360i has released a search engine optimization tool that assists marketers in Web site audits, but says it also points to shortcomings in social metrics across Facebook, Twitter and Google +1. In development for nearly two years, 360i released a scaled-down version of 360iTIGER that is free to marketers. The tool monitors social media shares supported by Facebook Likes, Twitter tweets and Google +1s. Marketers can grab a bookmarklet from the 360i site, place it in their browser similar to Instagram or Pinterest, and visit the Web site to conduct the audit. The tool will crawl up to 25 pages at a time. It uses a Google spreadsheet doc to place the information, so the tool requires the user to use a Google Gmail address. The tool also requires marketers to use Chrome, Firefox or Safari browsers, because the company says security settings in Internet Explorer are too "locked down." It takes two clicks on the bookmarklet to get the social media counters populated with numbers. One click starts the crawl, and a second from within the spreadsheet to replace the question-marks. 360iTIGER collects public data; any user can go to any Web site and run an audit. Marketers can audit both their own and competitors' sites. The tool provides information on the title of the article, description, headers 1 and header 2, and PageRank, as well as social signals. Despite 360iTIGER's ability to gives marketers free access to SEO audit data, the tool highlights flaws in social media counters, says Mike Levin, director of SEO strategy at 360i/Dentsu; and Adam Whippy, group director of SEO at 360i/Dentsu. One imperfection is in the way social media calculates shares, Tweets, Likes, Google +1s. Take, for example, the way blogging platforms tie the URL too closely to an article's headline. One change to the headline resets social counters. Every URL has a history. By changing the URL, it changes the history, according to Levin. "There's no such thing as a redirect on social media counters, yet," Whippy said. "It's a pain point, but it all has to do with blogging platform tying the URL too close to the headline." In the social space, Facebook, Google and Twitter have not responded to changing URLs similar to Google PageRank, according to Whippy.
Digital ad firm Rokkan and ad agency Team Detroit launched a real-time social project as part of a larger campaign promoting Ford Motor Co.'s 2013 Ford Escape. The project influences the direction of participants on NBC's reality show "Escape Routes." The campaign attempts to redefine social TV with support from the production company Profiles. Rokkan created and launched Ford's pre-season and the regular-season Web sites, as well as the game on Twitter and Facebook platforms that will run throughout the season, beginning March 31. This is the second year the companies worked together to promote the show and Ford. Last year, the Ford Focus project aired on Hulu rather than NBC. The show on NBC sends six teams on a nationwide collaborative competition, each in a 2013 Ford Escape. The teams work with online fans to conquer various challenges and tasks to win prizes. Registering with the Web site --available on the desktop, tablet and smartphone -- makes consumers eligible to win a prize, such as a camera, bicycle, trip or Ford Focus. Viewers will find the challenges in the games similar to those on "The Amazing Race," which Profiles also produces. People who interact with the site -- comment, play interactive games or upload user-generated content and help the teams with their challenges -- have an opportunity to earn points and badges, explains Jim Blackwelder, VP of technology for Rokkan. "Leveling up to certain badge and point thresholds gives you a likelihood of winning some of the prizes," he says. Teams on TV have different tasks. This week, the teams participated in a talent show. The videos were uploaded online, so people could vote on them. That team will earn points and the results announced on the TV show. A relay race will also include using tech to find information or gain direction from viewers through social media comments and tweets. There are several types of challenges, from interactive to flash challenges that happen randomly. The cameras are not on 24 hours per day, but when they are, the teams can communicate with viewers. "We're opening doors that allow viewers to communicate with the people on television shows through social channels in real time," Blackwelder said. "You can watch these people 24 hours per day, and also interact with them through social channels and live tweets."
Global agency Euro RSCG Worldwide has been publishing research and thought leadership content for years. It is expanding into a new series area, the Consumer Conscience Study. The study's raison d'être is that growing numbers of consumers are "activist consumers," thinking about where products come from and how they themselves can influence policy and corporate behavior with their purchases. Kate Robertson, Euro RSCG UK group chairman talked about the findings from the first in the series “Blueprint for a Sustainable Brand.” It was released at the 4A’s Transformation Conference in Los Angeles. She warned that brands can no longer assume -- and social media obviously is the elephant in the room -- that they aren't the subject of close scrutiny. "The tidal wave of the social media revolution is inexorably rolling over us and exposing all -- everything will come out, if not today, then for sure tomorrow,” she said at a panel. Nearly half of Americans believe the greatest change agent in the future will be “the people, empowered by social media” -- more than twice the number of respondents who chose politics or corporations as the greatest agent of change. The study, which surveyed 4,000 adults in Brazil, China, France, India, the UK, and the U.S. in 2007 and again in the winter of 2011, found that people are more focused than ever on corporate values and reputation. Sixty-nine percent said they are “paying more attention than in the past to the environmental and/or social impact of the products [they] buy,” and 71% said they believe “the most successful and profitable businesses in the future will be those that practice sustainability.” Sixty-seven percent of respondents said they prefer to buy from companies that share their values. Nearly three-quarters said businesses that are most likely to succeed now and henceforth are those that are open and collaborative. But beyond that, they expect companies they deal with to be drivers of social change. Nearly three-quarters said business has as much to do with positive change as governments. And when businesses fail to meet those expectations, people are punishing them: 70% of consumers worldwide said they have a responsibility to “censure unethical companies by avoiding their products.” China (91%) and India (89%) were the markets most likely to believe that consumers have a duty to censure unethical companies by avoiding their products.
