Speculation that Facebook will allow all Open Graph-enabled Web pages to serve up in searches when a member clicks on the "like" button surfaced Friday, but a company spokesperson dismissed reports. The All Facebook Blog reported that Facebook will create a semantic index of the Web through the "like" button, enabling stronger search options than Google through "link baiting" rather than "like bating," the technology the social site uses to determine relevance. The blog says a Facebook spokesperson confirmed the feature. Analysts and SEO professionals have been awaiting the arrival of Facebook's search strategy. With the exception of the past several months, the social site experienced higher growth rates in search query volume than traditional search engines, according to comScore. Some attribute the uptick to an increase in members, people creating and launching community pages, and brands expanding social campaigns supported by Fan pages. Search will not become the center of attention for Facebook, according to a Facebook spokesperson. Not now, anyway. Facebook will continue to test search features, but it will not become the product focus for the company. The 1,400 employees, of which there are about 300 engineers, will continue to focus on building a technology platform that allows "cool experiences" such as adding social elements. Social games -- which have become the site's strongest vertical -- should provide that social experience, not only on the site, but also tie into consoles like Microsoft Xbox 360. Built on the concept that sharing experiences among friends creates community, Facebook engineers will continue to create features on the platform that allow marketers to communicate with consumers, and friends to share experiences among friends. And although not intentional, Facebook members should expect surprises related to services, as the social site forges ahead with features not previously offered. Tests are done on all tools before being released, but testing cannot always identify all the bugs and faults in the code. Privacy holes and flaws in the code can sometimes appear as intentional, but Facebook employees do take privacy seriously. The continuous push into uncharted territory to open the social graph may present some unexpected features that engineers will need to fix as they are found. Take, for example, the privacy debacle and issues surrounding controls. Engineers will continue to work on making the privacy controls easier to use. Many of these controls have been buried in layers of clicks and Web pages, making settings nearly impossible for the layperson to figure out. Facebook officials assert that the site's basic privacy settings have been around for years, but the company has forged new ground on uncharted territory when it comes to opening and connecting the Internet's social graph. Now it's a matter of pulling out the settings to make it easier for people to find, as well as educate them. The company will continue to condense the privacy settings in "fewer buckets" to prevent people from feeling "overwhelmed" and realize that Facebook members do have control. In an effort to cope with the privacy backlash, Facebook hired White House official Marne Levine to work with its policy team. Levine joins the social network as vice president of global public policy, spearheading efforts to build and manage teams focused on policy in Asia, Americas and Europe.
We recently published "Evolve: Outlook Report 2010," our annual report on major trends and opportunities in marketing. It covers everything from looking backwards (media spends and trends from 2009) to how we see using agile development as a way to drive critical innovation. Considering all of the attention in the health and wellness space around social, I thought I'd share some thoughts we have around how to become a social brand. As we say in Evolve, "What's the biggest unknown for marketers today? The state of the economy? Not quite. The biggest question mark we at Razorfish see can be summed up in two words: social media. I think that's a very apt statement to make around healthcare as, at every turn, clients are trying to figure out how to play appropriately in a social world. I believe we are all in agreement that the question isn't whether to participate socially, but how. We see that one of the largest barriers to determining the right answer is that clients simply are not organized in a way that puts social at the core of how they make marketing decisions. This is somewhat ironic when considering that, ultimately, social media has real parallels to what good marketing teams already do: understand their consumers and market to them accordingly. In a highly regulated industry like healthcare, this challenge becomes even more acute because without developing a marketing team structure that really understands the social space, brands will too quickly fall into the defeatist posture that social is simply too fraught with challenges to work. Never fear ... we have six suggestions that healthcare marketers (and any marketer for that matter) can employ to better align their companies and brands with the social consumer: 1) Behaviorally focused account planning. The absolute critical first step -- deeply understanding your audience in order to craft the right solutions and communications. It's safe to say that most brands have copious amounts of data about their patients and HCP targets. This planning is different, though; it needs to be focused on behaviors and not just attitudes and mindsets to deliver the right social experience. 2) Content strategy and creation. Without content, there is no social strategy. This may make some legal and regulatory teams happy but it sure disappoints your audiences. In some respects, this is the most challenging part of a good healthcare social strategy, and organizations are largely not staffed with the right folks to create the transparent, meaningful and engaging content required for this space. Clients, arm thyselves ... either internally or through an agency with a real social healthcare understanding. 