Inside the Marketers Studio - David Berkowitz's Marketing Blog

Facebook Explains Its New Privacy Settings

If you’re a hardcore privacy wonk or Facebook addict, you’ll probably appreciate Facebook’s presentation below on explaining the new privacy settings it’s rolling out.

Facebook doesn’t get enough credit for all it has done in the privacy space (though I have applauded them at least as far back as two years ago). These changes all look like good fixes to protect and improve the user experience. I’ll be curious to see them in action.

Facebook Privacy Enhancements

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Facebook Turns a Design Flaw into a PR Coup

I've been commenting over on Scott Hoffman's Cliqology about Facebook's username registration.Scott wonders aloud if Facebook left $3 million in revenue on the table by not charging for the names.

I responded:

Facebook here is giving people something they expect on any other service - MySpace, Google, LinkedIn, etc. Creating a barrier to entry would have stood in the face of the democratization of social media. That customized names were needed at all was a design flaw. That they made it a PR coup was brilliant. That they left revenue on the table was a smart business decision.

As an aside, it wouldn't have been anywhere near $3 million. I'm sure a large number who did it enjoy the bragging rights and badge of honor, but it's not something they'd pay for.

There's more discussion on Scott's blog, so check it out.

You can also connect with me on Facebook via my new vanity URL, www.facebook.com/dberkowitz. (Send me a note if you know me through the blog - I often ignore people when I have no clue why they're connecting.)

360i Uses Google to Predict American Idol's Winner

If you haven't checked out 360i's blog Digital Connections, now's a pretty good time to start. I'll dispel two possible myths before you do:

1. I'm not the 360i blogger. I'm one of them. You can read bios of the ten contributors and see for yourself.
2. It's not all about 360i. There are a lot of industry perspectives shared there that have nothing to do with 360i, even if all of the insight draws from the agency's experience.

Alright, now that all of that's cleared up, you should check out 360i's American Idol's predictions and historical review based on Google data. There's a very detailed piece in Mashable showing how Google data has played out for Idol over the past few years, and the charts are embedded via SlideShare below.

American Idol Search Trends

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MySpace vs. Facebook – Who Won the WOMMA Smackdown?

  
Images courtesy of WOMMA

This post also appears on 360i’s blog.

At WOMMA’s Word of Mouth Marketing University (WOMM-U), I moderated the ultimate face-off, smackdown, no holds barred slugfest: FACEBOOK vs. MYSPACE. It’s the top billing matchup for the ages.

And it ended in a hug.

I must have done something horribly wrong.

Before the session, 360i CEO Bryan Wiener tweeted, “@dberkowitz moderating panel at WOMMA btwn Facebook and Myspace. Riot may ensue. Tweet him questions #womma”. When it was over, 360i tweeted, “@dberkowitz The MySpace-Facebook panel ended in a hug? You channeling your inner Gandhi today or what? #WOMMA”

Just last week, MediaPost reported on my Frost/Nixon-style moderating where I tried making panelists cry and demanded answers from the search engines on how much they were bidding to buy Twitter. How did plans go awry?

Part of my problem was who was on the panel: Heidi Browning, SVP Insight & Planning at MySpace and Chris Pan, Head of Brand Solutions at Facebook. The two were just too engaging, and I was too busy learning from each of them to try to get them to claw each other’s eyes out.

There were some turf wars behind the scenes, requiring extensive negotiating on which marketers would be the focus, how much PowerPoint would be used, and a few other ground rules. But some haggling aside, both sides brought a lot to the table, from Heidi’s great idea to share live campaigns on both sites to Chris’s determination to make it a bull-free session even if it meant telling marketers some things they didn’t want to hear.

Heidi kicked things off, showing Bruno’s over the top multimedia blitz on “Meinspace” as a foil to the more conversational and much-liked Page on “Facebuch.” (He’s also on “Tvitter.”) That led to my heavy hitting first question for the panelists: “Vassup?” Maybe they couldn’t understand my Austrian accent, but they weren’t up for fielding that one.

Heidi and Chris took a deeper look at Vitamin Water. On MySpace, the brand promotes free MP3 downloads in partnership with Amazon. On Facebook, the focus is the Great Debate on the better player: Kobe Bryant or LeBron James. Chris focused on the Facebook ads driving visits and interactions with the Page, while Heidi said Vitamin Water promoted its MySpace heavily offline, noting that such integration was a big selling point for them.

The first real question I brought up involved the audience. Heidi said while it’s largely 18-34 year olds, they have huge numbers running the gamut and it wasn’t just teens. Hopefully she doesn’t take too much umbrage with my recent quote in The New York Times that MySpace would do well doubling down on the under 34 set. As for Chris, he said he expects EVERYONE to be on Facebook. Each day, he’s getting closer.