360i has released a search engine optimization tool that assists marketers in Web site audits, but says it also points to shortcomings in social metrics across Facebook, Twitter and Google +1. In development for nearly two years, 360i released a scaled-down version of 360iTIGER that is free to marketers. The tool monitors social media shares supported by Facebook Likes, Twitter tweets and Google +1s. Marketers can grab a bookmarklet from the 360i site, place it in their browser similar to Instagram or Pinterest, and visit the Web site to conduct the audit. The tool will crawl up to 25 pages at a time. It uses a Google spreadsheet doc to place the information, so the tool requires the user to use a Google Gmail address. The tool also requires marketers to use Chrome, Firefox or Safari browsers, because the company says security settings in Internet Explorer are too "locked down." It takes two clicks on the bookmarklet to get the social media counters populated with numbers. One click starts the crawl, and a second from within the spreadsheet to replace the question-marks. 360iTIGER collects public data; any user can go to any Web site and run an audit. Marketers can audit both their own and competitors' sites. The tool provides information on the title of the article, description, headers 1 and header 2, and PageRank, as well as social signals. Despite 360iTIGER's ability to gives marketers free access to SEO audit data, the tool highlights flaws in social media counters, says Mike Levin, director of SEO strategy at 360i/Dentsu; and Adam Whippy, group director of SEO at 360i/Dentsu. One imperfection is in the way social media calculates shares, Tweets, Likes, Google +1s. Take, for example, the way blogging platforms tie the URL too closely to an article's headline. One change to the headline resets social counters. Every URL has a history. By changing the URL, it changes the history, according to Levin. "There's no such thing as a redirect on social media counters, yet," Whippy said. "It's a pain point, but it all has to do with blogging platform tying the URL too close to the headline." In the social space, Facebook, Google and Twitter have not responded to changing URLs similar to Google PageRank, according to Whippy.
Digital ad firm Rokkan and ad agency Team Detroit launched a real-time social project as part of a larger campaign promoting Ford Motor Co.'s 2013 Ford Escape. The project influences the direction of participants on NBC's reality show "Escape Routes." The campaign attempts to redefine social TV with support from the production company Profiles. Rokkan created and launched Ford's pre-season and the regular-season Web sites, as well as the game on Twitter and Facebook platforms that will run throughout the season, beginning March 31. This is the second year the companies worked together to promote the show and Ford. Last year, the Ford Focus project aired on Hulu rather than NBC. The show on NBC sends six teams on a nationwide collaborative competition, each in a 2013 Ford Escape. The teams work with online fans to conquer various challenges and tasks to win prizes. Registering with the Web site --available on the desktop, tablet and smartphone -- makes consumers eligible to win a prize, such as a camera, bicycle, trip or Ford Focus. Viewers will find the challenges in the games similar to those on "The Amazing Race," which Profiles also produces. People who interact with the site -- comment, play interactive games or upload user-generated content and help the teams with their challenges -- have an opportunity to earn points and badges, explains Jim Blackwelder, VP of technology for Rokkan. "Leveling up to certain badge and point thresholds gives you a likelihood of winning some of the prizes," he says. Teams on TV have different tasks. This week, the teams participated in a talent show. The videos were uploaded online, so people could vote on them. That team will earn points and the results announced on the TV show. A relay race will also include using tech to find information or gain direction from viewers through social media comments and tweets. There are several types of challenges, from interactive to flash challenges that happen randomly. The cameras are not on 24 hours per day, but when they are, the teams can communicate with viewers. "We're opening doors that allow viewers to communicate with the people on television shows through social channels in real time," Blackwelder said. "You can watch these people 24 hours per day, and also interact with them through social channels and live tweets."
