to earn new badges and compare you points with your friends. The user who visits an individual location the most earns a ‘mayor’ badge for that location.

I think the game changing aspect of foursquare is what its changing for user behaviour. As users check into new locations they can instantly see other popular locations that are near them. Right now that list is free from advertising and just based on the location and popularity of the locations. Kinda like search engines were in 2000, where there race was on finding content and less on advertising/monetizing like search engines today. Right now the user group engaged in foursquare is still quite small but its growing and ff this user behaviour continues it should develop into an excellent user intercept opportunity.

Advertisers could target users in their proximity with real-time offers. This is already happening on the Twitter today and its only going to get more powerful with the social mobile connection. Populating and controlling the list of ‘check-in’ locations will be increasingly important and profitable. As will advertising that can connect with this location information in a meaningful form.

It will be interesting to see if foursquare can maintain a unique position here or if the other social networks will just duplicate its functionality and bring it internally. Right now if feels like foursquare is more like an app on Facebook or Twitter than a social network on its own. I would expect that Facebook and Twitter will continue to provide the identity data for the social mobile experience but the player with the local advertising is still an unknown.

Colin Smillie

December 3, 2009

Marketing with Facebook Search

For most marketing search engine marketing is a common marketing technique and entire business united have been established to focus on search. The most popular tool being Google and in a distant second the Microsoft Bing/live tools. Facebook search on the other hand is a much different beast and much more difficult to market against. In order to optimize we need to understand the Facebook Search function.

The key component to understand with Facebook search is the interaction relationship. This means that content that the user has interacted with in the past will appear first and may appear in the auto-complete if they have Fan, Joined or Bookmarked the content.

Facebook search then will display search results based on your friends involvement with content. This means that individuals, groups, pages, or applications which your friends have interacted with appear at the top. The next considertation is your network(s) and content types with more people from your network will be assigned priority. Facebook has indicated they will removing networks but this logic is likely to be replace with geographic filters.

The next concept to understand is that Facebook assigns a priorty to different content types, assuming you have equal friend interactions or no friend interactions. The priority is generally:

Individual user profiles
Facebook Pages
Facebook Groups
Facebook Applications
Facebook Events
Friend Facebook Posts
Everyone’s Facebook Posts

After these internal Facebook content types Web Search results will be presented from the Microsoft Bing search results.

The other major different between Facebook and other search tools is the keyword matching. The matching seems to be much more strict that other tools and partial keyword matching is very poor.

Across all content types the depth of search seems to limited to the content title. This is probably the most important tool for Facebook search marketing. Creating an effective title can increase your placement in search. Without partial keyword matching a long title will be difficult to match with user keyword and keyword stuff has limited impact because the title on most content sources is limited.

The other important consideration, especially when combined with paid advertising is to get maximum coverage across networks ( geographic, schools and employers ) and across as many friend clusters as possible. Facebook allows for a number of geographic targeting options and good distribution here can help with Facebook search results.

Colin Smillie

May 8, 2008

User Generated Recommendations, hard to get right…

Joey deVilla has a great post about his experience trying to get a recommendation for a moving company. It sounds simple enough, ask you’re blog readers to respond with recommendations for local services. In reality its hard to get reliable information, in Joey’s case the recommendations were tainted by an apparent fake recommendation and legal/intimidation against apparently true recommendation. Not a great representation for user generated recommendations…

We looked at this when I was with Trader Media, and again with Refresh on Freshrevie.ws. The hard part with user generated recommendation is to evaluate the quality of the recommendation. Its a similar situation with Ebay, and their approach is a user rating system based on past transactions. Its hard to do a rating a recommendation engine since the past reviews have less baring and there is no money being exchanged to qualify the review.

I think the solution is to have some sort of context around the person writing the review. Facebook is a great environment for this, since you generally know your friends and your friend network helps define and validate you. Gigpark is doing a great job of getting user generated recommendations, by focusing on the user relationship first. They’ve done a good job of connecting users in Facebook and on their own website. The challenge they might face is that people have a limited friend network and they don’t have a complete businesses listings.

The big business directories, like Yellow Pages have very complete listings but haven’t been willing to expose their advertisers to user generated recommendations. Yellow Pages has just recently launched user reviews inside the Yellow Pages Facebook application. This should reduce their exposure to fake reviews since Facebook spends alot of time tracking down and deleting fake accounts.

Colin Smillie

December 4, 2007

FacebookWeekend Beta Wrap-Up

First of all, thanks to all of the organizers and volunteers who participated in the planning and running of our event. Your efforts are greatly appreciated and it’s great to see so much support for entrepreneurship.

Facebook Weekend BETA was very productive and a number of different teams made significant progress on their projects. All groups were able to access a Joyent Accelerator account with 12 months of free hosting for their Facebook Applications

The Pet Food Testing team, including Refresh Partners, Ron Smith, and Lanny Geffen were able to establish their business goal, create the branding and logo and get a functional Facebook Application working. Their Facebook Application is live and you can use it: http://apps.facebook.com/petfood
Martin West was able to form a great team around his collaborative educational Facebook application and they were able to complete the initial business case/plan, user scenarios, and build the base for their technology platform. They are moving full-steam ahead to try to turn this application into a business.
The Tippsee team also made progress on their business plan and are moving into the market validation phase of their project. They’re still looking for developers to join the team, if anyone is interested.
Libin Pan continued to refine and develop the ideveloper application, which provides developer support inside Facebook.
Alex Sirota was able to refine his Healthbook concept and benefited from great feedback from a number of people who dropped by.

