Facebook Pages Timeline
AdAge: Facebook to release Facebook Timeline for Facebook Pages this month; http://eicker.at/FacebookPagesTimeline
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Gerrit Eicker
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Gerrit Eicker
The Public Facebook
Public Facebook: 845M MAUs, 483M DAUs in December – $3,7B revenue and $1B net income in 2011; http://eicker.at/PublicFacebook
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Gerrit Eicker
Facebook, Prospectus Summary: “Our mission is to make the world more open and connected. – People use Facebook to stay connected with their friends and family, to discover what is going on in the world around them, and to share and express what matters to them to the people they care about. – Developers can use the Facebook Platform to build applications (apps) and websites that integrate with Facebook to reach our global network of users and to build products that are more personalized, social, and engaging. – Advertisers can engage with more than 800 million monthly active users (MAUs) on Facebook or subsets of our users based on information they have chosen to share with us such as their age, location, gender, or interests. We offer advertisers a unique combination of reach, relevance, social context, and engagement to enhance the value of their ads. – We believe that we are at the forefront of enabling faster, easier, and richer communication between people and that Facebook has become an integral part of many of our users’ daily lives. We have experienced rapid growth in the number of users and their engagement. … We had 845 million MAUs as of December 31, 2011, an increase of 39% as compared to 608 million MAUs as of December 31, 2010. – We had 483 million daily active users (DAUs) on average in December 2011, an increase of 48% as compared to 327 million DAUs in December 2010. – We had more than 425 million MAUs who used Facebook mobile products in December 2011. – There were more than 100 billion friend connections on Facebook as of December 31, 2011. – Our users generated an average of 2.7 billion Likes and Comments per day during the three months ended December 31, 2011. … Revenue 2011: $3,711B, Net income 2011: $1B”
Facebook, Letter from Mark Zuckerberg: “Facebook was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a social mission – to make the world more open and connected. – We think it’s important that everyone who invests in Facebook understands what this mission means to us, how we make decisions and why we do the things we do. I will try to outline our approach in this letter. – At Facebook, we’re inspired by technologies that have revolutionized how people spread and consume information. We often talk about inventions like the printing press and the television – by simply making communication more efficient, they led to a complete transformation of many important parts of society. They gave more people a voice. They encouraged progress. They changed the way society was organized. They brought us closer together. – Today, our society has reached another tipping point. We live at a moment when the majority of people in the world have access to the internet or mobile phones – the raw tools necessary to start sharing what they’re thinking, feeling and doing with whomever they want. Facebook aspires to build the services that give people the power to share and help them once again transform many of our core institutions and industries. – There is a huge need and a huge opportunity to get everyone in the world connected, to give everyone a voice and to help transform society for the future. The scale of the technology and infrastructure that must be built is unprecedented, and we believe this is the most important problem we can focus on. – We hope to strengthen how people relate to each other. … We hope to improve how people connect to businesses and the economy. – We think a more open and connected world will help create a stronger economy with more authentic businesses that build better products and services. – As people share more, they have access to more opinions from the people they trust about the products and services they use. This makes it easier to discover the best products and improve the quality and efficiency of their lives.”
Jarvis: “Zuckerberg has his own, social version of Moore’s law – I call it Zuck’s law, though he doesn’t. It decrees: This year, people will share twice as much information as they did last year, and next year, they will share twice as much again. Facebook will expand to more users – from 750 million today to a billion soon? – and users will expand their sharing. Meanwhile, one Facebook investor, Yuri Milner, tells me that advances in artificial intelligence will get better and better at understanding and making use of all the service’s data. It has only just begun. ‘The default in society today still is, OK, I should not share it. The by far default today is that everything’s anonymous,’ Zuckerberg laments. ‘In the future, things should be tied to your identity, and they’ll be more valuable that way.’ There is the master plan.”
RWW: “Facebook shocked no one by filing an initial public offering of its shares today. – The filing was the first glimpse into the company’s inner financial workings and, as expected, Facebook said it would try to raise $5 billion when the company’s shares begins trading – a number that could eventually be raised to $10 billion and would ultimately value the company between $75 billion and $100 billion. – Today marks the day that Mark Zuckerberg goes from being the guy who makes world-changing technology to the guy who makes money. (He could be worth $20 billion when all is said and done). And it also means today is the day you stop being a Facebook user and become a Facebook customer. – That can mean good and bad things for you, the end user. But one thing is certain: Facebook will never be the same again. … A successful Facebook IPO means some restored faith in the social media space. That means more capital and more incentive for the next Zuckerberg to come along and create something earthshaking instead of finishing a degree at Harvard.”
