by Kristen Nicole on March 3, 2010
How does the advertising industry get more involved with social media? By making a deal. Omniture has strengthened its partnership with Facebook to allow for the retrieval and study of more consumer data surrounding the behavior of Facebook users. The idea is to extend more optimized solutions for marketers looking to tap into Facebook’s large and still-growing user base.
The deal will first focus on the automation of Facebook media-buying, as well as providing access to analytics measuring customer engagement. The idea, however, is for the two companies to expand their relationship even further down the line. According to TechCrunch, that could very well mean some enhancements to Onmiture’s SearchCenter Plus, which is a client search engine tool for marketing management. It aids in purchasing Facebook Ads that will offer the best return for advertisers on the vast social network.
Acquired by Adobe for $1.8 billion last year, Omniture will also be able to offer side-by-side metrics for Facebook and its other media channels, giving greater recommendations on how to best spread a given marketing campaign within the social media realm. This is a powerful tool for marketers, as the ability to dig into the data surrounding consumer behavior is a major obstacle towards the development of social media-integrated advertising.
As the very nature of advertising changes with the growing adoption of social media, consumer data and behavior is key to segmenting the necessary demographics. With advertising having to take on new methods of accessing users effectively, there will need to be more cooperation from the soical networks themselves. Of course, this really just boils down to Facebook being able to better monetize its users and their activity. All that free social networking going on, something’s gotta give.
More and more advertisers and brands are seeking ways in which to creatively integrate their message with user activity, which can sometimes be quite convenient on the users’ end. Other times, as with Facebook Beacon, the users fight back with a vengance. As Facebook continuously seeks the medium between its own initatives and the concerns of its consumers, there’s always room for improvement and backlash.
Yet deeper analytics for Facebook activity is increasingly important as Facebook looks to centralize even more of your behavior on the site. Facebook has already launched a hefty virtual goods marketplace, and it’s now looking to implement a site-wide currency that would simplify and aggregate a lot of what’s already taking place on its platform. In many ways this is a good development, particularly as such centralization makes it easier for users to interact with Facebook apps, as well as each other.
by Kristen Nicole on February 19, 2010
Many of MySpace’s former users have migrated to Facebook over the past couple of years. Could RootMusic cause a similar push for music industry artists and bands? A new tool called BandPages is being launched by the startup, creating an automated process for creating a Facebook fan page. Artists and bands can use the new tool to quickly establish a Facebook presence, with just a few clicks. RootMusic plans on launching the full BandPages service some time next month.
BandPages works by letting you sign in with Facebook Connect, eliminating the need to create a new or separate account just for RootMusic. Use photos you already have in your Facebook albums, and set up your public fan page for yourself or your band. This only works, of course, if you already have a Facebook profile established, with photos already uploaded to your account.
The idea behind BandPages is that there’s no need for much hassel to go into the creation of an extended web presence that promotes you as an artist, or your band. The tools you need are most likely already online, so why not tap into those? As Facebook is already well-adopted across the world, there’s a good chance you already have your content here as well. If you’re looking to create a public fan page to better promote your music brand, what better place to go than Facebook?
The migrating of music professionals to Facebook also indicates the ongoing demise of MySpace, as the previously dominating social network struggles to return to its core competencies. While MySpace still has a large user base and a great deal of attention that’s still directing traffic to its users’ music profiles, the business of social media marketing can be archived in different ways with the use of Facebook.
When it comes to marketing, Facebook makes the leveraging of social media that much easier for users. While MySpace has been developing tools similar to Facebook Connect for this very purpose, Facebook continues to reign as far as its social media platform goes. The standards Facebook has established keep things like sharing information relatively streamlined and effective forms of communication amongst users.
The simplicity of a tool such as BandPages also draws on the need for products to take their own overarching approach to making things easier for end consumers. BandPages is looking to address a growing need for a specific industry, one which is turning to the web for the bulk of their marketing practices. The automation of this particular process by RootMusic is even one that can be applied to a number of niche groups, many of which would plan on marketing their brand via Facebook as well.
The next step for RootMusic’s BandPages product would be the development of analytics, to demonstrate how a fan page is performing and how it can be made more effective. As far as Facebook limitations are concerned, there is only so much RootMusic would be able to offer in the analytics department, but this is a growing interest for several third party apps. We’re likely to see the market develop in the coming year, for Facebook and other platforms as well.
by Kristen Nicole on February 18, 2010
Online networking privacy is a huge concern right now, especially for Facebook and Google. Both companies have been facing a good amount of backlash for some of their recent product launches, including the new Facebook and Google Buzz. With all the ado about privacy concerns, both Facebook and Google are taking steps to regain user trust and deal with the can of worms they opened.
