Nudge Social Media

Why use Facebook to market your brand…

sarah — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 14:19:48 +0000

Essentially because everyone is doing it and if you don’t you will be left behind!

Brands are embracing the Facebook fan page as a way to market online and to engage their customers. With Facebook membership soaring to unbelievable levels, now 500 million users worldwide, there is no wonder that brands are harnessing the power of social media to market their wares.

Here are some features the fan page has: they are visible to unregistered people and are thus indexed, you can host a discussion, there is a discussion wall, a discussion forum, extra applications can be added, you can message all members, you can get visitor statistics, there is public exchange of video and photos to name but a few.
Coca Cola has an unbelievable 7,219,810 fans! The Hangover film has 5,428,923 fans, Red Bull has 6,054,643, Disney has 4,323,163 fans and Ben and Jerry’s - 1,313,604 fans. Quite astounding I think you’d agree.
If top brands are embracing Facebook fan pages then this must be telling us something. It seems to be a winning formula; you can communicate with your customers via a platform they use regularly, in their language, engage them and at the same time get some free stats on customer demographics which is all very valuable. There is a wealth of information. It’s a marketers dream! We’re all for it her eat Nudge, of course.

Social media – it’s a two-way street!

sarah — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 09:52:43 +0000

Using Facebook to market your brand is a new and wondrous thing! However, it’s not something that you can do on a one off basis. It takes a serious investment of time to create a genuine two-way relationship.
Social media after all is about interaction. If your brand wants to use social media then it must be aware that this is what customers are expecting. They do not want to see a wall full of static adverts and generic brand tag lines. They want dynamic and fun content. They want to be entertained at the heart of it.
It’s also not advisable to leave the management of your social media campaigns/Facebook fan page to a junior. Any communications sent out are in real-time and so mistakes can not be made. The manager of the page must be well versed in what your brand stands for and know what constitutes an acceptable message to put out in the public domain. Once this is understood, however, let the love flow!

If you’re not on facebook, you’re not invited!

sarah — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 14:59:55 +0000

Now that almost everyone has a Facebook account, understanding how different people use
it, and how it has changed the way we interact with others in the real world, may lead to a
better understanding of human social nature, and help see the effects Facebook will have on
our lives in the future.
One of the big differences in usage of Facebook is the way it has become an integral part of
some people’s lives and just a toy for others, this could be because of many factors such as
age, access to internet or a user’s outlook on life. Age is a good example as the difference
is easily seen when contrasting elder users with young users; the elderly (if on Facebook at
all) tend to use Facebook in ways that they understand, to send messages and sometimes
upload pictures like a message board, and who spend relatively few hours on Facebook.
Contrast this with many teen users who, with a greater grasp of virtual concepts and more
internet knowhow, spend large amounts of time on Facebook, commenting, sending invites,
creating events, groups and “Facebook stalking”. These users rely heavily on Facebook for
their social lives and lack of access can restrict access to things in real life. An example of
this is my own experience with social events. One of my friends I don’t see often was having
a BBQ, I was invited via Facebook but had never before used the events part of Facebook
so never saw the invitation and missed a supposedly “Killer feed”. Even only a year ago
things would have been different, I would have got a text message regarding the event.
Facebook had a real effect on my life regardless of whether I chose it or not, in a way forcing
me to log on to get access to my own friends.
The move to use Facebook for notification of events is just one of the ways Facebook is
changing how we interact with others. For example Facebook is now the way I communicate
with my friends, when only a year ago I would have been emailing them. If I take photos
now, I post the best ones to Facebook because I know my friends are there to view them.
It has given me a new way to interact with my friends and family that I never had before.
The increase in connectivity has opened up access to more social groups and events but at
the same time has come at the cost of human interaction. For example because of the ease
in which I can contact and interact with some friends, I less frequently see them in real life.
Facebook is now so big there would be an outcry were it to disappear or change too
drastically, it is moving to replace many of the social interaction humans have established
in the past and it is important for us understand this so we have some measure of control
over our social networks. Some people may like or dislike these changes, but is a reality of
a future in which we are all connected through the giant that is Facebook.

Nabil Boag

12 leading marketing tools for Facebook Fan Pages

toby — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 15:41:22 +0000

A helpful list of some of the more well known third party Social Media Marketing and Monitoring (“SoMeMaMo”) tools available for running marketing campaigns on Facebook:

Awareness - broad social media marketing tool
Buddy Media - complete package including apps for tabs
Clearspring - container app for brand content
Context Optional – Complete package including apps for tabs
Conversocial - fan page moderation
Gigya – container app for flash content
Involver - tab apps and amp campaign management hub
Liveworld - ”discussion forum” moderation tool now offering moderation on Facebook walls
Sendible – publishing platform
SocialTalk - Syncapse’s enterprise publishing tool with tracking
Spredfast - publishing platform
Wildfire - brand promotions app

It’s still too early to point to a runaway winner but I hope this list helps you in your own search for a great tool to run your marketing campaign.