Guardian: “The seismic nature of the Facebook IPO can hardly be oversold. The IPO creates a currency that will allow the company to buy whatever it needs to vertically integrate all the elements of its massive appetites – to be your wallet, your phone, your search engine, your company’s cash register, your entertainment portal, and your publishing platform, as well as your social life. And to do this all in a closed world of protocol enforcement, behavior monitoring and data gathering. – The technology business is an ever-expanding effort at monopoly and control: Microsoft sped past Apple to grab the desktop; Google sped past Microsoft to control the internet itself; Apple reappeared to control mobile devices. Now Facebook seeks to control pretty much … well, you. … That’s, of course, the ultimate Facebook sell: Mark Zuckerberg, a true American savant – Steve Jobs, but better even (and not so nasty) – has created a wholly-owned internet, which can not only monitor behavior but can encourage it, and regulate it, and dominate so much of it that Facebook inevitably becomes the platform for modern life.”
NYT: “With sharing at the center of Facebook, and the new new Web, analysts also wonder if the constant chatter will create too much white noise. As psychological barriers to sharing fall and companies become more deft at leveraging social media, there’s a legitimate concern that platforms, like Facebook, will be less valuable without the proper filters. User growth has slowed in some mature markets. – ‘What are the limits of sharing?’ said Ms. Yi, of the Altimeter Group. ‘At what point does the presence of all these partners on Facebook, all this sharing, begin to degrade the quality of the site overall?‘”
GigaOM: “Brad Silverberg, a veteran of Microsoft and other tech companies and general partner at Ignition Partners, a Seattle-based venture fund, thinks that the IPO could have a corroding influence on the company culture. … Facebook – Mark Zuckerberg’s Hacker Way missive not withstanding – is a lot more mercenary and materialistic. And part of that means employees are likely to cash their chips and run, only to place them on some new startups. And whichever way you look at it, I am pretty sure 2012 is going to be one heck of a ride. Buckle up!”
FC: “Zuckerberg first love has always been the Facebook product itself. There’s nothing he loves more than rolling up his sleeves and getting down and dirty with a set of mockups and a prototype or two. So while the Zuck will toss on the old jacket-and-tie and tap dance through the IPO dog-and-pony, as soon as it’s all over, it’ll be back to Menlo Park and the product, while COO Sheryl Sandberg (and CFO David Ebersman) continue to sweet talk advertisers and analysts alike.”
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Gerrit Eicker
Guardian: “So is Facebook worth it? After a fevered day and evening reading the S-1 document filed with the US securities and exchange commission (SEC) – an event that proved so popular online that the SEC had to devote an extra server to handling demand – the answer seems to be that it’s not worth $100bn (£63bn), but it might be worth $75bn. … Analysts say it can’t continue: ‘The hypergrowth is probably over,’ said Michael Pachter, head of research in the private shares group at Wedbush Securities. ‘The low-hanging fruit of the western developed world’ has already been grabbed, he said. ‘It’s just kind of obvious that they’re not going to ever get every single person that lives on the planet.’ … Some analysts believe that Facebook’s reliance on advertising is a weakness. … And Facebook is now wandering among giants – with one in particular eager to crush it. Google’s annual revenues in 2010 were $38bn, ten times larger than Facebook’s, and almost all of that comes from advertising. Google is setting up its own social network, Google+, and trying to tempt people away from Facebook through come-ons in its search results in the US which have pushed Facebook results down.”
VB: “‘The issue of click-through rate was not mentioned as a risk in the S-1,’ said Peter Adriaens, a professor of entrepreneurship at the University of Michigan’s Zell Lurie Institute for Entrepreneurial Studies. That omission stood out for the Internet IPO expert because research suggests that the percentage of Facebook users who actually click on ads is quite low, and that means advertising dollars could eventually drop. – Facebook does not publish its average click-through rate (CTR), but independent analysis from Webtrends on more than 11,000 Facebook campaigns showed that the average CTR for Facebook ads in 2010 was 0.051 percent, which is about half the industry standard CTR of 0.1 percent. The rate, according to the Webtrends report, dropped from 0.063 percent in 2009, which points to a downward trend. … ‘(Facebook) talked about the risk of privacy laws … but what was not mentioned is that the European Union issued a list of 35 requirements related to privacy that Facebook is going to have to adhere to,’ Adriaens pointed out. ‘(Facebook) can’t automatically collect the data that it might be collecting in North America … so what I see going forward is this challenge … of having to deal with very fragmented privacy laws. Those privacy laws are directly going to affect the value of Facebook’s data to its advertisers.’”
