Bryan Person
Bryan Person is the former LiveWorld Social Media Evangelist.
Facebook has unveiled a slew of changes to its platform and the user experience over the past week, including the major announcements and launches at last week’s f8 conference. What does it all mean for brands? Here’s our walkthrough of the most relevant changes:
New Timeline for user profiles now; similar features to follow for Pages
Facebook has completely revamped the profile page for individual users with the launch of Timeline. The new product features a visually compelling, scrapbook-like layout of your entire history on Facebook, from photos you’ve uploaded and friends you’ve added to the places you’ve checked into and the status updates you’ve shared.
You can also fill in Timeline with earlier moments from your (pre-Facebook) life, so expect to see a surge of baby pics and bad-hairstyle shots from your friends!
Facebook applications are getting prominent treatment in Timeline, too, making it easy to share actions around your media and lifestyle interests, such as meals you’ve cooked or music you’ve listened to. In a screenshot from my timeline below, the “News” section displays articles I’ve read in new Facebook social readers from The Guardian and Washington Post (more on the opportunities with rich applications below).
Pages, the brand companion to user profiles, isn’t undergoing a similar makeover just yet. But if past history is any indication, expect Facebook to launch a Timeline-style layout equivalent for Pages later this year. The most memorable status updates from brands, high-impact photos and videos, prominent conversation threads with and among fans, and activity around branded applications will mesh together in a single place, encouraging users to share and interact with more content from the page.
To get a visual sense of what these new-and-improved Pages might look like for brands, check out these Mashable mockups.
Open Graph expansion
Facebook is expanding its Open Graph in a big way. And if you’re a brand marketer, that’s very good news!
As mentioned above, new applications built on top of the Open Graph will integrate directly into users’ timelines, driving and brand awareness and affinity. Here’s how Spotify (one of several Facebook partners that launched a new app at f8) looks inside Timeline:
Also, applications will no longer be limited to a pre-defined set of Facebook objects and the verb “like.” Instead, Open Graph applications can incorporate any action verb and any object. Here are some potential action/object combinations:
- [Read] a [book]
- [Watch] a [show]/[movie]
- [Cook] a [meal]
- [Visit] a [city]/[store location]
- [Test drive] a [car]
- [Play] a [sport]/[game]
- [Want] a [piece of clothing]/[gadget]
This new ecosystem offers plenty of advertising opportunities, too. Brands can target users who have taken the specific actions or interacted with the specific objects built into applications. Hulu, say, could buy Facebook Sponsored Stories aimed at users who have [watched] a television show, while NBC could target fans who have watched a particular [show], such as Saturday Night Live.
Or a retailer like Best Buy could build an app that allows users to create and display a holiday wishlist in their timeline, and then advertise to those who [want] certain items.
Ticker + updated News Feed
Just before f8, Facebook also launched both Ticker and a refreshed News Feed. Ticker, as shown in the screenshot above, is a real-time firehose of all the activities taken by your Facebook friends, including the status updates they publish, photos they share and tag, and comments they make and like.
New posts from brand pages and actions taken on applications (“David is listening to Town Called Malice by Studio 99 on Spotify”) appear in Ticker as well, meaning additional content discovery and sharing from fans and brand advocates.
With the News Feed, the main layout now combines both “Top Stories” and “Recent Stories.”
“Top Stories” appear first for most users, and surface the most relevant and interesting posts to users since their last Facebook login; “Recent Stories” then feature updates from friends and pages in reverse chronological order (similar to Ticker).
But while the look and feel of News Feed have changed, creating compelling status updates essentially follows the same recipe. Posts still have to be interesting enough for fans to share, like, and comment on in the first place, so they can tap into the EdgeRank algorithm that powers “Top Stories.” The timing of posts remains critical, too, especially since new status updates will pop into the News Feed and Ticker for fans almost immediately.
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Ultimately, these new changes are all about encouraging users to share more of their identity, interests, and life moments inside Facebook. And with continued publishing/engagement on Pages and the creation of interactive Open Graph applications, amplified by advertising, brands can tap into and benefit from this powered-up social sharing.
