LiveWorld is proud to be listed as one of the companies included in the Facebook® announcement of its new Preferred Marketing Developer (PMD) program, in the Pages category. With proven experience scaling social media programs through moderation, insight and community programming, LiveWorld is now a Facebook Preferred Marketing Developer, qualified by the PMD program in Pages.
What is the Facebook PMD Program?
Facebook’s Preferred Marketing Developer program helps developers create products that make social marketing easier and more effective. With proven expertise in the social mechanics and technical possibilities of the Facebook platform, PMDs are experienced developers who have built numerous Facebook integrations and offer solutions ranging across page tools, ads tools, custom integrations, and insights tools.
PMDs are qualified by Facebook under four possible categories:
- Pages – Post scheduling and targeting, moderation, permissioning, and other tools to manage Facebook Pages.
- Ads – Advanced ad creation, campaign management, and reporting capabilities.
- Apps – Services and platforms for building socially enabled integrations – customized or self service.
- Insights – Page and post analysis, benchmarking, KPI tracking, and other tools for measuring performance across Facebook objects.
What does it mean for LiveWorld clients?
LiveWorld provides a combination of technology and human services to scale your social media programs through moderation, insight and community programming. Our clients use these solutions for marketing, support and insight. As a Facebook PMD, LiveWorld has increased access to Facebook employees, training, and events, elevating the level of solutions we can offer our clients as we help them with new and existing Facebook initiatives. LiveWorld offers a series of applications, toolsets, and platforms designed to stimulate more conversation and relationships among and with a brand’s customers, and/or aggregate conversations, curate user input, and distribute it appropriately across brand projects and the corporate organization. In particular, our Content Review System (CRS) platform integrated with Facebook via the API, enables large scale delivery of human review and management of user content for
- Brand protection with Content Moderation.
- Actionable insight, based on tagging of the user content combined with qualitative tone/insight reports.
- Customer engagement and support with Brand Interaction Moderation and Community Engagement service.
Companies are dealing with the need for scale, brand protection, and customer engagement as they manage increasing volumes of user content on an increasing number of Facebook Pages. The LiveWorld technology platform, coupled with our human review, management, and insight, solves those issues, encouraging our clients to do more with Facebook. Brand managers can use our combination of technology and human review (Tech-Powered Human Touch) to improve their customer engagement programs, and to ensure consistency of response across social channels.
Interested? Call us at 1-800-301-9507!
Facebook has provided a way for brands to review Posts users make to their Pages before releasing them to be published. It’s important to understand two things about this feature:
1) It applies only to user-initiated Posts; it does not apply to Comments users make in response to a brand Post. Comments cannot be pre-moderated.
2) Brands already have the option to completely disallow user Posts; but no way exists to disallow Comments (except for certain pharma brands).
How it works
Assuming you allow your fans to initiate Posts on your Page, when they do so, the post doesn’t publish on your Timeline. Instead, it appears in your Activity Log on the Admin Panel. From there, you can make the post visible once you’ve reviewed it.
How to enable it
In your Facebook Admin Panel, go to Manage > Edit Page > Manage Permissions. You’ll find a check-box labeled, “Only show Posts by [Brand Name] and friend activity on your Page until reviewed by an Admin.”
Where to find posts
The Posts from fans show up in the Activity Log (Admin Panel > Manage > Use Activity Log). Once you designate them for visibility, they’re published immediately. Note that, although the LiveWorld moderation tool collects these fan posts, allowing moderators to approve or remove them, the Activity Log workflow is currently the only way to make the posts visible on the page (until the tool is integrated via the API).
When to use it
Generally, LiveWorld considers it a best practice to allow users to make posts on your Page. It’s friendly, it indicates your interest in what they have to say, and it doesn’t imply that you want to hear from them only when you ask for responses from them. In most cases, we’d also recommend that you avoid pre-moderation. That’s because people find it annoying when their posts don’t show up immediately. In social situations among friends, it would be unthinkable to delay a friend’s contribution until it was reviewed by someone first.