GigaOM: “Of Facebook’s 845 million monthly active users (MAUs), 425 million accessed Facebook in December alone through a smartphone or feature phone app or through its mobile-optimized website. In 2011, 85 percent of Facebook’s $3.7 billion in revenues came from advertising, but none of it came from its mobile platforms, over which it doesn’t serve up display ads. Despite that huge gap, Facebook is doing nothing to discourage the shift in use to handsets and tablets… As the S-1 points out, most Facebook members use mobile to supplement their PC activity, not replace it, so the company does ultimately put its ads in front of their eyes. But that won’t always be the case. … Facebook’s problem has an easy fix: It can simply start putting ads in its mobile apps and website. … My guess is that Facebook just doesn’t want to put apps into its mobile products – at least not yet. There is limited real estate on a handset screen, and Facebook probably doesn’t want to clutter up its slick interfaces with display ads, especially while it is still formulating its mobile strategy. … Either way, Facebook’s filing makes it clear that it has to do something to monetize its mobile traffic soon. The company will soon be public, and while it will likely be controlled by Zuckerberg and those loyal to him, investors will question why Facebook is devoting so much effort and so many resources to building a mobile business it makes absolutely no money from.”
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Gerrit Eicker
Winer: “To me Facebook already feels over. I really don’t feel like I’m missing anything. Look at it this way. There’s lots of stuff going on right now that I’m not part of. That’s the way it goes. Me and Facebook are over. It’s going to stay that way. And if I’m on a ship that’s sinking, well I’ve had a good run, and I can afford to go down with the ship, along with people who share my values. It’s a cause, I’ve discovered, that’s worth giving something up for.”
Boyd: “Facebook is the new AOL, despite the market cap. But it’s headed for a hard landing for other reasons than Winer is pushing. Facebook will fail because of the imminent rise of social operating systems – future versions of iOS, Mac OS X, and Android – which will break the Facebook monolith to bits.”
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Gerrit Eicker
Nimble
Turn your social communities into customers: Nimble social CRM platform for unified communications; http://eicker.at/Nimble
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Gerrit Eicker
Nimble: “Today, business has changed. With the advent of social media, email, IM, text messages and more, businesses are overwhelmed by the myriad applications needed to listen to and engage with their customers. The question is no longer how to stay connected – but how to efficiently and cost-effectively build business relationships given multiple communication channels. From that new need sprang Jon Ferrara’s latest innovation: Nimble. … After two years of development and thousands of real world users, Nimble has emerged as the next evolution in relationship management – the only web-based solution that brings together all of your contacts, calendar, communications and collaborations in one simple, free platform. – Nimble’s core benefit lies in its ability to unify email, calendar activities and the most popular social channels (LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter), and automatically link this functionality to business contacts. Instead of jumping from application to application, small businesses now have one solution that can help them find individuals relevant to their business – no matter where they are on the Web – listen and engage with those individuals in any number of ways, and build relationships that can lead to opportunity.”
Nimble: “View core contact information, and all activities, emails, notes, and social conversations related to that contact, in one clean and simple screen. – Nimble will automatically identify contact’s social profiles on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter so that you and your team can easily connect, listen, and engage with your most important business associates. – With Nimble, you can send messages, add tasks and events, edit or download the contact profile…right from the contact’s profile window. … Listen to all of the relevant conversations happening in your social networks. Connect with your community from one unified inbox. – Listen to all of the relevant conversations happening in your social networks. – Nimble’s message screen gives you plenty of options for engaging contacts. Quickly create tasks, schedule events, or reply to messages using the most popular social platforms. … Create and delegate tasks to team members with ease. See who assigned the task, or keep track of team member tasks by viewing their calendars and to do lists. … Nimble unifies your social streams and conversations from Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Now you don’t have to go to three different places to listen, engage, and build trusting relationships. … Extend the power of Nimble with these great products from our Integration Partners. Offering lead capture and analytics, email marketing support and more, Nimble’s add-ons give your business even more ways to close the marketing and sales loop: MailChimp, Wufoo, HubSpot”
TC: “Jon Ferrara thinks Salesforce is doing it wrong when it comes to social. The founder of Goldmine, a CRM company he sold for $100 million nearly a decade ago, is attacking the market a different way with his latest startup, Nimble. ‘We are effectively Salesforce but social,’ he says, taking a jab at what is now the 800-pound gorilla. – Salesforce would counter that it has Chatter and Radian6, but punching up is always a good way to get noticed (just ask Marc Benioff, who became a billionaire tussling with Microsoft and Oracle). … Nimble isn’t going up against Salesforce head-on. That would be stupid. Instead, it is trying to nail the social component of business communications. Nimble is an enterprise social platform built around contacts, calendars, and communications (both internal and external). It ties together email with social streams (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn) and puts it all into one interconnected database. … A better way to think of Nimble is as a social contact and communications database which ties into other enterprise and social services. Today, it pulls in messages from Gmail, Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. With its next release, it will pull integrate with HubSpot (which turns website visitors into sales leads), Infochimps (datasets), and WuFoo (online forms).”
