Welcome to my blog on Content Intelligence and Engagement Performance; I have spent years in collaboration, messaging and social space developing advanced technologies to improve the consumer experience and lead generation. Was inducted into the Viral Hall of Fame by Marketing Sherpa as well as other industry awards. Join me in the conversation.

Sunday, May 9, 2010

Ready for Social Relevancy & Facebook Open Graph?


With all the hype over on Facebook launch of Like and Open Graph, it is time for me to highlight areas that marketers have to consider besides just dropping in a widget or a plug-in on their pages. Facebook has opened big opportunities in information discovery, consumer opt-in, expanding Social CRM (SCRM) and increasing Social Density around your brand. SCRM has now expanded beyond social listening and seeing your consumer overlaps with vertical products to a whole new level. Below is a great example of how to identify consumers that match other brand preferences and expand reach through loyalty.

With Open Graph, users now don't just become a "fan" of a brand, band, sport, or style of music. They will simply decide whether they "Like" something. By using the "Like" button or making a “comment” on a site, users automatically authorize Facebook to publish this information on their profiles or their friend's news feeds. Below are examples of categories listed in the Facebook Open Graph API. Plug-ins provided by Facebook allow the segmenting of friends who "Like" something by publisher.




Facebook Object types currently supported:


This provides much greater access to user information, but the majority of companies don’t really know what to do to enhance the social velocity of their brands. Since greater access carries greater responsibility in consumer privacy protection, brands must offer a level of transparency to assure integrity.

As of last check, Facebook has added nearly 300 website "Like" buttons per hour and now over 100K. Marketers are salivating over Facebook's 500+ million users but without a clear way to comprehend what is information is available and how to maximize their conversational presence. The publishers are organized by top level categories enabling network based content interaction across many publishers.

The vision here is to build a network of discovery tools and information that operates at a higher level than search. The goals are to answer questions for users. What are my friends doing? Where are they eating? What do they recommend? This clearly doesn’t eliminate the need for search, but it does represent an alternative way in which to discover information. For This will make it easier for marketing professionals, who will have yet another set of content connections to manage, to make sense of the new services.


The mountain of data that Facebook will gain is going to improve the site's search capabilities as well as integration of Bing. For example, if Facebook knows the most “Liked” Caribbean restaurants in Miami and my friends like these same restaurants, the site can show that information in my search results. This hypothetically makes Facebook search much more social, turning the site into more of a "recommendation engine” than Google in its current state.

This is all speculation for the moment. Since Facebook doesn’t have a really good search experience, it remains less useful than Google. However, it is possible to imagine much improved Bing integration combined with data and metadata gleaned from millions of profiles and “Likes” across the internet — making Facebook a more personal, more social and much better “discovery engine” than it is today.
This social discovery also applies to Brands and consumers sharing links about where they are or what they are Twittering about is a bonanza for smart marketers who want to be more in tuned to the audience they service.

Viral link sharing in the context of social density of who is sharing what provides a MUCH better discovery experience for Brands that want to understand their social ecosystem and the relationship between consumers who want to find people interested in the same topics. This radically different approach disrupts old ways of searching over a massive web-based indexes welded to link structure. By zeroing in on collective group movement, viral link sharing provides greater relevance to all parties. Twitter and Facebook reflect what’s resonating among the community affinity matrix right now.

I’m working on this real-time aspect of leveraging brand ranking and social preferences to understand social resonance and relevancy of a particular fan page and linked content that a key audience is collectively resonating around. We now have the ability to determine relevance of a page beyond the number of links it has.

Influencers are interacting with content and sharing links all the time. The Social Syndication Acceleration is based on the number of shared and the influence Rank of the person sharing the links. Google-style search is based on web links and document content where as real-time search is linked to what people are talking about now and provides radically different search results for users who are linked to brands/tribes.

Also see Trend: Social CRM Consolidation

@ChaseMcMichael


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