3) User-experience design driven by customer insight. This means really knowing your audience's needs, desires and actions and then creating experiences that deliver against those in a way that is better, deeper and more useful. This type of engagement is as important as "The Big Idea" in driving truly engaging experiences. When we think about how important and personal most healthcare issues are for people, the ability to develop engaging and honest experiences that deliver against someone's needs becomes the differentiator between simply having a presence in social and really enabling a social experience with your brand. 4) Deep technological expertise. Ultimately, social media is delivered through a variety of technological platforms. To get the most out of them you need to really understand what they can do and evolve your efforts as they evolve, because they most surely will. In other words, whether to be on Facebook now and, if so, how will surely be answered very differently 12 months from now. 5) Interactive media design. The media team's role has gotten more complex with the advent of social. It's not enough to just find the right place to put an ad; now media folks need to determine how people are behaving on different platforms and create the right experiences for them as a result. That means that the traditional notion of media planning -- i.e., where the ad will run and how much the client will pay -- is really not the main point in the social space. Instead, great media folks are looking at how to enable social experiences in the right way on the right platform. As a result, clients need to focus less on compensating agencies for placing paid media and more around compensating them to come up with great social strategies that enable deeper relationships. 6) Real-time data analytics. In the social world there are two main types of data: the conversation and the behaviors that result from it. Loads of data exist on both fronts and the real challenge is being able to decipher it and uncover insights that drive future opportunity. And that opportunity has implications beyond the social space -- it is a rich treasure trove of insights that can change your mass media communications, compliance programs and uncover gaps in the conversations happening between patients and HCPs. If you want to get a sense of just how much conversation is happening at any given time, check out our health conversation. One of the best outcomes of employing the above is that it gets marketers away from being obsessed with social platforms ("I need a Facebook page!") and back to really understanding the audience and creating compelling, engaging and meaningful programs for them as a result. So there you have it ... six simple suggestions on how to get the most out of social. Of course, I say that somewhat in jest because asking well-established marketing departments to think differently and change course with how they make decisions is no easy task. But I do believe this industry is talking so much about social because we all recognize what a powerful role it can play in educating patients and HCPs and enabling better patient outcomes, and deep down we all know that there are enormous missed opportunities by playing on the sidelines. To that end, I believe that healthcare marketers should be at the center of the social revolution and using the above as a framework, we can all begin to deliver against its promise.
Here's the funny thing about watching Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's interview at this year's Cannes International Advertising Festival: If there hadn't been a backdrop touting the festival right behind him, you might not have picked up on the fact that he was addressing a bunch of ad execs. That's really heartening, if you fret -- as I long have -- about whether the two sides of advertising can ever get along. It seems as if for the last 15 years, it's been populated by old-line Madison Avenue on the one hand, and Silicon Valley on the other. The Madison Avenue gang has sometimes seemed willful in its desire not to "get it" and the Silicon Valley crowd has often played hard-to-get with its East Coast counterparts. There are still great divides, to be sure. But to imagine Zuckerberg among the drunk crowds along La Croisette -- maybe icing a bro' in the wee hours? -- or actually breathing the same air as Leo Burnett global chief creative officer Mark Tuttsel or Laura Desmond, CEO of Starcom Mediavest Group (not to pick on Publicis agencies), is enough to make me wonder if one day we'll find all of advertising, technologists and old-liners, singing (a drunken) round or two of "Kumbaya" as the sun rises over the Riviera. It's an encouraging sign of the times to hear Zuckerberg talk to a packed house of ad execs about platforms and applications and developers and have a sense that many of the ad execs actually get it. I know that sounds awfully disparaging to ad execs, but, hey, for too long too many of them have held onto advertising and media as they knew it. And vice versa. But now that's beginning to change. Why now? Here's what I think has happened -- and needed to happen -- for the two worlds to start to come together. Average people -- and yes, I mean you, traditional ad execs -- had to come to services and platforms like Facebook and iPhone en masse. With Facebook at close to 500 million users, and the iPhone at well in excess of 30 million users (not to mention the iPad), it's obvious that a lot of ad execs have incorporated the best and brightest services coming out of Silicon Valley into their own lives. My perspective on this is partly taken from the last -- and only -- time I went to the festival 10 years ago, when I was head of communications for Organic. The truth is, I wanted to go because my husband, then at USA Today, was presiding over a session about dot-com companies advertising on TV. Paradox! Though my company was good to send me, I think I had to pay the admissions fee. On the flight over, I played solitaire on my Palm III. At