VB: “CRM systems act as a database of people you have been in contact with. From quick e-mail conversations to full out meetings, this often cloud-based software – the best-known vendor of which is Salesforce.com – is your little black book of sales. But because of how many different ways there are to connect with people, along with how many different people we can reach with the advent of social media, customer relationship management has become extremely messy. – Nimble’s solution takes your e-mail, calendar, social networks, business networks, and a number of other points of connection and aggregates them into its software. But even with all of these integrations, CRM systems are static, one-way streets. That’s where Nimble’s changes start. … With the topic of ‘big data’ floating around, Ferrara wanted to touch on not just what you could do or enter into Nimble, but rather what Nimble could tell you. Currently, Nimble’s system sends out daily e-mails announcing a contact’s birthday, job change, or other tid bits of information. But it will soon add alerts to let you know about possible relationship changes with your contacts.”
Comparz: “Nimble’s account set-up, contact-importing and profile-building features are largely automatic and at least as easy to use as those of leading competing offerings. The Nimble interface offers fewer configuration options than those of some other offerings, but is clean and easy to navigate. Nimble’s ability to let users post to Facebook, LinkedIn and/or Twitter and to create e-mails from within the same interface offers more flexibility and agility in integrated management of communications and social networks than available from most leading alternatives. … Nimble goes beyond social media management, adding collaboration, sales and marketing features and consolidated communication options not available with other leading alternatives. Those interested in converting social networking contacts into engaged relationships, business or personal, should look closely at Nimble (and keep tabs on promised enhancements such as add-on applications and campaign management features).”
CRM Idol: “While Nimble is only two years old, it seems like it’s been in the making for the past two decades. The founder, Jon Ferrara, is one of the pioneers of the industry; he was one of the co-founders of Goldmine (contact management application). And that experience, along with his passion for relationship building is at the heart of the company, and the product. … Nimble builds on the valuable experience the core management team obtained while building Goldmine. That experience combined with the organization’s social philosophy has led to a unique application that delivers a nice set of services to SMBs needing to be social and do business. The approach to creating a community of developers and integration partners – as well as relationships with local resellers from the Goldmine days- provides Nimble with an ecosystem most small vendors don’t have at their disposal. Nimble also has the financial resources to compete in the SMB market, which puts them in a great position to succeed in the space – that is unless somebody snaps them up in the near future.“
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Best Website Design
As ever, really interesting and also practical piece Social Enterprise « Wir sprechen Online..
Many thanks…
Gerrit Eicker
Twitter Brand Pages
Twitter’s relaunch includes Twitter Brand Pages: an eye tracking study predicts hard work; http://eicker.at/TwitterBrandPages
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Gerrit Eicker
SimpleUsability [PDF]: “Users were drawn to different sections of the branded pages depending on the features each employed. All pages received initial attention on the section of the page that contained imagery. Generally this was the promoted tweet, but on the Staples page the promoted tweet did not contain any visual elements so the header image initially received more attention. … 1. Header images need to work hard – Header images can communicate how users can interact with the page. … Advertising can lead to too much of a corporate feel. … Competitions and promotions can entice users and encourage exploration. … 2. Promoted tweets need to take advantage of embedded visuals – A promoted tweet featuring an image draws users in. – This can quickly convey and affect the brand values of a company. Users made assumptions about the company on whether they were either corporate or approachable from the content of the image. … Promotional tweets can reinforce other featured content. – The promoted tweet on Staples featured a link to the competition referenced in the header. The promoted tweet and the header image supported each other as they were relaying the same message to the users in two different forms, one predominantly pictorial and the other completely text based. – Embedding video in the promoted tweet instantly engages the user. … 3. Users make brand decisions based on tweets – A range of tweets on the page communicates to users the level of interaction between the company and the user. The HP page featured tweets for different types of interaction including general replies, retweets and complaints. This gave the feeling that the company was being honest and that the tweets were genuine interactions with their followers. … So while Twitter shifts to incorporating the new features to the brand pages in order to engage those who see the page, the likelihood is that many of the brand’s followers may never see the page at all. This means that the strength of a company’s following will be based on what they tweet. … Also, with regards to the header, companies should keep in mind that due to its size and position on the page, users might assume that it is a clickable banner. … When they were unable to interact with the header they were annoyed and lost interest in page. … If a brand page comes across as either too sales-heavy, it will not hold the user’s attention. Users preferred when they could see the more ‘human’ side to the brand…”
RWW: “While some initially heralded Twitter brand pages as a ‘game changer,’ that scenario may not play out. One of the major problems facing brand pages, as noted in the SimpleUsability study, is that once someone starts following a Twitter account or brand page, there is usually no reason for them to return to the page as all of the new and relevant information will show up as tweets in the followers own timeline. … Users ultimately want brand pages to show a ‘more human side’ to the company, the study said. The HP site, for example, scored well because it did not emphasize sales and advertising, and even made an effort to respond to individual followers. Some of the tweets on the page responded to customer complaints, which improved transparency and credibility as viewed by page visitors.”