Here’s our final installment of panel recommendations for the 2012 SXSW Interactive festival in Austin, Texas.
Over on my personal blog, I’ve listed 23 of my favorite proposals, culled from three of the 17 categories in the Interactive PanelPicker: 1) Branding / Marketing / Advertising, 2) Social Media / Social Networks, and 3) Emerging Technology / Mobile.
You can see other panel recommendations from the LiveWorld team in our previous two posts:
We’re also publishing links to our favorite panels on our @LiveWorld Twitter account.
You can review, vote, and comment, on any of the proposed SXSW submissions up through this Friday, September 2, until 11:59pm CDT.
We continue the list and summary of our favorite sessions proposals for the 2012 SXSW Interactive festival, scheduled for next March in Austin, Texas.
In today’s post, we share our recommendations from the Journalism and Content / Content Strategy categories.
You can vote for and comment on any of these sessions through the SXSW PanelPicker up through 11:59pm CDT on Friday, September 2, 2011.
Journalism
1) Is Aggregation Theft?
“Join top media writers and the trailblazers of aggregation for a conversation about the art of filtering and curating other organizations’ content, and where this editorial model fits into the new media landscape. Decide for yourself: aggregation—friend or foe?”
- Felix Salmon – Reuters, and panel
2) Has Twitter Made The Sports Reporter Obsolete?
“An NFL star live tweets his own traffic stop. An accidental DM reveals a shocking trade rumor. Instead of press releases, Tiger Woods breaks news about Tiger Woods by having @TigerWoods share a link to TigerWoods.com. These are just a few examples of sports stars bypassing traditional media outlets to tell their stories directly to fans….”
- Dashiell Bennett – Business Insider, and panel
3) No Office, No Problem: Running a Virtual News Team
“Discovery News was born online in 1998 and maintains a virtual newsroom kept afloat through emails, web chats, IMs and speakerphones. Editor-in-Chief Lori Cuthbert has developed a remote digital workforce that must come together as a team despite being in five different locations across four different time zones….”
- Lori Cuthbert and panel from Discovery Communications
4) Twitter to the Editor
“In the old days, a voicemail or a letter to the editor might be the only way to communicate with a newspaper, magazine or broadcast outlet. But thanks to social media, average citizens can – and do – engage with local and national news organizations. As a matter of fact, many traditional news organizations have embraced it …”
- Terri Thornton – Thornton Communications
5) Online Commenting: Conversation Friend of Foe?
“Few issues vex newsrooms these days quite the way online story commenting does. On the one hand, allowing readers to comment on stories on news sites carries the potential of an engaged citizenry envisioned in Western democracies. In theory, comments provide a forum for citizens to converse with each other …”
- Doreen Marchionni – Pacific Lutheran University
6) Vetting in the Age of Social: Who do you trust?
“In the past, an editor, a professional trained to vet content for a publication decided what you consumed. Today, content is vetted by our friends, celebrities, and strangers we’ve ‘liked’, followed, or circled. Influence over who shares what, how often it is shared, and eventually what shows up in search is the holy Grail for anyone who wants …”
- Michael Pranikoff – PR Newswire – and panel
Content / Content Strategy
7) All Eyes on You–Visual Effects & Viewer Engagement
“Why do certain videos capture your attention, while others fall flat? Whether you realize it or not, visual effects touch over 80% of the minutes you see on television or in a movie theater today. Not to be confused with special effects (think big explosions), visual effects are more subtly …”
- Katherine Hays – GenArts, Inc.
8) Blogsurdity #1: “What __Teach Us About __” Posts
“What Happy Gilmore teaches us about blogging? What soccer teaches us about taxation? They’re comparison blog posts. When done right, they’re great….We’ve found the most absurd connections of all time and ranked them all on axis of ridiculous/sensible and popular/unpopular….”