However, in some cases, it may be wise for a brand to consider pre-moderating posts:
- Highly regulated industries: If your brand has to comply with specific rules, and certain kinds of content might jeopardize your standing with governing agencies, you’re already carefully moderating your comments. Because a Post has more prominence on your board than a Comment, compliance considerations may make it wiser for your brand to pre-moderate. However, you need to make sure you check the queue often so as not to irritate people with the delay. Outline your policy in your user guidelines, noting the reason for it.
- Crisis situations: If your brand is facing a very large volume of user complaint or ire because of a company policy or issue, or if you’re frankly just under attack, it may make sense to pre-moderate Posts for a while. Be sure you’re responding to users on the issues they’re bringing forward, however. And keep in mind that you’re still likely to be deluged with Comments, especially if Posts aren’t appearing — and pre-moderation could even throw more fuel on the fire.
- Sensitive topics: If your brand or product deals with very sensitive topics, or if you frequently have to deal with users who make fun of or denigrate your product or company, it may be wise to pre-moderate Posts, understanding you’ll still need to watch Comments.
- Spam: If you’re dealing with a big spam episode, go ahead and pre-moderate for a while until you get it under control.
Brands have long been asking Facebook to allow them to send direct messages to fans. 
Because Facebook has now provided a way, here’s our perspective, having looked into it in the past week.
How it works
Brands now have the option to install a Message button on their Facebook Pages. A key characteristic of the function is that brands cannot initiate the contact with individual fans; it must be initiated by the fan. The feature does offer a welcome opportunity to deal with customer support issues out of the public eye. However, LiveWorld believes brands should fully consider the benefits and challenges before implementing the new button.
How to enable it
In your Facebook Admin Panel, go to Manage > Edit Page > Manage Permissions. You’ll find a check-box to show the Message button; that’s all it takes.
Where to find messages
The messages from fans show up on the right of your Admin Panel. If the message has multiple responses, you’ll see only a snippet of the last conversation here; click the username to see all the messages in the thread between fan and brand.
Actions available for messages
Besides responding to the fan, you can take these actions:
- Archive: Removes from view, places into and Archive folder, where it can be recovered.
- Delete: Deletes the message; it’s no longer recoverable.
- Report as Spam: Reports user to Facebook, moving the message from queue to Other folder, with admin option to recover later.
- Report Conversation: Reports to Facebook; does not remove from queue. Note that it provides no options for selecting reasons why admin is reporting the message.
- Mark As Unread: Changes the status of read messages to unread.
Drawbacks worth considering
Think about these issues before deciding to implement the feature:
- Remember, only the fan can initiate contact; you can’t reach out first to solve problems.
- Only the last message displays on your Admin Panel; if you have a lot of volume, issues will be hard to locate among potentially hundreds of posts.
- Facebook provides no way to organize or tag messages for searching through them later.
- Moderators can’t mark where they left off in a queue or give messages a status.
- With considerable volume, it’s a confusing workflow. Messages could be in numerous folders with no indicators that they exist.
- At this time, no reporting or analytics exist for this feature.
- API is provided; we’re looking into how to connect to an internal CRM system to track and manage these messages. (Updated 3.16.12 from our original statement that no API exists.)
What we’d like to see changed
This private messaging concept is a good one for lots of reasons: It’s another channel for communication; it affords privacy for situations where that’s appropriate; and users appreciate the ability to contact a brand directly. If we were able to request changes to this feature so that all brands could benefit from it, here are some we’d like to see:
- Ability set a status designation for each message.
- Sorting, searching, and organizing mechanisms.
- Reporting on number of messages received, responses sent, current message status.
- API accessibility, to allow integration into other tools more suitable for managing and tracking messages. (Update: 3/14/12 – We’ve been told an API is available, and we’re looking into it.)
- Ability for brands to initiate contact with an individual, providing that the fan has left a message in a comment or on the Wall. (That way, brands can’t spam fans, but can reach someone who has issues but doesn’t know about the private messaging option.)
As I look at the 2012 schedule of social media events for the SF Bay/Silicon Valley area, I think about how this week used to be about a relatively few events. Now we have online registration for dozens of events per day in numerous large venues. People have a lot to talk about. Brands tout their efforts and reveal their results, some of them getting a lot of press for it.
Continue reading “Social media: Walk before you run” »
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