At Nudge we can either integrate your campaign with one of the tools above or create a bespoke solution. Bespoke solutions, like a dedicated CMS, while more expensive, offer better integration into a companies processes and allow greater campaign flexibility.

Feel free to suggest further packages in the comments below.

What to expect on the Google Games platform?

toby — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 14:01:22 +0000

Ok, so the rumour mill has a mega social games platform launch coming soon Google Games with a Zynga inspired.

It’s hard to see where Google will be able to add value over Facebook but I suspect they will have a few new tricks up their sleeve.

What can we expect to see:

- Google Buzz for game status updates (Toby is now a Senior Executive on Powerbrands)

- Google Waves within gameplay - integrating with Wave might spawn new types of Mafia Wars style collaborative social games, i.e. planning a mob raid using a Wave

- Google Chat / Voice / Gmail for friend to friend notifications (”You’ve been sent a chicken on Farmville”)

- Using your Google ID to log in - time to dust off that old gmail account!

Well the future is as ever uncertain. But one thing is for sure, this is big competition for Facebook itself, in a very hot vertical.

Contact me direct if you’d like to work with us to get on the launch list.

Nudge win London Hackathon as judged by Mark Zuckerberg

toby — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 13:51:42 +0000

Toby, Mark, Iskandar and Geoff at the Facebook Garage London

Ever tried to go to a Facebook party and found the tube lines were down? Our entry in the recent Facebook Developer Garage London Hackathon saves you the pain.

The hackathon gave us 5 hours to write a cool Facebook app that used the new Open Graph API Facebook recently unveiled.

TubeWarning (http://www.tubewarning.com) checks your Facebook events and two hours before an event checks the tube lines for you. If they are down you get a nice email telling you what the problems are. Nice, simple and it just works.

Mark Zuckerberg said to me the next day “I told David Cameron about your app this morning, and he thought it was pretty cool!”.

Cool indeed. Thanks Mark!

Toby presents on stage

Tube Warning in action - thanks to the winning team which consisted of Pankaj Naug, Rafal Wieczorek and Steve Folkes.

A day spent on Nudge marketed products

toby — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 02:15:14 +0000

So I wondered what would a day be like in a world where Nudge projects dictated all I did?

I woke up to the cool sounds of Theory of a Dead Man’s song I Hate My Life, not the best start so I put on my Last.fm radio play list and felt much better. Breakfast was a Caffe Americano care of Dolce Gusto, and a some chocolaty MIkado’s.

I left for the office, using the London Tube, Tube Warning told me it would be okay to travel today. On the way I enjoyed a Geisha chocolate bar from a friend in Sweden.

At work as an RAF Careers officer, I found I had a bit of downtime so I got out my PlayStation for a game of God of War and a bit of Little Big Planet thrown in. Lunch time was a rush so we headed out to the local TenPin for some bowling with the lads and I used my Mastercard to pay for the food. I shared the photos on Facebook and stored the high res version for printing out later on Photobox using Super Photos.

On the way back I popped in to Carphone Warehouse to enquire about a new O2 contract and came out with a PSP fully loaded with all my favourite Comics. I shared out a few Mikado sticks with friends at the office while we shared a refreshing Cornetto ice cream to cool off in the sun. One of my colleagues is running the Marathon so I gave him some money via JustGiving on Facebook and checked into Reckitt Benckiser’s PowerBrands game to improve my score.

At home it was Domino’s Pizza time watching Flash Forward with a delicious Baileys on ice. Time for some breath freshening Tic Tacs while catching up on the days activity on Sky News and checking CNN too. Creating a few Modnation racer tracks for friends meant I could just check my score on Nudge Social Value Index to see how I’d been doing on my Facebook score.

Not a bad day all in all.

Facebook Credits will be everywhere… how to get your business ready!

toby — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 09:20:59 +0000

Kids can soon update Facebook credits at Coinstar machines thanks to Rixty

Facebook Credits, the virtual cash associated with your Facebook account, has that frightening 3 m’s mix we see in the biggest technology hits:

momentum, it’s hardly even out of R&D (still available only to beta partners) but companies like Rixty are building it into Coinstar machines for kids to gain virtual credit with real pocket money.
monopoly, you can’t compete with it – it’s an easy extension of Facebook’s 500 million user near monopoly of the social graph. No other payment platform could build that many users so quickly.
meliority, it’s better than the rest. The smooth payment system (a few clicks) contrasts sharply with the “leave the shop, pay at the bank, return to the shop” payment experience we’ve come to expect. Some early adopters like Crowdstar have seen an ARPU jump of 50% despite the 30% transaction fee Facebook charge.