- Jed Hallam, VCCP, and Jon Burkhart, iris Worldwide’s Urgent Genius HQ
9) Texas Content Massacre: Real-life Horrors & Heroes
“We’ve all been there. It’s a sunny day in Amityville, everything is going well. Your content audit is in place, you’ve completed a solid gap analysis, and your messaging architecture is gleaming. And then! Darkness falls and your seemingly perfect content strategy project starts to look like something out of a horror movie….”
- Michaela Hackner – Forum One Communications – and panel
10) Do You Speak Like Your Customers?
“Companies use social media to engage in two-way conversations with their customers. Despite valiant efforts, there are often disconnects. Why? A lack of “listening” is a well-known shortcoming. But another major cause is that the people inside companies (especially lawyers) often don’t talk in a manner that’s accessible to their customers….”
- Paul Walker – PulsePoint Group
11) Scrappy App Marketing
“Do you have a new app ready to launch or have an app in the app store but are a bit stumped on how to get traffic? This session on Scrappy App marketing will help you whether you are getting ready to launch, already have an app launched or are looking for more traction for your mobile application….”
- Lindsey Harper, Swayable, and Maya Bisineer, MemeTales
12) How To Win at YouTube
“Some of the best brands, agencies, and companies have tried their hand at YouTube with varying degrees of success. None have had much of any. The real triumphs have gone to new players in the digital broadcast game. This panel brings you face-to-face with these players …”
- Dan Demsky – BizMedia, and panel
13) Why locate your content? Because you can.
“In order to deliver relevant content to communities, knowing where is an essential piece of the puzzle, to keep visitors engaged and returning to sites. Being able to serve location-based content to visitors of your website or users of your app will help differentiate your material from others….”
- LaurieAnne Lassek – Quova
14) Mickey’s 10 Commandments of Interaction Design
“In 1987, Walt Disney’s Imagineering President, Marty Sklar, presented “Mickey’s 10 Commandments.” These commandments come from a combination of his work with Walt Disney and 30 years experience designing the Disney theme parks The commandments are an excellent set of guidelines for user experience professionals, whether they deal with an amusement park, or an interactive product….”
- Garth Braithwaite – Adobe Systems
15) Does Free Content Cannibalize Your Paid Consulting
“How much do you open your kimono? Does “thought leadership” imperil your ability to monetize what you know? Does giving away info snacks enable you to sell knowledge meals, or does your blogging and content program actually cost you paying customers? Do you publish everything you know, or hold something back?…”
- Jay Baer, Convince & Convert, and Joe Pulizzi, Content Marketing Institute
16) What Content Strategists Can Learn from the Movies
“Whether it’s Bridget Jones in pursuit of Mark Darcy or Luke Skywalker on a quest to find himself while defeating evil, film protagonists are on a journey inspired by the promise of adventure and reward. Real people are on a similar quest to solve problems–including the prospective customers you hope to attract with your content marketing strategy….”
- Carmen Hill, Babcock & Jenkins, and Katherine Gray, The New Civilization
17) Storytelling with URLs
“How do your friends introduce you to others at a party? On the web, your URL is your chance to make that first impression. Even in this post-Google, post-AJAX, post-URL-shortner era, your URLs speak volumes about who you are and how you think….”
- Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine – MIT
18) Rude Awakening: Content Strategy Is Super Hard
“Four of the brightest minds in content strategy will tackle some the toughest issues our companies are facing: cross-platform distribution, governance, legacy content, distributed publishing, and trying to prepare our content for future technologies we can’t possibly predict.”
- Kristina Halvorson – Brain Traffic, and panel
19) Humans + Robots: SEO & Social-Friendly Content
“In today’s digital landscape, both search engines and social activity play an important part in how people find and engage with content online. And, social signals now play a growing role in search algorithms, making social shares and engagement an important part of optimizing your content for search. This session will provide practical steps you can take to make sure your content is both SEO-friendly and engineered to boost social shares and engagement….”
- Tiffany Monhollon – ReachLocal, and panel
20) Entertain or Fail: Brands As the New Publishers
“Brands today have more consumers at their fingertips than any TV show or magazine could ever offer thanks to an abundance of multi-connected digital platforms. But entertaining those consumers on multiple platforms is a role that brands have never had to play before….”