Gerrit Eicker
Predictions for 2012
Thoughtful new year’s predictions on media, social media, analytics, S/CRM, big data; http://eicker.at/PredictionsFor2012
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Gerrit Eicker
Guardian: “Media predictions for 2012: press and digital – Press – [W]ith print sales continuing to fall and advertising revenue stubbornly refusing to grow, publishers will axe more regional and local titles. … National titles will suffer print declines too, just as they have done for five and more years. It is doubtful that any will close in 2012, but the tabloids will rue the day they brought Leveson down on their heads. … – Digital – It is one of the most hotly anticipated flotations in US corporate history; on track to be the biggest internet public offering since Google. For Mark Zuckerberg and his seven-year-old social network, 2012 will be the year when Facebook goes public. … In the digital world, 2011 will always be remembered for one thing: the untimely passing of Steve Jobs. … Having transformed digital music, smartphones and tablet computers in recent years, Apple’s next big bet looks set to be TV. Apple is reported to have fast forwarded its planned assault on the living room since Jobs’s death, with ideas focusing on software that recognises viewers’ tastes across a number of devices without the hinderance of a remote control. Expect more on this in 2012.”
Forbes: “Social Media Predictions For 2012 – Companies sometimes gripe that social media is useless as a branding tool. – For marketers, converting messages into transactions is the Holy Grail, but if they don’t quickly materialize through new media outlets, that’s no reason to throw in the towel. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other outlets are constantly evolving and experimentation is necessary to find success. – Once we accept that ‘social’ does not equal ‘transactional’ we’ll all be a lot more adept at using it in 2012. … Geo-location has been an important marketing tool for a few years, but in 2012 it will become more personal and more transactional, especially in social-media marketing. … How will that work? Look for marketers to motivate and change behavior through geo-location tools and social gaming. … There’s a reciprocal relationship between the check-in and the reward, which is what game dynamics are about-rewarding behavior through real and virtual currency. … These are ways for brands to say, ‘Believe in us, be part of our community, and when you engage with us, we notice.’ It’s that acknowledgement that creates loyalty, advocacy and drives earned-media value. … Would it surprise anyone to think Facebook will become the overlay of the Internet experience? It may not happen in 2012 but it certainly will in our lifetimes. … As marketers build the bridge to commerce through online communities, it is imperative that they do not cannibalize them for the sake of transactions. … Imagine being at a party with people you know and feel comfortable with, and then suddenly, an outside group of revelers crashes your bash. It’s not the same party anymore. You don’t want to be there. You aren’t going to stick around. … Brands in 2012 must create a social world of personalization. – Facebook has built a model for this. Its ‘pages’ function enables brands to engage customers on a virtual island and have a theme party of their choosing. … The Facebook triad of Pages-Ads-Stories is one example of how to create a loop using paid media dollars to drive earned media. … The best kind of media is organic earned media. In 2012, social media as a bridge to commerce may seem obvious, but the journey will be much more interesting-and lucrative.”
HBR: “Six Social Media Trends for 2012 – Social media continues to move forward toward business integration, a trend that I identified last year. … I was also partially accurate in predicting that Google would ‘strike back’ in 2011. They did, with Google Plus, a formidable initiative that acts as Google’s ‘social layer’ to the Web. … So what can we expect in 2012 in a world that seems to grow ever connected by the hour? Here are six predictions to ponder, in no particular order: Convergence Emergence. For a glimpse into how social will further integrate with ‘real life,’ we can look at what Coca Cola experimented with all the way back in 2010. … These types of ‘trans-media’ experiences are likely to define ‘social’ in the year to come. … The Cult of Influence. In much the same way that Google has defined a system that rewards those who produce findable content, there is a race on to develop a system that will reward those who wield the most social influence. … Gamification Nation. No we’re not taking about video games. Rather, game-like qualities are emerging within a number of social apps in your browser or mobile device. From levels, to leaderboards, to badges or points, rewards for participation abound. … Social Sharing. Ideas, opinions, media, status updates are all part of what makes social media a powerful and often disruptive force. The media industry was one of the first to understand this, adding sharing options to content, which led to more page views and better status in search results. What comes next in social sharing is more closely aligned with e-commerce or web transactions. … Social Television. For many of us, watching television is already a social act, whether it’s talking to the person next to you, or texting, tweeting, and calling friends about what you’re watching. But television is about to become a social experience in a bigger and broader sense. … The Micro Economy. Lastly as we roll into 2012, watch for a more social approach to solving business problems through a sort of micro-economy… a new future reality where economic value is directly negotiated and exchanged between individuals over institutions.”