the time, most ad execs had some access to the Internet, but the top ones, if they had email, probably had it printed out by their secretaries. They may have started to use Google or Yahoo or AOL, but even if they did, there's a huge difference between that earliest part of the digital age and now. It's not just about the transition to broadband in the first years of the millennium; the newer class of digital services is much more personal, and social, taking the social experiences of the time -- email and IMing -- to entirely new, compelling levels. In addition, interface design, which any good art director can appreciate, improved a lot, too. Facebook has its quirks, but it is light years better than the AOL chat rooms that dominated in the 1990s. And, Apple, of course -- during the second reign of King Jobs -- took technology to an aesthetic level that the ad world could appreciate. And, that was even before the iPhone. I can remember going to many, many conferences in the 1990s where the touchstone for most execs to the digital world seemed to be their teenagers. They'd marvel out loud about how their children could segue effortlessly from Yahoo to AIM to the telephone to the TV, but their experience wasn't hands-on. Now their touchstone is their own experience. They post status updates to Facebook, download apps on to their iPhone, have a YouTube channel. The next step, and one that the more traditional types in the industry haven't entirely made, is to get better at creating really compelling experiences within the digital services in which they now play. But just as it is with kids and play -- as any parent knows, play is a child's work -- this, too, will develop into a stronger understanding about how to make digital, social services work as marketing applications. When that happens, I'll be singing "Kumbaya" right along side all of you. Editors's note: We've posted the agenda for the first-ever Social Media Insider Summit, to be held in August in Lake Tahoe. Check it out here.)
As business marketers, we feel obligated to participate in social media. But beyond the basics of setting up a Facebook page and Twitter profile, marketers are still finding ways to measure results. While some believe the intangible benefits of having a voice for your brand engaged in various social media channels is reward enough, other marketing departments need to provide the CMO and CEO with a more quantifiable answer. The best way to accomplish this is by demonstrating the value social media brings to lead generation. Not just lead quantity (volume), but lead quality (scoring) and conversion rates. However, truth be told, tracking business leads from social media is neither straightforward nor easy. It requires a serious investment in time and/or technology to get it right. This Place We Call Social Media Social media is a seemingly cluttered landscape with numerous vendors and customers vying for attention and voicing their opinions in 140 characters or less (in the case of Twitter). The origin of social media, which gained popularity with consumers, remains a space dominated by a collection of many individuals and few businesses. Admittedly, the challenge of reaching B2B customer prospects via social media is definitely more challenging than reaching individuals or consumers. Generating even one qualified business lead against this noisy backdrop may look and feel impossible. Ironically, the very noise of this environment can play into your favor. Although many companies are using social media, only a handful of them are using it effectively to actually engage in a meaningful dialogue with their audience. The key is to match a call-to-action with a state of mind, so you can properly engage customers -- businesses or individual consumers -- and move them through the purchase cycle. For example, a call-to-action on a blog post should match the visitor's state of mind. Start with the simple assumption that visitors to a blog post are not there to buy the company's product or sign up for a free account (at least, initially). Rather, they are there to read interesting content or learn more about the space. Therefore, the call-to-action should match that state of mind and prompt the visitor to "learn more" or "download a white paper." These types of call-to-action align with the visitor's reasons for visiting your Web site and are more likely to convert a visitor to a lead. Social Media Takes it Personally The biggest difference between social media and traditional media is the level of personalization. Social media is highly personal and interactive -- it's a two-way, interactive form of communication in real time. Traditional media is not. In addition to being a more personalized communication medium, social media leads are more targeted than those generated through other online channels. This is a major bonus for marketers. If a call-to-action is strong, it can do an amazing job of bringing in solid leads. If the channel and activity align, meaning you are using activities that are appropriate to the channel you are using, leads tend to be more engaged and thus more enthusiastic about a given product or service. As a result, leads involved in social media outreach tend to be more forgiving of problems with your product, as they feel more connected to the product and the company. At the same time, social media opens up feedback channels and discussion loops that are muted or not present at all in traditional media. For example, if customers are disappointed in a particular product or service, social media provides equal opportunity to spread their own messages in their own words. Some control will be forfeited. This introduces new risks not associated with traditional media, as the reputation of your brand now rests in other people's hands.. These effects on a brand, both positive and negative, are often said to be hard to track and measure. Better Business Leads The bottom line is that social media has the potential to generate more business leads. These leads are more targeted and they know what they want. If your call-to-action is relevant and aligned with your message, leads generated from social media can be highly qualified. On the other hand, as with traditional marketing, some leads from social media will be less qualified and require more lead nurturing. The key, as a marketer, is to establish a set of objective criteria and automated lead scoring that can help sales distinguish a "hot lead" from a cold one once they hit your site. Consider the following six suggestions to begin capturing stronger, more qualified leads. Six Tips for Generating Business Leads from Social Media: 1. Think like publishers:- Break through the noise and get people interested in what you have to offer.