- Anthony Batt – Katalyst, and panel
21) The Trend of Trending
“All around the web we’re seeing trending content. From Twitter’s trending topics to Mashable’s Trending list, from CNN’s NewsPulse to the NYT’s most emailed articles, trending topics are swarming the web. This trending content is giving us a new and exciting curation platform in which we’re seeing how the world is interacting with online content in real time….”
- Ryan Geyer, Trenspot, and Henry Mason, TrendWatching
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You can also check out the first post in our series; it included 27 of the best SXSW 2012 panel proposals.
It’s open voting season again for proposed panels for next year’s SXSW Interactive festival! The SXSW PanelPicker 2012 includes more than 3,200 panels to choose from! You could try reading them all yourself, but you’d probably have to forfeit your entire weekend in the process!
To make things easier, we’re rolling out a series of posts over the next several days that highlights the top 100 70 or so proposals we think are most worthy of your attention, votes, and comments.
In this initial post, we’re sharing our favorites from four categories: 1) Health / Future of Medicine, 2) Branding / Marketing /Advertising, 3) Social Media / Social Networks, and 4) Greater Good / Charity / Nonprofit categories. We’re also including summaries of own two submissions — a presentation from Valerie Sprague about online identity, and my panel on Facebook customer service by brands.
According to SXSW, public voting accounts for 30% of the final decision on which panels are ultimately chosen, so your input does matter! Voting remains open until 11:59pm CDT on Friday, September 2, 2011.
LiveWorld panels
1) The Facebook Customer Service Challenge for Brands
“Managing customer service on a Facebook Page is a messy proposition, particularly for large businesses and brands. Increasingly impatient customers and fans are flocking to the Facebook Wall to …”
- Bryan Person, Social Media Evangelist at LiveWorld
Confirmed panelists: David Berkowitz ‐ @DBerkowitz, Senior Director of Emerging Media & Innovation, 360i; Molly DeMaagd ‐ @MollyD1, Customer Care Social Media Director, AT&T; Eric Ludwig ‐ @TheSEMninja, Sr. Director of Online Marketing at Rosetta Stone.
2) Handles, Vandals, and Online Scandals
“Social networks want to be the place where everybody knows your name, and the big ones require users to state their legal one, first and last. But is “authenticity” really about using the name your parents gave you everywhere online, or …”
- Valerie Sprague, Senior Community Programs Manager at LiveWorld.
Health / Future of Medicine
3) Spoonful of Sugar: A Digital Strategy
“While they might not have realized it in 1964, the Mary Poppins tune “Spoonful of Sugar” is the ideal interactive media strategy. You’ve probably been searching for the right combination of content and personality to make your healthcare interactive media …”
- Kristin Thompson – Franklin Street
4) Friending Pharma: Patients, Industry & New Media
“As more and more patients begin using social media as an information source and a support network, it’s inevitable that they’ll begin to interact with representatives of pharmaceutical companies looking to use new technologies to inform and educate….”
- Brian Reid – WCG
5) Irreconcilable Differences: Pharma & Social Media
“The pharmaceutical industry has struggled for years to find its way in the world of social media. While many initiatives have been attempted, they have mostly been in the shallow end of the digital networking pool …”
- Steve Woodruff – Impactiviti
6) Designing Effective Online Physician Communities
“The emergence of online communities dedicated to physician collaboration is the result of a need for new tools, mindsets and relationships. Yet physicians present one of the most challenging populations to mobilize around change in the practice of medicine….”