WMG: “Social Media Analytics – A lot of the platforms I deal with in Social Media Analytics were in the process of being acquired and as I am the most connected with this space than any other, I’ll start with it… by the end of 2012, most of them will have been acquired. … Google, as I covered, will enter the space as a collection system and PR type dashboard… Google will become the market leader, forcing standards in Social Media Measurement that industry needs but lacked the consensus to enact. … As a result of the imminent appearance of Google in 2012 as the emerging market leader in SMM, the remaining independent firms will face choices of consolidation (mergers of disparate platforms) or will hurry off to sell themselves to advertising, marketing, market research or PR agencies that haven’t been able to scale social listening, successfully. … Analytics platforms will improve or incorporate mobile Analytics, which, to a large extent, has been lacking in the first and second generation platforms. … It’s not much of a stretch that as more and more people are using mobile devices, and the mobile devices are becoming more powerful, that more time will be spent generating social media, and that by the end of 2012, social media data will, for all it’s limitations, be a must have for most businesses to capture. … I think there’s a good bet that Web Analytics and Social Media Analytics will merge in 2012…”
ZDNet: “CRM 2012 Forecast – The Era of Customer Engagement – Part I – What customer engagement does mean (so there is no nebulosity here) is the company’s and the customer’s relationship is defined by the customer’s ongoing involvement with the company for their own specific reasons. The company doesn’t have to know all of them. – It does mean that it is an era where the engagement the customer has with the company is controlled by the customer – and it can be at any level. … It does mean that the company model is to provide the customer with the products, services, tools and experiences that the customer needs to make an intelligent decision on how they want to be (selectively) engaged with the company. … It does mean the provision of a measurable result when it comes to that engagement via direct or indirect impact on revenue or some other key performance indicators that show the value of the engagement to the company – and the customer. … It does mean the use of systems of engagement … which are systems that foster the interaction of the company with the customer. … The Era of the Social Customer Ends… – CRM began to morph into Social CRM, business into social business, and internal collaboration became more than just an advanced idea and was put into practice at many of the Global 2000 companies and some even smaller than that. … For the first time, we began seeing leading academicians and consultants, like Dr. V. Kumar, create a quantifiable metric for the revenue impact that social customers were having on a company that was designed to work with the traditional measure of customer lifetime value (CLV). …The Era of Customer Engagement Begins – The social customer is no longer a customer to gawk out, just a customer to deal with – like any other customer, with one explicit difference. … What defines the Era of Customer Engagement more than anything is that so-called social channel strategy is now a normal part of multichannel strategy for the company. To be clear, customer engagement means that customers are part of the company’s collaborative value chain. The customer selects how they want to interact with you, and hopefully uses your products, services, tools and consumable experiences to make that decision.”
PG: “CRM 2012 Forecast-The Era of Customer Engagement Begins- Part II – Gamification, while often over hyped and misunderstood, is a concept that has increasingly important business value. … Insight Solutions will emerge as a technology category of its own – One thing that we can’t ignore (okay, that I can’t ignore) is that if customer engagement is to work, then insights into how customers want it to work are becoming increasingly necessary. The current generation of social media monitoring tools with a few exceptions – Radian6 and Attensity come immediately to mind… There are a number of emerging players in this space which I’m calling ‘insight solutions’ who have been misplaced in or evolved from other market categories. … This is not to say that more ‘traditional’ analytics such as text and sentiment analysis, business intelligence, etc are going to be replaced or suffering. In 2012, they will be even more important than they are now. … Analytics as a whole is becoming fundamental to all business strategy. 2012 brings more of that than ever and the rise of a new category customer-focused solution that provides a combination the surfacing of dynamic information and the analysis of that behavior as dynamically as it is surfaced. … In 2011, we saw a significant shift away from the pure left-brained messaging of CRM toward a much stronger focus on customer interactions, engagement and behaviors. … Social marketing becomes an integral part of an explosive marketing automation sector – In other words, there is a recognition that social channels are now part of the mainstream and that they are additions to the channels that we’ve reached customers on traditionally. … 2012 will bring us continued explosive growth in marketing, especially social marketing because we have reached ubiquity when it comes to utilizing social channels as part of campaign planning.”