A bit of discussion followed on when to use self-service ads (I’ve run campaigns on both, and they are really easy to use), but more options come with spending the big bucks through an account representative. Both Heidi and Chris stressed the deep targeting options, with Heidi adding a bit more on MySpace’s psychographics and behavioral targeting.

The big word both Facebook and MySpace wanted to avoid was the c-word: “campaign.” They wanted to stress longer engagements. Chris said Facebook doesn’t want brands having separate Pages for campaigns; they should be about the brands. Separate Pages for spokesmen, mascots, or other brand components are okay though, like a Page for Frank Perdue and another for Perdue Chicken. MySpace is more accommodating for campaign-based Pages.

The audience Q&A offered a few dramatic moments. One attendee said MySpace charging six figures just to launch a branded page made it prohibitive for a lot of marketers to get started. Heidi took a straw poll and asked if that was the case for the others, and a good percentage of hands went up.

Of course, you can’t get more dramatic than that historic hug.

Read more about the session on WOMMA’s live blog from the show, which also helped refresh my memory.

 

 

Technorati Tags: myspace,facebook,womma,wommu,social networks,social media,events,conferences

Doing More With Less: You Can’t Run But You Can Hide

Today, I’m following fewer people on Twitter than I was a month ago, even after major events like SXSW and iMedia Breakthrough.

I’m friends with fewer people on Facebook, even though I’ve made many more connections.

My blog, cluttered as it may be, has far fewer links along the right-hand side than it did earlier this year, and the links that are there are far more likely to be current.

It’s all with the goal of trying to do more with less and focus on the objectives and ties that matter.

Facebook is perhaps my favorite case in point, as I’ve come around on the redesign in a big way. I couldn’t stand what they did at first, and I still in many ways would prefer to have the old layout back, where its algorithm picked which stories to highlight in my News Feed (the central update list on the homepage for registered users). It was far easier to make sense of what’s happening on the site, especially with over 1,000 “friends” there, when Facebook prioritized the updates that were mutually of interest to a number of my connections. Now, it’s a fire hose, spewing out everything.

Yet Facebook has one feature I absolutely love, and I wish Twitter, LinkedIn, Plaxo, and others would copy: the “hide” button. There are many people I want to be friends with on Facebook to stay in touch, see what events they’re going to, send birthday wishes, and that sort of thing. I’m fine giving these people access to my full profile, and once in awhile when I’m curious what they’re up to, I might want to view theirs. Yet I don’t need to hear from them on a daily basis. And if they post a few updates a day to the site, if not more, I really don’t need to be that close.

Enter the Hide button. In one click, they disappear from the News Feed, and their updates are gone for good. I can still see all the hidden posts, but now the hidden posts almost always outnumber the posts in my News Feed (especially because hidden posts are often from people who post excessively). I can alternatively hide updates from applications if I love the person but hate the app. That led to my recent Facebook update:

just took the Which Facebook Quiz Are You? quiz and found that he's the quiz that just LOOOOOOVES seeing his news feed overrun with Which ___ Are You quiz updates.

On Facebook, I’m feeling a greater sense of control. Hopefully that will get even easier on Twitter and other services too. On Twitter, there are people who I follow because I’m friends with them, or I want to be able to direct message them, but I don’t need all their updates. Increasingly, I’m choosing to break my ties with them, which creates other problems.

The Hide button, though, is elegant, efficient, and solves that information overload problem in the most user-friendly way I’ve seen – one that won’t harm any relationships in the process.

Update:

For further reading, see Jeremy Epstein's take, calling the hide button the "Facebook's line item veto."

Could Facebook Out-Google the Google?

Image via CrunchBase

I can't get into great detail on this today, but this story's huge and worth a read:

Ad Age: Facebook Sending More Traffic Than Google to Some Sites

Marketers spend billions to attract search traffic from Google, but late last year Facebook started becoming a bigger source of traffic for some large websites, according to analytics firm Hitwise.

...Since the beginning of the year, Facebook has become a bigger referring site than Google to a        number of sites, including gossip sites PerezHilton.com and Dlisted, mom site CafeMom, Evite, video site Tagged.com, and, yes, Twitter...

Since the beginning of 2009, gossip site PerezHilton.com has received 8.7% of its visitors from Facebook, compared with 7.6% from Google, according to Hitwise. 

I'm not saying Facebook's the Google killer du jour (perish the cliche). But marketers do pay close attention to this. Heck, I do. You know when I started getting really into Twitter? It was when Twitter surpassed Yahoo as the #2 referrer to my blog (behind Google). I suspect some day it will be #1. And that was before I was really into Twitter.