- Kenn Louis and panel from Within3
Branding / Marketing / Advertising
7) Community & Influence: How to not piss people off
“Marketing is social. We’re all sold. But how do you maximize your return in social without appearing like a douchebag? One the one hand, top influencers in the social space are the one …”
- Megan Berry – Klout, and panel
Just ‘Cus It’s an Infographic Doesn’t Make It True
“Data has … risen as a means to generate buzz & awareness, and none has been more buzz-worthy than the almighty infographic. But with the rise of flashy data, the old adage rings true – ‘Don’t believe everything you read.’ …”
- Gray Blue – FanBridge, and panel
9) Feeding the Social Media Content Machine
“In today’s social media environment it’s the brands that spark that draw engagement. What’s harder is sparking in such a way that’s authentic to who you are – generating retweets, replies or forwards around purpose…”
- Britton Upham – McGarrah Jessee
10) Unleashing Advertising’s Age of Engagement
“Technology, creative, media, communications, public relations, and product development have evolved to become parts of one another, yet advertising agencies and the companies that hire them remain siloed and organizationally unable to move as fast as they should….”
- Ian Schafer – Deep Focus
11) Using You Tube Channels to Tell Your Brand Story
“This presentation will cover the essentials in how to tell your brand story and reach your audience through various forms of YouTube Channels….As brands continue to push the boundaries of what’s possible and engage their audiences in completely new ways, choices for marketers on how to leverage YouTube Channels and video content abound….”
- Karen OBrien – Crimson Consulting
12) Customer Service and Web 3.0 at Business Scale
“As social technology moves beyond marketing and into core business disciplines the challenges of the social web (Web 2.0) give way to those of the semantic web (Web 3.0)….Making the challenge even harder, operating in the rapidly evolving area of customer service a mainstream brand may have to receive, prioritize and responds to thousands of posts every day….”
- Dave Evans – Social Dynamx
13) Facebook Stole My Site Traffic: How To Get It Back
“Like other brands in 2010, you jumped on the social media wagon with a Facebook page, gathered Fans with the usual promotional tactics, and waited for them to fall in love with everything you shared. Your Fans Like you, but they aren’t going to your site any longer….”
- Gina Rau – Janrain
14) How To Offer Customer Service That Doesn’t Suck
“Do you know anyone who enjoys speaking to an automated teller for customer service? If your customers are real people, then your customer service should be, too. Today’s modern consumers expect 24/7 service and the ability …”
- Kristin Smaby – Simple Finance Tech Corp (BankSimple)
15) Brands Need 3rd-Party Tools to Succeed on Facebook
“Facebook changes fast. The site’s functionality and interface are in constant flux, there are always new marketing strategies emerging, and the technology to execute marketing campaigns takes a long time to develop in house. Can brands succeed at Facebook marketing on their own?…”
- Josh Constine – Inside Facebook, and panel
Social Media / Social Networks
16) EdgeRank, Metrics & News Feed Optimization, Oh my!
“How do brands succeed on Facebook? It’s not magic that some brands’ Wall posts get visibility in the Facebook News Feed and others don’t. Every Wall post published by a brand competes with the Wwall posts of an average Facebook user’s 130 friends and 90+ Liked pages….”
- Helen Todd – Sociality Squared, and panel
17) Google+ Business: Plus, Minus or Something Else?
“Google+ and business will have only been together for a couple months. Is it an engagement, a wedding or a divorce? A look at the opportunities of Google+ for Business, as well as early initiatives that have been a success or failure. Is this just another social network?”
- Richard Binhammer – Dell, and panel
18) A Culture of Yes
“All too often, highly regulated industries like healthcare, finance, insurance and others, feel as though their hands are tied when it comes to certain marketing tactics…. But while the majority sits firmly on the sidelines, a smart minority have ventured forward and found success engaging in social media. How have they done it?…”
- Carissa Caramanis O’Brien – Red Box Communications
19) Lessons from a Decade of Community Management
“In this session, I will riff on the past 10 years [of community management experience] and share some of the most important, enduring lessons that I have learned from being directly involved in the day-to-day management of these online communities…”
- Patrick O’Keefe – iFroggy Network
20) Do You Really Like Me? Acquire True Facebook Fans
“To ‘Like’ or not to ‘Like’ is a proposition we are faced with every day on Facebook. As a consumer, you ask yourself, ‘Why should I Like this brand?” and “What will I get in return for my Like?’ And as a brand, you aspire to get as many Likes as possible …”
- Jayson Merlino and panel from G2
21) Like This: Secrets of the Top Branded Fan Pages
“As marketers try to get the most out of their Facebook fan pages, they need data on how often to post, how many likes they should expect, how many comments, what percent of active fans should they strive for and much more. In this session, we’ll provide a data-driven analysis …”
- Jim Tobin – Ignite Social Media
22) The Community Revolving Door: Staying a Step Ahead
“Some say getting started is the hardest part – and it can be, but often this is a phase of excitement organizationally and time where everyone is focused on the shiny new toy. Year two, those internal stakeholders are on to the next new thing, your customers are back to their regular day jobs and you are stuck having to push that community rock up the steep hill of engagement….”
