Stories are In, Tabs are Out

By now everyone will be aware that by the end of this month Facebook will be rolling out some major changes across all brand pages.

So just what are these changes and what do they mean for people managing brand pages?

Layout – All brand pages will soon adopt the new timeline layout that has already been rolled out across our personal profile pages. These changes seem to be about offering more options to convey the brand’s identity with the ability to load a larger cover image across the top of the page, and the ability to load retrospective company milestones to the timeline ie. company ‘birth’ date or key product launches.

There are also a number of cool new features that have been introduced to the wall, my favourite being the ability to ‘pin’ an important wallpost to the top of your wall so that key wallposts maintain premium positioning on the wall. You can also highlight certain important wallposts along your timeline to span the full width of your wall which could be used to highlight a certain milestone or successful campaign. Primarily it will be potential new fans who are considering liking the page, who will benefit from these new features, rather than existing fans who tend to do most of their interaction with brands from within their own news feeds.

Page Tabs – One of the biggest changes for me is the death of the default homepage tab. I can no longer set a tab or application as my default homepage, which was useful during a campaign when using a promo tab or launching an application. This is where the new wallpost features ie. ‘pinned posts’ will become very handy. Obviously you will still be able to direct ads straight to a tab or app’s unique URL, but it can no longer be the first port of call for new visitors finding their way to your page by other means. This was done possibly to discourage the practice of fan-gating entry to a page.

In addition, tabs and apps will no longer be given prominence down the left-hand menu of a page. These will instead display along the top right-hand side of a brand page, where four customisable icons will represent the four key tabs for a brand page, with the rest to feature within a dropdown menu.

Why the reduced emphasis on apps and tabs? There seems to be an attempt to move away from anything that draws people away from the wall, where most social interaction happens between fans and brands, bringing the focus back to brand ‘stories’.

Messaging - Another feature that will help brands to manage the conversations on their wall is the ability for fans to message pages directly. This allows the opportunity for pages to take certain conversations - of maybe a more customer service nature - offline, and will also help to minimise timeline ‘clutter’.

Overall the changes seem promising, pushing pages to focus more on creating and sharing great content that people are going to want to share and interact with. Now that the page designs have been standardised, it will be great content that will help your brand page to stand out, without any fan gates or apps to hide behind.

The Sky is Falling....

And in breaking news:

“ComScore Study finds 31% of Display Ads Never Seen”

“UH, OH! Facebook Pages Only Reach 17% Of Fans”

Crikey, I thought over my morning cuppa. We are all doomed. Or are we? Let’s break it down:

The only real new news here is the ‘31%’ in the headline. We all know that a percentage of ads are never seen and that’s ok because there are lots of perfectly relevant reasons for this. We all know CPC media buys deliver squillions of impressions and no-one really expects that every single one of them will be seen. Because the buy is based on clicks, wastage isn’t an issue.

As for ad impressions being delivered outside of geographic areas – well duh. We all know that ad serving isn’t an exact science and that some networks aren’t that rigorous with their targeting.

At the end of the day, if you want a guarantee that your ads will be seen (as much as there is a guarantee) then you need to pay for premium placements in contextually relevant environments. Media Planning 101 is to ensure you have the right mix of high reach/low cost placements which deliver cost effectiveness and premium, contextually relevant placements that deliver awareness and give the campaign a presence. The split is different for each brand/campaign, but a good starting point is 60/40 (and which way round that goes will depend on whether your objectives are awareness or response).

Anyhoo – its all a bit of a moot point as the real story behind this is ComScore’s announcement that they have launched a new “Validated Campaign Essentials” report which in a nutshell reports back on campaign wastage.

So on to the headline that Facebook pages only reach 17% of fans. If some of the brand pages I ‘like’ are anything to go by, this is also no surprise. For a start, some of the “content” they offer is so offputting I have ended up in the -5% propensity to buy category more than once. Secondly – the sheer volume of content appearing on my wall in any 24 hour period is overwhelming. And I don’t even have that many friends.

If you are managing a brand page on Facebook it’s essential to have an always on media budget set aside to support the page outside of wider campaign activity. Your campaign budgets should be used primarily to grow connections so that your always on budget can be used to build engagement through judicious and clever use of the sponsored stories product.

What I loved about the blog was the insight into a reporting metric we could all do with keeping an eye on – “average post visibility”. I’ll be adding this to our reporting metrics from here on in. And we could all do with keeping the “Tips for Solving Facebook Post Visibility Problems” close at hand.

So, I can get on with my work today in the safe knowledge that the sky is in fact not falling. Not today at least.

When 'Likes' are not Loves

We’ve all had the brief:  the client wants to build a fan base on Facebook (new or existing), and we must challenge the audience with new and exciting (as well as tried and tested) advertising avenues to achieve this goal.  Basically, the client wants more Facebook Likes.  The success of the campaign is measured in Likes, often exclusively.

But what does this actually mean for the client, to have more people Liking their brand page?  PHDiQ attended the MSN Digital Marketing Summit in Auckland in November, and many of the speakers emphasised the role social media plays in advertising.  Thomas Scovell (Clemenger BBDO) discussed the idea that “Likes don’t equal sales” which is something we should consider when planning campaigns (see clips of his speech as well as others here).