Facebook, which revealed a new set of default privacy settings late last year, has spent the last few weeks amending the rather open sharing policies that the new site features. This week, the social network has updated the privacy settings around third party apps, letting users determine settings for individual apps. Before, you could set the privacy settings for all third party Facebook apps, essentially making them all equal in how they’re shared throughout your social graph. Now, you can manage settings for each individual app, indicating how you want each app to interact via your Facebook profile.
The change is quite similar to what Facebook did with profile postings, which first had overarching settings as well. Now you’re able to have a more detailed set of options for individual posts shared on your profile wall, meaning each item shared comes with its own privacy settings. In all, it appears that Facebook is reverting to a more customizable approach to sharing on Facebook, creating standards around each item shared instead of the standards being focused on your relationship standing with other users.
Combining the two major facets of socializing on Facebook, users are able to manage their relationships through their sharing activity, which is more fluid and realistic to the way in which our relationships play out in life. It’s a tight rope walk, for sure, but it’s Facebook’s thing. Returning to that principle is likely a good move for Facebook.
Hopefully Google Buzz can learn a lesson or two from Facebook’s recent mistakes. The public default settings have caused a huge uproar and even a class action law suit, which Google now has to deal with. Google has already made changes to the way in which Google Buzz interacts with your email contacts, though it may have a few additional tweaks to make in order to reach a happy medium for its own objectives and the desires of its users.
That happy medium is what makes things to tricky to navigate for the likes of FAcebook and Google. In pushing out new features that will help the companies reach their ultimate goals and achieve higher monetization, th consumers are sometimes left wondering why things have changed so drastically and with what seems to be little regard for their own concerns.
Facebook knows first hand how this can affect a company’s relationship with its user base, as its news feed feature first received a great deal of backlash but soon became a primary means of communicating the stories of our personal lives. Figuring out when a company knows better than its consumers is a tough problem to work out, so we’re likely to see ongoing changes made to Facebook and Google’s integrated Apps as users continue to recognize the compromises they’re making for the convenience of centralized social networking activity.
by Kristen Nicole on February 5, 2010
Search is where it’s at on Facebook. Moving even further away from display ads, Microsoft has announced it will no longer be selling them on the Facebook site at all. The move was accompanied by the announcement that Microsoft will also be using Bing as the default for web search on Facebook on a global scale, pushing beyond the current U.S. restrictions outlined by their existing partnership.
Microsoft has said in a blog post that the decision to stop selling display ads on Facebook was a mutual decision, and that Microsoft would like to focus on the aspects of Facebook advertising that make sense. As Microsoft has already shared its plans to expand its current Bing offering on Facebook, it appars as though search may have a lot to do with the monetization of Facebook and related advertising options.
Right now Microsoft Bing is still rolling out new features on a regular basis, seeking additional adoption from web users and mobile users alike. Upon launch, Bing was already rather inclusive as far as features go, with a multimedia approach to search that also leveraged the social web more directly than Google. Incorporating Twitter and Facebook into their long term search plans indicates Microsoft’s hopes around the social web as they pertain to its own investment in Facebook.
Bing’s search results on Facebook, however, are pretty dismal. Going along with Facebook’s simple format for displaying information, it’s difficult to even tell that it’s a Bing search. Unlike the vibrancy of Bing’s main search portal, Bing results on Facebook are merely a series of links. That’s archaic compared to most search engine’s increasing ability to better contextualize search data. This is particularly notable as far as Bing is concerned, as its move towards contextual search results is one way in which Microsoft could be looking to out-do Google.
This process of contextualizing search data has been an ideal attached to the potential of social networking platforms, with Facebook leading the race. As Facebook continues to open up its platform towards more default public sharing, Microsoft’s Bing is leveraging that publicly-shared information to provide more relative search results in some cases. Tying search into more aspects of our actual Facebook experience can be another way in which an improved Bing presence on the social network could be used to Microsoft’s advantage.
The old tactic of becoming a default tool across as many partnering services as possible is one that Microsoft is now able to better employ on web-related platforms, particularly Facebook. With the social network claiming over 375 million users now, accessing those users on such a large scale could be a major benefit for Microsoft Bing.
Come on, Twitter – we liked Tweet!