- Heather Strout – Farland Group, and panel
23) Inside Out: Internal Social Media & Big Business
“Social media has been the bright shiny object for marketers from the beginning. But, the fun doesn’t stop at the firewall. Businesses of all size are finding that the tools of social media help bring people together for collaboration and conversation inside a company …”
- Brad Mays – WCG, and panel
Greater Good / Charity / Nonprofit
24) Can growing a moustache change the world?
“Join Adam Garone, CEO/co-founder of Movember, as he discusses how Movember leveraged the support of a few daring partners and pockets of loyal fans to generate a global movement that saw 450,000 moustache growers in 2010. Learn how Movember captivated the attention of a demographic infamous for not discussing their health…”
- Adam Garone – Movember
25) Content As A Means for Social Change
“[W]hile social media has been the Internet’s buzzword for some time now, research shows that content consumption actually represents 53% of all time spent online. Given that content takes up most consumers’ time on the web, it’s time to harness it as the most effective way to drive social change in the real world.”
- Arianna Huffington and panel from Huffington Post
26) Kill the Follower Count & Embrace Your Mission
“So how do we move the social media measurement conversation away from ‘dumb’ metrics like the number of followers, beyond ‘smart’ metrics like the click-thru rate for links, and get to the heart of the matter: does social media support your goal for social good?…”
- Devon Smith and panel from Threespot
27) An Open Source Approach to Community Building
“Open source goes beyond code — it’s a philosophy founded in creating, sharing and modifying with an active community. In building our community with an open-source philosophy, we’ve found that the more an organization opens itself up, the more the potential of the community is unlocked….”
- Sean Connolly and panel from the Online News Association
We regularly work with our brand clients on scenario and workflow planning for customer service and brand response on social channels, particularly Facebook. Social media is transforming customer service, and we find that many brands are still catching up and adapting to the always-on, public, and conversational nature of social networks.
As a start, these 10 questions help brands to think through how they are already set up to manage social media customer service, and what steps they will need to take to improve:
1) How are you scaling coverage for monitoring and brand response, including on nights and weekends?
2) Which customer service duties can/should be outsourced, and which should remain with the brand?
3) When should you respond to customer comments/questions and when should you stay silent, either because it would be overkill to chime in all the time or because your fans/brand ambassadors could jump in on your behalf?
4) Considering both customer expectations and what’s manageable/reasonable from the brand side, how quickly should you, and can you, respond?
5) What is the appropriate tone for your responses?
6) Are there any regulations or requirements (such as for pharma) that dictate how or whether you can respond?
7) When is it appropriate to respond publicly, such as on the Facebook Wall, versus moving the exchange to a more private venue (email, phone, 1:1 direct messaging)? How will the approach differ by channel? (For example, DMs work well on Twitter, but are more complicated on Facebook.)
8) Should customer service reps initially respond from a brand account or their own profile? Can they take a hybrid approach, as Southwest Airlines often does?
9) How will high-priority customer service issues be escalated within the organization?
10) Should a worst-case scenario or crisis erupt online, including on your Facebook Page, who is on your crisis management team? And does that team include stakeholders from across the organization?
Following a discussion that he led at the BDI Social Communications & Healthcare 2011 roundtables last week, our LiveWorld Sales VP, Jay Bryant, checks in with Pixels & Pills’ Sarah for a conversation about social media’s impact on the pharmaceutical industry.