BBDO in the United States recently conducted a study that found people who Like a brand on Facebook are anywhere between +40% to -5% likely to spend money on the brand product.  So while Likes certainly drive some sales, many people probably never look at the page again, having Liked it on a whim.  And some people are -5% less likely to buy the product than they were in the first place (most likely due to irrelevant brand page posts, or being bombarded by posts).

Carrie Hill has written an interesting blog post on how Likes can be misconstrued.  She talks about how some companies are being paid to generate Likes which are redundant, and the negative effects of redundant or ‘fluff’ status updates.  She also mentions that the bounce rate skyrockets by up to 600% when status updates are made which are unrelated to the brand.  You can read her full blog here.

Nobody is suggesting that Likes are useless in terms of brand awareness and pushing sales; but sometimes a Facebook Like is used as a measure of success, when in fact the Like is doing nothing for the brand, or even worse than nothing.

2012, The year of.....

It’s that time of year when digital pundits are busy making their picks for the year ahead.

A variety of terms have been bandied around across the last decade: The year of mobile (over and over again), the year of social, the year of gaming, the year of online video etc

So what does 2012 hold in store from a digital perspective?

Mashable recently published their predictions for 2012. They expect to see growth for Smart TV’s and TV apps, big moves in motion gaming, Google + to break 100m users and mobile to become a key media channel and payment tool.

You can view the full article here: http://mashable.com/2012/01/05/mashables-digital-predictions-for-2012

Forbes.com interviewed 15 US based CMO’s of top consumer brands to get their digital predictions for 2012. They expect to see mobile become a much more important part of the overall media mix, social media to become a cornerstone of brands’ marketing strategies, and ‘good content’ to become much more important to digital campaigns:

The full article is published at the following address: http://www.forbes.com/sites/marketshare/2012/01/05/cmo-predictions-for-2012-part-1-dominos-motorola-progressive-radioshack-say-its-mobile-mobile-mobile/

Millward Brown also expect mobile to become increasingly important and predict that the mobile wallet and mobile ‘location based marketing’ will become a reality in 2012. They also expect to see strong growth in social TV (effectively social tools, technologies and platforms that allow people to interact with TV programmes, and other viewers of those programmes) and changing attitudes to online privacy.

A link to the article is as follows: http://www.litmanlive.co.uk/blog/2012/01/top-12-digital-predictions-for-2012-by-millward-brown/

As you can see mobile is again a common theme for 2012. This is understandably so given the growth in smartphone/tablet penetration, the fact that mobile data is becoming more affordable and media owners are getting better at adapting their content to mobile devices.

If NZ media owners and adserving providers can continue to invest in their mobile offering it could become a key part of the overall media mix.

Who knows, the year of mobile may not be so far away after all.

Email - Productivity tool or time waster?

A French company recently announced it was banning internal email and in typical French fashion, without a trace of irony, it is an IT company.

It an interesting experiment. Sure there is a certain amount of correspondence that needs to be documented [in our industry rate agreements, approvals, amendments], but the majority of these are external and even then probably don't account for more than a small fraction of the daily deluge.

Actual conversations are so important in an industry built on relationships. And unless you are a secretary on Mad Men, talking is immeasurably faster than typing.

So, before you send that email, pick up the phone, or go for a stroll. Have a chat and let serendipity take its course. Some of the best ideas come from an idle chat around the photocopier...

Move Over Justin Bieber!

Google have today released the 2011 Zeitgeist listing the hottest search terms Kiwi’s searched for this year.

It is of no surprise that the Rugby World Cup made the top of the list as the fastest rising search term of 2011. A much bigger upset though would be that of Sonny Bill Williams trumping Justin Bieber off the number 1 spot as the most searched for image on google.co.nz - and it doesn’t end there. SBW also made the top 10 in the News search, Newsmakers and Fastest Rising People categories!

Besides rugby, Kiwis were also searching for information on the Japanese earthquake, the notorious, bunless Double Down burger and the Nek Minute video on Youtube.

The global search list is set to be released next week. Check out the top search terms in New Zealand here.

The Evolution of Google

Google has come a long, long way since 1996 – from the research project it was then, to the search engine power house it is today. The search giant recently released a 6 minute video encapsulating 15 years of evolution, highlighting its key milestones and possibilities for the future.

The video comes as a follow-up to one Google posted in August this year, shedding some light into the “methodology” behind search ranking and evaluation.

Underpinning Google’s efforts to revolutionise search is their goal to “get you to the answer you’re looking for faster and faster, creating a nearly seamless connection between your questions and the information you seek. That means you don’t generally need to know about the latest search feature in order to take advantage of it.” (Ben Gomes, Google Fellow)

As part of this release, Google also created a timeline of search features.

In our opinion, the most significant changes to Google AdWords came by way of enhancements to their standard paid search ad format with the inclusion of the advertisers domain name, or description line as part of the ad title and more recently, the shift from displaying ads on to the right of Google’s organic search results to below the last organic listing.

Other improvements worthy of mention include the introduction of Image Search ads which resulted in ads similar to paid search ads, but including an image thumbnail displayed above of search results. Also, the inclusion of Google Local resulted in Location Extensions; which provided advertisers with the ability to feed store information, Click to Call functionality and Maps integration within their ads.

Perhaps the most exciting development was the introduction of ‘blended search’, whereby a combination of the above ad formats as well as video content from websites such as YouTube was offered to searchers, providing a more comprehensive and interesting search results page.

Who knows what Google will come up with next?!