- Choose unique, eye-catching headlines and titles, and incorporate good images.- Content is the bait. If you don't make content sound and look good, no one will read it. 2. Create good, interesting content:- Social media with no content is like a bicycle without a wheel: You'll put a lot of effort into riding, but you will go nowhere.- Again, content is the bait. 3. Organize your efforts into campaigns:- Campaigns are easier as a way to create and shape the right message and call-to-action.- Enable easy tracking and monitoring.- Can be measured and analyzed as a learning tool for future activities. 4. Invest the time to make a campaign worthwhile:- Social media takes time. It might be cheaper in dollars spent, but it's definitely not free in terms of time invested.- Use time management tools to track and measure the time you invest in social media, so you can truly measure your ROI. 5. Track and score your visits and leads:- Qualify and score leads accurately to ensure the best conversion rates.- Focus and align marketing and sales and force a discussion about what constitutes a good lead.- Help with analyzing and prioritizing efforts.- Focus on channels and campaigns that offer a higher lead quality based on your lead scores. 6. Measure and report in real time for ongoing success:- Prioritize your efforts and invest the time in the places with the highest payoff.- Measure based not just on quantity, but based on quality too.- Track all the way to a sale, not just to a lead. This will help you refine your lead score and truly measure ROI. Is social media going to disappear into the background after the hype winds down, or is it here to stay? This author's opinion is that social media is not just a fad that will go away --it has become a significant marketing channel that can drive leads and increase revenue. Don't be consumed by the hype and forget all your other channels; marketing is a mix, and social media is only one component.
Speculation that Facebook will allow all Open Graph-enabled Web pages to serve up in searches when a member clicks on the "like" button surfaced Friday, but a company spokesperson dismissed reports. The All Facebook Blog reported that Facebook will create a semantic index of the Web through the "like" button, enabling stronger search options than Google through "link baiting" rather than "like bating," the technology the social site uses to determine relevance. The blog says a Facebook spokesperson confirmed the feature. Analysts and SEO professionals have been awaiting the arrival of Facebook's search strategy. With the exception of the past several months, the social site experienced higher growth rates in search query volume than traditional search engines, according to comScore. Some attribute the uptick to an increase in members, people creating and launching community pages, and brands expanding social campaigns supported by Fan pages. Search will not become the center of attention for Facebook, according to a Facebook spokesperson. Not now, anyway. Facebook will continue to test search features, but it will not become the product focus for the company. The 1,400 employees, of which there are about 300 engineers, will continue to focus on building a technology platform that allows "cool experiences" such as adding social elements. Social games -- which have become the site's strongest vertical -- should provide that social experience, not only on the site, but also tie into consoles like Microsoft Xbox 360. Built on the concept that sharing experiences among friends creates community, Facebook engineers will continue to create features on the platform that allow marketers to communicate with consumers, and friends to share experiences among friends. And although not intentional, Facebook members should expect surprises related to services, as the social site forges ahead with features not previously offered. Tests are done on all tools before being released, but testing cannot always identify all the bugs and faults in the code. Privacy holes and flaws in the code can sometimes appear as intentional, but Facebook employees do take privacy seriously. The continuous push into uncharted territory to open the social graph may present some unexpected features that engineers will need to fix as they are found. Take, for example, the privacy debacle and issues surrounding controls. Engineers will continue to work on making the privacy controls easier to use. Many of these controls have been buried in layers of clicks and Web pages, making settings nearly impossible for the layperson to figure out. Facebook officials assert that the site's basic privacy settings have been around for years, but the company has forged new ground on uncharted territory when it comes to opening and connecting the Internet's social graph. Now it's a matter of pulling out the settings to make it easier for people to find, as well as educate them. The company will continue to condense the privacy settings in "fewer buckets" to prevent people from feeling "overwhelmed" and realize that Facebook members do have control. In an effort to cope with the privacy backlash, Facebook hired White House official Marne Levine to work with its policy team. Levine joins the social network as vice president of global public policy, spearheading efforts to build and manage teams focused on policy in Asia, Americas and Europe.