In the interview, Jay addresses the concern that many pharma brands raise as they participate in social media, particularly on Facebook: the monitoring and reporting of adverse events.
Says Jay: “When pharma gets involved in social media, it’s not opening up a floodgate of additional work for them, handling all these adverse events, which has always been a big fear. The reality is, it really isn’t [a huge risk], if you properly manage and anticipate what’s going on. So much of what they find as an adverse event is something that’s coming through an existing channels. … Most of the time, the stuff that we’re reporting they already know about. A lot of it then becomes a documentation process for them, and sending in the appropriate information to the FDA.”
Jay also cites a recent LiveWorld case study of five pharma brand Facebook Pages in which just 2 % of all Wall and News Feed comments constituted adverse events.
How concerned should pharma brands be about adverse events (AEs) on their Facebook pages? LiveWorld analyzed more than 9,000 comments over a three-month span, and we reveal our findings in this case-study presentation.
Continue reading “Case study: Moderation of pharma Facebook pages” »
August 15, 2011 looms as the date when disease-state and over-the-counter (OTC) pharma brands will no longer be able to prevent fans from commenting on their Facebook Pages. This also means an obligation to watch for and report all adverse events (AE) on the Page.
So how much AE content should pharma brands realistically expect?
To find out, LiveWorld analyzed fan behavior on 5 existing client pharma Facebook Pages already allowing comments. We looked at more than 9,000 comments over a three-month period on these Pages, which range in size from under 50 fans on the low end (for a brand-new Page) to more than 2 million fans on the high end.
Here are our key findings and moderation recommendations:
* There was no significant flood of adverse events or other critical issues on the Pages. Less than 2 % of fan posts and comments across all pages were reports of Adverse Events.
* There was no correlation between number of adverse events and either the number of brand posts/week or the total number of fans. AE content was consistently less than 2 %.
* Advanced training of moderators (5 hours +) ensures understanding of company/brand and FDA rules, and human review of Facebook comment is the best practice for compliance.
Read full case study
For more data and details from our research, check out the full case study, which is embedded as a public document below, and on Slideshare.
LiveWorld can and does support pharma companies and other brands with their Facebook moderation needs, including the reporting of adverse events to the FDA. If you have questions about our services, please contact us.
The Google+ social network launched to great fanfare last week, and has attracted plenty of digital ink, activity, and experimentation in the 10 days since, particularly among the early-adopter crowd.
We still think it’s way too soon to draw any definitive conclusions about Google+’s place in the social media landscape, but we’re certainly keeping a close eye on it. And we think brands should, too (some, like Ford, already are!). With that in mind, here are five suggestions for how brands can approach getting involved with Google+:
1. Apply to be a Google+ business test partner
Google says it will start beta testing business pages for Google+ within two weeks and is looking for about 300 partner companies, including many brands. To be considered, fill out this short application from Google.
2. Learn the culture
At their core, social networks are about people and their behaviors. Google+ will be no different. Before you launch a brand presence on Google+, encourage some of your employees to create personal profile accounts and start exploring! Find out how and why people share content on Google+, how they connect to each other, and what they really want to talk about.
3. Test out the features
From creating Circles and participating in video-chat Hangouts to sharing photos and videos, there are lots of cool features to try out on Google+ — but some are trickier than others. Take some time putting these tools through their paces to understand how to optimize them.
4. Prepare for the customer-service implications
The culture of social media is transforming customer service, and fans and customers routinely reach out to brands on Facebook and Twitter now when they have a question, complaint, or service issue. We should expect similar behavior on Google+.
Once your brand launches a formal page or presence on Google+, you should be prepared to engage and respond to people from the get-go. How will you staff for monitoring, listening, and jumping into ongoing discussions, and for responding to individual customer-service issues? Will your participation and moderation guidelines from Facebook apply, or will they need some tweaking for the Google+ environment?
5. Think integration
A big part of Google+’s promise comes from all the potential integration points with other well-established Google services and applications. What might this look like eventually on Google+?
- Your brand’s Google+ page, and the content from it, will display prominently in Google search results.