This stuff matters, and I will spend more time writing about this soon, but I welcome your comments in the meantime so we can start a dialogue.

How to Brace for the Facebook Page Redesign - new in Ad Age's Digital Next blog

Image via CrunchBase

I've got another contribution to Ad Age's Digital Next blog today, this one on the Facebook Page redesign and how that's going to affect marketers.

Here are a few tips from the post:

• Upload photos and videos more often so that the update appears on the wall on the main page screen.
• Update the page regularly. Now much of the value will come from posting updates to the page itself and changing the status, rather than sending messages directly to all of the page's fans.
• Consider tests of sending consumers to different tabs to see which ads perform better.

There are more tips and lots more context in the original post, so read it on Ad Age to learn more, and share your feedback in the comments here, there, on Twitter (follow me at @dberkowitz), or anywhere else you see fit..

Eteku Elemi, Please Stop Sending Me Nigerian Scam Spam on Facebook

So, you thought Facebook was all about personal identities and relationships, right? Well, now a Mr. (or Ms.?) Eteku Elemi is sending me spam on Facebook, and he (or she) doesn't even send me a friend request to go along with it.

This is the first time I've seen the Nigerian scam on Facebook. This won't scale as well as email as Facebook is a controlled system as opposed to the openness of email, but it's also one new added annoyance - each new communications channel is one new channel to get spammed and scammed.

Below's the snapshot of the email; the full text is in the extended entry.

Update: Minutes after I first viewed the email, I went back to it (with plans of sending a snarky response) and the "reply" box disappeared. Facebook worked very fast to clamp down communications. Yes, someone could theoretically reply to Eteku's Hotmail account, but this was quick work on Facebook's part.

Facebook Page SEO: Will It Matter?

Image by sitmonkeysupreme via FlickrToday I posted an entry on 360i's blog relating to search engine optimization on Facebook. I'm not going to repost the whole thing, but it's an interesting issue, one I've been discussing quite a bit with my colleague Mike Levin. The post includes quotes of mine from MediaPost's coverage of the story.

The impetus for the latest discussion is that Facebook now will include links to Pages (the stuff you say you're a fan of) in public profile listings. Public profile listings are indexed by Google. Google likes links. More links means (to oversimplify it) better search rankings. Do the dots all connect?

There are a few key things you should pay attention to:

1. There are no guarantees that this will have a major SEO boost. The more I dive into this, the more it's apparent that Facebook is guilty of so many worst practices. That can change, but SEO is not high on their priority list.
2. We also don't know how many fans are needed to really rev up the Facebook Page rankings.
3. If the answer to #2 is "a lot," then marketers will have to really earn those fans, so there will be some cost/benefit analysis around that. Do you spend the manpower along with a potential Facebook media buy to push these Pages and get the SEO value, or do you invest resources elsewhere?

Meanwhile, here's some of the coverage from 360i's blog. Click to read the complete entry on Facebook SEO:

If you’ve ever done some vanity searching in Google (come on, admit it) and you have profiles on a number of sites, you probably found that your LinkedIn page, Flickr account, and other links come up before Facebook. We were doing a lot of vanity searching in the office yesterday to test this out, and Facebook links were out there, but generally buried.

Some of this was addressed in MediaPost:

…Potential traffic gains for branded Pages from search engine listings could be limited by Facebook’s lack of focus on search engine optimization. “The way links on Facebook are structured right now, they don’t have the type of permanence that search engines are looking for,” said David Berkowitz, director of emerging media and client strategy at search engine marketing firm 360i.

He continued: “Facebook does evolve pretty quickly, but so far they’ve been a little behind the curve when it comes to SEO.”

.

Facebook's Jewdar Strikes Again

I can't avoid it. Facebook's Jewdar is too damn strong. Maybe I should give up and put my religion on my profile already, and then drape my profile in an Israeli flag. Once again, I'm getting pinned as Jewish there.

See the ad below. I already reached out to them to find out more.

Update: I sent a lengthy note asking the proprietors of NYCHighHolidays.com about their ad targeting, and they sent me this one-word response: "random." I'm assuming that refers to their ad targeting, and not the nature of my question. They probably get a lot of random questions, like if you can bring Pomeranians to services, and where to get good deals on lox for break-the-fast dinner.

I really would like to see someone try a little bit harder to ferret out the Jews. Maybe soon you'll be able to target fans of The Great Schlep - but then again, all my black friends who've mentioned it to me like it as much as any Jews I know (and a couple of the racist Jews I know don't find it funny at all).

Related posts:

• How Does Facebook Know I'm Jewish?
• The Chutzpah of Facebook's Jewdar
• Facebook's Jewdar Blackout