Finally, we also had a lot of interest and encouragement from the investor community including Keith Bates from Cinnabar Ventures, Bryan Watson from the National Angel Organization and Robert Koturbash from the Maple Leaf Angels.

We’re looking forward to working closely with these groups and the investor community to ensure their success.

We already have an open invitation from the Maple Leaf Angels to allow one of the teams to pitch angels directly.

We’re looking forward to more great initiatives in 2008 around entrepreneurship and social entrepreneurship. Stay tuned!

Colin Smillie

November 27, 2007

Creepy Friends Invalidate Social Networks?

Cory Doctrow, a Canadian writer who I have alot of respect for, has just written an article about Facebook, and social network in general. Cory believes that social networks come and go because people eventually encounter an awkward social connection. A friend from highschool, college or co-worker that you don’t really want as a ‘friend’. After reading the article I think Cory is way off the mark.

First off, I think social networks have come and gone because they fail to achieve a critical mass. People left friends, and myspace because their friends weren’t on in any regular or consistent basis. This has gotten better with each generation of social networks ( friends->myspace->facebook). In Canada Facebook has achieved an incredible market penetration and its similar to Orkut in Brazil in Latin America. Soon after Orkut launched it took off in Brazil and remains the dominate social network today. Not because its innovation, but because it achieved critical mass in social circles to the point where it was efficient not to be on Orkut.

I think another comparison would be email. The ratio of real email to spam has been out of whack for years now but people are still using email because its still the primary means to connect with people. There is enough value and effficiency to make it worth while. As long as social network can do the same it will remain popular.

The article also made reference to Facebook allowing profile pictures to be used in sponsor advertising. While Facebook does claim ownership over this information I was able to find any reference to Facebook use profile pictures this way. The link included in the article just talks about Facebook adding profiles to Google search which I don’t think is the same thing or not atleast in anyways I can understand.

Colin Smillie

November 8, 2007

FacebookCampMontreal Review

FacebookCampMontreal

We were in Montreal last night for the FacebookCampMontreal event, its was our first time in Montreal as part of their Barcamp community. The FacebookCampMontreal event combined both the developer and marketing tracks into a single night and was able to get nearly 200 people in the SAT (Société des Arts Technologiques ).

SAT is great venue and was easily divided into the 2 tracks when required and most importantly had an open bar the whole night.

We bounced around between the different tracks most of the
night. Some thoughts on the different
tracks are blow:

Introduction

Montreal is #9 in overall Facebook city networks and the power of Facebook as marketing platform has certainly spread to the city. I think when Facebook does actually launch a French version it will absolutely take off in Montreal.

Keynote

Roy and I did a keynote for the night, trying to balance both the developer and marketing interests in the room. Our goal was to provide some updates on the Facebook Platform and some real numbers on Facebook in the world and Canada.

Developer Panel

I attended the develop panel because I find the developers often have interesting ideas and solutions. Jerome Paradis was also part of the panel, who met at FacebookCampToronto2 and wanted to hear his views on the Facebook platform. The developer panel was good mix of developers with lots of experience with online and interactive development. The panel included developers from a variety of platforms, .NET, PHP, ROR etc… Many of the Facebook developer challenges and problems were discussed.

Demos

I’ve also been a big face of live demos so I stayed through most the developers demos.

BabyTel Demo

BabyTel was the first demo of the nite and unfortunately had some problems with the internet connection. They demo’d their Egg phone application which lets you call Facebook friends that also have the application installed. The application will soon include the ability to call real phones. I think this application will be great when it can be installed on an Business Page as a ‘Call Me’ button.

BlipCast

My first reaction to the BlipCast demo was yuck!, when I saw the iframe inside Facebook that didn’t fit the Facebook style or design. As the demo progressed I thought it was interesting to see all the different media options that they are bring into Facebook. The application presents videos similar to Youtube but provides more of the Facebook social context. I think this is a big advantage
for users that don’t want to invest in a Youtube account and friend network. I do think the application would be more appealing with a more Facebook similar style.

Bok

Bok’s main business is providing cheap long distance using
an SMS call back system. They have created an application that lets you go through this process inside Facebook. You click on a friend and
choose the call them and you receive a call back shortly from Bok with your friend on the phone line. Again I see a lot of advantages for this type of service for business pages.

Facebook Roundtable

The final panel was made up of a variety of people including, Sebestian Provencher, who I know quite well from Yellowpages. While the discussion was a mix of English and French it was hard to follow the fast past discussions in French. From what I did pick up it was interesting to hear the perspective of the panel members on the value of Facebook to their lives and businesses. The discussion also covered the Microsoft and Facebook relationship and the impact on the trust level with Facebook. There was a lot of comparisons with Google and their “Don’t be Evil” culture and if a similar culture is possible with Facebook.

Overall a great night, I met a lot of interesting people and the Montreal tech community certainly has a lot going on. There was also a lot of marketing and advertising agencies in attendance so there was some great discussions around the marketing tracks.