- Real-time search results about your brand from both inside Google+ and across the social web will be mashed together.
- Your YouTube channel videos and Google+ Hangouts will be published and shareable in both places.
- Google Places data and activity for your brand’s physical location(s), such as reviews and check-ins, will be mixed in to your Google+ brand page.
- Activity from your Google+ brand page will be integrated into your corporate website and measured through Google Analytics.
More reading on Google+
I’m maintaining a list of bookmarks of articles and posts about Google+.
And if you want to follow or connect with me on Google+, I’m right here: Bryan Person on Google+.
During our “31 Days of Facebook Marketing” series this month, we’ve covered several of the components that are needed for an effective Facebook brand marketing plan and program. To tie it all together, we’re mashing together our best practices into three key areas: creating content, advertising, and building the right team to manage the work.
Here’s our recommended Facebook marketing framework:
Create compelling content
All of your other marketing efforts on Facebook won’t amount to much if you aren’t publishing a steady flow of status updates that inspire your fans to respond in the form of likes, comments, and shares. And because the overwhelming majority of your fans (96%) will only ever visit your Facebook Wall and tabs one time, you’ll have to reach them through status updates in their News Feeds to stay visible at all (see our explanation of the Facebook EdgeRank algorithm).
To do that, create and share content that…
- Informs
- Delights
- Surprises
- Entertains
- Taps into current events
- Surfaces at the time of day when your fans are most likely to be connected to Facebook, including nights and weekends
- Includes an element of “exclusivity“
- Features a standout visual or video thumbnail/link
- Reflects your brand’s own culture and values
- Is targeted toward a particular geographic region, language group, or demographic
- Gives your fans a way to talk about themselves, their interests, and their opinions
- Offers a “social object” that your fans will want to interact with, post on their own Walls, or show off to their friends
- Isn’t always about your brand, your special offers, and your broadcast news
- Is sometimes social … just for the sake of being social
- Integrates with initiatives on your brand’s other marketing channels, including your corporate site.
Advertise to fill in the gaps
Ads on Facebook won’t make up for bad content, but they can drive users to the good work that you’re already doing on your brand’s Page.
You’ll need to spend time regularly testing what works and doesn’t, but Facebook advertising offers a (relatively) affordable way to acquire new fans and to re-engage existing fans who may not be seeing your brand posts in their News Feeds.
Use Facebook Sponsored Stories, for example, to point your fans to a recent status update, or to an interactive application or game that someone has played. As those fans click through and start connecting with your content again, their EdgeRank affinity to your brand Page will rise, and you’ll gain a News Feed visibility boost for future posts.
As Dennis Yu told me before our recent Facebook News Feed Optimization panel, “At the end of the day, NFO is about getting the folks who love you in real life to express that love to their friends. And we have to use a variety of mechanisms to get a combination of exposure [NFO] and engagement. For you to even get that interaction, you must show up. And advertising is how Facebook wants us to get that [News Feed visibility] going.”
Staff and manage appropriately
To publish all of your content, respond to the resulting comments and feedback from fans, and run your advertising campaigns, you’ll need the right kind of team to manage your Facebook Page(s) on a day-to-day basis. That should include many or all of the following:
- A person or group to gather and produce content assets such as photos and videos
- Community managers who are trained and skilled in starting stirring, and carrying on online discussions (think “social” rather than “broadcast”), with an underlying approach that ties back to the brand strategy
- Human moderators and/or customer-service reps, either internal or outsourced, who review and tag all fan posts and comments against moderation guidelines, and then remove, escalate, or respond as needed
- An analytics person to review data from Facebook Insights and/or moderating tagging, measuring the results against the business strategy and tweaking/reworking as necessary
- A marketer who knows the nuts and bolts of Facebook advertising
- A developer who can integrate Facebook social plugins to your brand’s corporate website and the Graph API “Like” button back into your Facebook Page.
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This post is part of an ongoing “31 Days of Facebook Marketing” series from LiveWorld, a social media agency that offers moderation, insight, and community programming Facebook services for Fortune 1000 brands.
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