Global agency Euro RSCG Worldwide has been publishing research and thought leadership content for years. It is expanding into a new series area, the Consumer Conscience Study. The study's raison d'être is that growing numbers of consumers are "activist consumers," thinking about where products come from and how they themselves can influence policy and corporate behavior with their purchases. Kate Robertson, Euro RSCG UK group chairman talked about the findings from the first in the series “Blueprint for a Sustainable Brand.” It was released at the 4A’s Transformation Conference in Los Angeles. She warned that brands can no longer assume -- and social media obviously is the elephant in the room -- that they aren't the subject of close scrutiny. "The tidal wave of the social media revolution is inexorably rolling over us and exposing all -- everything will come out, if not today, then for sure tomorrow,” she said at a panel. Nearly half of Americans believe the greatest change agent in the future will be “the people, empowered by social media” -- more than twice the number of respondents who chose politics or corporations as the greatest agent of change. The study, which surveyed 4,000 adults in Brazil, China, France, India, the UK, and the U.S. in 2007 and again in the winter of 2011, found that people are more focused than ever on corporate values and reputation. Sixty-nine percent said they are “paying more attention than in the past to the environmental and/or social impact of the products [they] buy,” and 71% said they believe “the most successful and profitable businesses in the future will be those that practice sustainability.” Sixty-seven percent of respondents said they prefer to buy from companies that share their values. Nearly three-quarters said businesses that are most likely to succeed now and henceforth are those that are open and collaborative. But beyond that, they expect companies they deal with to be drivers of social change. Nearly three-quarters said business has as much to do with positive change as governments. And when businesses fail to meet those expectations, people are punishing them: 70% of consumers worldwide said they have a responsibility to “censure unethical companies by avoiding their products.” China (91%) and India (89%) were the markets most likely to believe that consumers have a duty to censure unethical companies by avoiding their products.
Attorney Casey Mattox was among hundreds of spectators who went to the Supreme Court this week to watch the judges grill attorneys about the Obama administration's health care law. Unlike others in the audience, Mattox attempted to do more than just observe. He tried to document the argument as it happened by posting updates on Twitter. Mattox succeeded, but only briefly. The court has all sorts of bans on electronic devices, cameras, and the like. Typically, those prohibitions make it impossible to send out updates on Twitter. Mattox, however, came up with a workaround. The lawyer, who is part of the conservative group Alliance Defense Fund, watched from an overflow room for attorneys, and then left and sent emails to another staffer at the group, Reuters reports. That person then sent out tweets to the group's 4,000-plus followers on Twitter. One read, "Seems to be broad skepticism again today that this is a tax. #ObamaCare #SCOTUS." Court personnel got wind of the project, however, and shut it down soon after it started. The Supreme Court's ban on tweets (and other real-time news) stands in stark contrast to recent moves by state court judges, who increasingly allow legal proceedings to be broadcast, blogged and tweeted as they occur. In Massachusetts, for instance, the highest state court gave the green light to the "Open Court" project -- an initiative of Boston's National Public Radio station. The project Webcasts proceedings live from Quincy District Court. The Massachusetts ruled two weeks ago that restrictions on the streams would violate free speech principles. That decision makes far more sense than attempting to prohibit contemporaneous updates. After all, courts are supposed to be open to the public. In the age of the Internet, there's no reason to limit that access to the limited number of people who can make it to a courthouse in person.
Forgive me for thinking that maybe April Fool’s Day came a week early, but, hey, when you wake up first thing in the morning and read that there’s a startup called Sh*tter, that will print your tweets on a roll of toilet paper, it’s to be understood. And, wow, what a metaphor! The company actually helps guide you to the deeper meaning, if you didn’t get it immediately. Its tagline is “Social media has never been so disposable.” However, the flaw I see in the business model is that -- well, certainly, this is true in my case -- my tweets are genius. Does a tweet as compelling as this one, from Mar. 14, deserve to die a slow, but biodegradable, death in the Westchester County sewer system? “It took several years, but I've finally gone thru all 5000 sheets of white letter size paper for my printer. Off to #staples we go.” I think not! (However, in case you were wondering, the strategic use of the #staples hashtag did not result in the hoped-for tweet from Staples with a link to a coupon.) No, the much stronger business model for the people at Sh*tter would lie in printing other people’s tweets on toilet paper, like the people you really want to unfollow, but just haven’t gotten around to. There’s also a huge market in toilet paper printed with the status updates of people who are a little too prolific when it comes to detailing their life, but that’s a ponder for another day. All of which leads me to today’s important business question: Is it good that WPP said it will be doubling its spend on Facebook this year? The admission came in remarks that CEO Martin Sorrell made at the 4As “Transformation” conference in Los Angeles this week. In raw numbers, that will mean an increase from about $200 million to $400 million. That’s still a small percentage, also per Sorrell, compared to what WPP spends with Google ($2 billion), and