ORR: “Five big data predictions for 2012 – This year has seen consolidation and engineering around improving the basic storage and data processing engines of NoSQL and Hadoop. That will doubtless continue, as we see the unruly menagerie of the Hadoop universe increasingly packaged into distributions, appliances and on-demand cloud services. … Hadoop’s batch-oriented processing is sufficient for many use cases, especially where the frequency of data reporting doesn’t need to be up-to-the-minute. However, batch processing isn’t always adequate, particularly when serving online needs such as mobile and web clients, or markets with real-time changing conditions such as finance and advertising. … Your own data can become that much more potent when mixed with other datasets. For instance, add in weather conditions to your customer data, and discover if there are weather related patterns to your customers’ purchasing patterns. … As data science teams become a recognized part of companies, we’ll see a more regularized expectation of their roles and processes. One of the driving attributes of a successful data science team is its level of integration into a company’s business operations, as opposed to being a sidecar analysis team. … [I]sualization fulfills two purposes in a data workflow: explanation and exploration. While business people might think of a visualization as the end result, data scientists also use visualization as a way of looking for questions to ask and discovering new features of a dataset. – If becoming a data-driven organization is about fostering a better feel for data among all employees, visualization plays a vital role in delivering data manipulation abilities to those without direct programming or statistical skills.“
Gerrit Eicker
Peer Influence
Study: When it comes to taste, peer influence in social networks is virtually nonexistent; http://eicker.at/PeerInfluence
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Gerrit Eicker
PNAS, Lewis, Gonzalez, Kaufman: “Social selection and peer influence in an online social network – Disentangling the effects of selection and influence is one of social science’s greatest unsolved puzzles: Do people befriend others who are similar to them, or do they become more similar to their friends over time? Recent advances in stochastic actor-based modeling, combined with self-reported data on a popular online social network site, allow us to address this question with a greater degree of precision than has heretofore been possible. Using data on the Facebook activity of a cohort of college students over 4 years, we find that students who share certain tastes in music and in movies, but not in books, are significantly likely to befriend one another. Meanwhile, we find little evidence for the diffusion of tastes among Facebook friends – except for tastes in classical/jazz music. These findings shed light on the mechanisms responsible for observed network homogeneity; provide a statistically rigorous assessment of the coevolution of cultural tastes and social relationships; and suggest important qualifications to our understanding of both homophily and contagion as generic social processes.”
Wired: “Are We Immune To Viral Marketing? – When it comes to taste, ‘peer influence is virtually nonexistent,’ said Kevin Lewis, a Harvard sociology graduate student who co-authored the study. Lewis cautioned that the experiences of college students on Facebook may not apply to everyone in all circumstances, but the results offer a sobering counterpoint to the conventional wisdom on the ubiquity of taste diffusion. ‘The extent to which friends’ preferences actually rub off on each other is minimal,’ he said. … If we don’t influence each other, does that means viral marketing is a bogus concept? And what does it say about the business value of social media? … The study’s findings suggest that it would be much more worthwhile to invest in understanding how and when friendships are a conduit for preferences, rather than assuming that they are and planning marketing strategies accordingly. ‘They clearly are under some circumstances, but we still don’t know whether those circumstances are common or important enough to warrant the time and money of business strategies,’ said Lewis. … One of the most valuable aspects of social media is who you know. It’s easy to glean information about members of social networks. This focuses sales, marketing and product development efforts. Knowing something about one person gives you insights into the people that person knows. … The Harvard study affirmed that, as in other aspects of life, people’s social media relationships tend to be with people who are like them. … Who you know is arguably a more valuable aspect of social media than who you might be influenced by.”
AT: “Studying the factors that bring people together creates a serious challenge for researchers. Do friendships form because of shared interests, or do those interests develop due to the friendship? A research team has now tracked a set of college students across all four years, using Facebook to identify social ties. The study reveals that people are fundamentally a bit lazy, as proximity provided the strongest predictor of social ties. Once that was accounted for, however, shared tastes in music and film did promote friendships, while books had a minimal effect. … The authors recognize that a Facebook friend probably doesn’t represent the strong social bond that we typically view as a friendship, but it is probably similar to the sort of fluid links that many of us form at work and elsewhere. There’s also a risk that at least some of the choices revealed on Facebook are the product of social posing, rather than deep-seated preferences. Despite these limitations, the study is a rare look at how social dynamics and personal tastes influence each other over the course of some very formative years. It’ll be pretty difficult to arrange a study that provides a clearer picture.”