So what should we do to be ready you cry? Well you might want to start by requesting a copy of Nudge’s white paper on “the next online payment revolution – how Facebook credits will affect your business and how you can be prepared”.

Enterprise software for social media marketing

toby — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 16:57:06 +0000

The SoMeMa (Social Media Marketing) enterprise tool space is set to erupt over the next few months. Otherwise “acronym-ified” as SMMS, (that’s a great looking ETLA you got there -Ed. ) there’s a nice list here on Jerimiah Owyang’s blog.

Pretty comprehensive, but it misses out local player, Conversocial, which is a neat moderators solution for Facebook walls.

Nudge has been meeting with suppliers and evaluating all the technologies to identify the best in class and we’re skilled up to be able to integrate these tools into client business processes and systems.

Most tools take a channel agnostic approach ensuring they will continue to be of value whether messages are being pushed on a Facebook wall, twitter account or even a Foursquare tip.

So, whether it is

ensuring new posts follow an internal approval process,
moderating customer comments on a Facebook wall or
simply measuring social media marketing activity more precisely,

…these tools look to give early adopters breathing space in their busy and frenetic channels.

Take aways from the Facebook Developer Garage in London

guillaume — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 10:36:38 +0000

The Facebook Developer Garage held on Monday 21st June at the Barbican centre was probably the best one I have attended so far as Mark Zuckerberg and other senior figures from Facebook were present to give more information on where Facebook is heading and what their plans are for Europe.

So here is a list of the information we got throughout day:

Figures:

70% of Facebook users are not in the US, so Facebook has to start a real global push.

200 million gamers on Facebook playing 4 games on average per month

Now 26 million UK users (the UK is the second biggest market for Facebook)

300,00 websites have implemented the like button (50% are European websites)

More than 1 billion pieces of content are ‘liked’ every day

Social Gaming:

Facebook is the biggest gaming platform worldwide and had just launched the beginning of a revolution. As the CEO of Playfish said, we have only scratched the surface of social gaming.
Social gaming breaks down access barriers to the games people play, requiring nothing that a user doesn’t already have (e.g. Facebook account, mobile phone, and computer) - as opposed to a console: PS3/XBOX/Wii.
Facebook credits simplify micro-transactions, and there’s a social element too. Credits build trust so that when a user sees a payment request from an app they can see the friends that have trusted the service before.
Facebook credits are a key to profitability for the company. As Facebook takes a commission of 30% on any given transaction, it represents a strong revenue stream for the company.

Recommendations Features (Social Plugins):

Implement Amazon style recommendations on your website. The Recommendation Facebook social plugins offers new opportunities for brands to personalise the content of their website: it applies the Facebook engine to your website content (what everyone likes + what your friends like + what you liked before).

How Facebook Works as a Company:

First the great idea, then the monetisation plan. The company focuses on a great idea and monetisation will follow if it works, Facebook (even in its leaner days) didn’t think about monetisation until the idea had developed and succeeded on its own merits.
Facebook still perceives itself as a start up. Mark Zuckerberg kept saying that this was the beginning of the journey. And even when describing his company, he insisted they were still small, with a team of 30 engineers taking care of the platform and only one guy in charge of the chat function (which is the 2nd or 3rd biggest in the world).

Facebook in Europe:

Europe is a key territory for Facebook’s future expansion. As there are 140 millions Facebook users in Europe, it has become a market as vital as the US for the company. And as the penetration rate is lower, in the long run, Europe will overcome the US in terms of users. So by investing in Europe, it looks like Facebook plans to generate more revenue from here too.
Facebook is going to extend its European presence to strengthen its relationship with developers and agencies. It means more support for developers in Europe with engineers available on European time zones. This also involves more Facebook Developer Garages organised all over Europe.

Location Feature:

“Coming soon” was Mark Zuckerberg’s comment when the question was raised.

‘Liked’ by Everyone:

Everyone within the Nudge team liked Mark Zuckerberg. He is a lot more down to earth than he appears when he does public speaking.

What I found extremely interesting throughout the day was how Facebook CEOs insisted that what they have achieved so far it is just the beginning of the journey. So expect Facebook to become the social network of choice for 1 billion users, have one of the most demanded (virtual) currencies on the planet and be implemented on every website. Get used to it: Facebook will be the web.