News Corp. ($5 billion). Still, when one considers that Facebook’s revenue last year, according to its S1, was $3.7 billion, the WPP-o-meter would put its projected 2012 revenue at $7.4 billion. In other words, if everyone doubled what they spend on Facebook, that’s where the company would end up by the end of the year. But Sorrell also appears to have made the case for how all of this social media advertising could end up in the -- yes! -- sh*tter. And that’s if Facebook -- and its social advertising competitors -- don’t do a better job of nailing down the pink slime that is social media ROI. “The area is a very sexy area, and clients have gone in almost willy-nilly, because it is fashionable to do so,” Sorrell said. “The investments have reached a scale where procurement departments, finance departments are increasingly looking at those investments.” As I’ve said before, Google has this much easier, at least in its search business. See ad. Click on ad. Procure payment from advertiser. Maybe it’s uncharitable for me to compare social media ROI to search ROI, but, even if it’s not pink, you have to admit it is pretty slippery. For one, it defies easy definition: Is it about wracking up Facebook “Likes” or Twitter followers? Is it about tracking social media advertising down to the point of sale, or lifts in brand awareness or favorability? Is it click-throughs? What the hell is it? The challenge for Facebook then, and its competitors, is to offer a depth and breadth of metrics that can apply to any and all of the above. It also requires a certain amount of discipline from advertisers, who will need to decide -- here’s the extension of the sex metaphor you’ve been waiting for -- why they got in bed with social media in the first place. That’s why, while we can expect Facebook’s growth to double -- or just about -- in the near-term, the long-term presents the bigger challenge. When one combines the many different forms, and potential goals, of social advertising -- from paid ads that lead to commerce to social videos whose main objective is reach -- ROI becomes a difficult thing to get a grip on. In case you were wondering, the "twoilet" paper referenced above goes for $35 for four rolls. Mashable estimates that at 75 sheets per roll, the cost of each individual sheet is 8.5 cents. It’s up to you to decide whether that’s good ROI.
Until not so long ago, friendships were simple: to follow the most common universal definition, friendship is a relationship between two humans that is based upon mutual empathy, understanding, trust and have the other person best interests at heart. In the early 2000s, with the rise of social networks such as MySpace or Friendster, we became aware of several new types of friendships, the kind that didn't settle with all the "classic" definitions of the term and, in a way, changed the very concept of online friendship: During the early years of social networking, we first encountered "collectors," people that are "friending" other people not because they care for their interests nor share mutual trust (most of the time the "friends" don't know each other at all), but only to add more friends to their list and accumulate popularity on the social network. The third turnover of the friendship concept occurred with the rise of commercial involvement in social networks and the introduction of "fake" users. Although fake users on social networks existed even before the Friendster-MySpace-Facebook era, they always implemented the same rules of classic friendships: Seeking approval and trust, creating relationships based on empathy etc. It was the branded fake users in the late 2005 social ecosystem that "friended" people on social networks just to convey a commercial message or a special offer. The branded fake users often used a human avatar, just like a real person or used a fictional character avatar, all to appear human to the friended person while using the social network's user system to make new friends for the brand. Brand-User separation Facebook's page system (formally the fan page system) separated the people from the brands by creating different types of pages to create (user profiles and community pages), thus defining a very clear border for users and regulating the user-brand communication. This separation gave birth to a magical world of using Facebook as a digital asset and a social beachhead for many brands and local businesses. Users can "like" a page, recommending its content to friends (hopefully true friends) and participate on various interactive promotions using an application system available only to pages. When brands become friends When Facebook launched its timeline feature for pages earlier last year, it created a unified "Facebook experience" for all users making brand pages and user profiles visually similar, while keeping both systems technologically separate. Moreover, Facebook enabled branded pages to communicate with the social network users using the in-site messages system, mostly reserved for communication between users. By doing both of these things Facebook has done a great step towards humanizing the brands and making them as close as it gets to being a normal user profile. For teens, who were born into the special dynamics for the social world, making this unified experience creates a new type of friendship: Brand as a friend. This type of friendship is unique and somewhat different than anything we have seen so far as brands openly communicate with the young audience and engage in public or private conversation. Teens talk freely with the brands in the same way that they are engaging conversation with a friend, often not knowing or caring that every brand has its own team of social media managers talking to the younger audience. With brand as a friend, major companies don't have to hide behind sneaky avatars and fake users while trying to reach out to teens, and have the potential to reach out to teens while still maintaining their identity and social power. It's too soon to tell what will be the impact of brands’ humanization process on Facebook, but it's definitely worth keeping an eye on.