TC: “Here’s a bit of science that’s contrary to what a heavy utilizer of social networks might expect. Researchers at Harvard tracked the Facebook activity of hundreds of college students for four years, and came away with the rather unexpected result that the interests of friends don’t, in fact, tend to influence one another. That’s not to say it doesn’t happen at all, of course, but it’s clear that propagation and virality are subtler and more complex than some people (marketers and, I suspect, researchers) tend to think they are. … The central source of data for the study, in fact, doesn’t strike me as solid. Tracking the interests of college kids is a sketchy endeavor in and of itself, but tracking it via their Facebook favorites (i.e. what shows on your profile, not what you post about or share) seems unreliable. – After all, not only does everyone use the network in their own way, but the network itself has changed. … The study does establish something that I think we perhaps understand is true already: you befriend people because of your overlaps in taste, but it’s rare that your existing friends change the tastes you already have. This is as much true out in the ‘real’ world as it is online. … The Harvard study does indicate another thing, which is that social networks are, for now, ‘light’ social interaction. … That’s changing, but Facebook doesn’t appear to be in a hurry to make the change to ‘serious’ social interaction: the kind of trusted exchanges you have with friends in conversation or in repeated encounters over years…”
Gerrit Eicker
Google Analytics Social Data Hub
Google opens its Social Data Hub to 3rd party social networks to integrate with Google Analytics; http://eicker.at/SocialData
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Gerrit Eicker
Google: “Every day, millions of people share and engage with content online. But most sharing doesn’t happen on the site where it was published, it happens throughout the social web. Marketers and publishers are looking for a comprehensive view of all interactions with their content – on and off their site – and so we’re working hard to make this happen. – To enable our customers to discover who’s sharing, voting and bookmarking their content on the social web, cross-network measurement needs to become easier. So today we’re inviting social networks and platforms to integrate their activity streams with Google Analytics. Through these integrations, marketers and publishers will be able to discover off-site engagement, optimize their engagement within each social community, and measure the impact of each social channel and its associated digital investment. … To make integration easy for social networks and platforms we’ve created a social data hub – it’s based on widely deployed, open web standards such as ActivityStreams and PubsubHubbub. A number of partners are already working with us to improve measurement of social actions – including Delicious, Digg, Diigo, Gigya, LiveFyre, ReadItLater, Reddit, TypePad, Vkontakte, and of course, Google+, Blogger and Google Groups.”
Google: “Plug your social data into Google Analytics – As the number of social networks and activities performed grows, there’s no comprehensive way for marketers and publishers to see the big picture of how social behavior really impacts their brand, let alone understand how these social actions lead to engagement or true return on investment [ROI] of their content. – That’s why we’ve developed the social data hub – so any network can integrate their activity streams – like +1, votes, and comments – into Google Analytics Social Analytics reports, which will be available next year.”
Google: “The social data hub is a free platform that social networks and other social platforms can use to integrate their activity streams- like +1, votes, and comments-with Google Analytics. – Enable your social network to be visible to marketers, publishers and analysts using Google Analytics – Promote a broad, comprehensive and inclusive picture of the global social media landscape – Advance accessible measurement of all social media platforms and activities … To integrate your social network with Analytics, you need to meet the following criteria: You operate a Social Network/Platform – You own the social data and/or are legally able to share it with Google.”
Google: “Google Analytics will provide a social reporting suite so marketers and publishers can see how their content is being shared or interacted with off their site. This will include visibility into social actions such as voting, commenting and sharing amongst other reports helping marketers tie social activity back to engagement and conversion. The social data hub will supply the data needed to enable these Google Analytics reports.”
WMG: “In other words, the platform vendors did little if anything to tie the output of their platforms with anything specific or practical enough (probably, because they couldn’t yet do so) to be meaningful. While Facebook may drag their feet implementing and interfacing with Social Data Hub, Twitter already has been using Google Analytics to track every important action, and it’s not a stretch to see Twitter adopting the Social Hub, and eventually, Facebook will have to, as well, because advertisers and publishers will demand it. – Which, as Lovett says, is good for all of us. Will it be good for the vendors? That all depends.”
SEW: “While social media integration into analytics packages is relatively new, there are a few enterprise-level analytics software that already offer users the ability to integrate not only social sharing sites, but also information about apps in their respective stores. Webtrends, for one, allows users to enter their usernames and passwords for various social sites and app stores directly into the software and data from those respective sites are seamlessly integrated into reports. … Is this a good idea or a bad idea for social networks? How would you use integrated social analytics in your day-to-day analytics reports?”
WPN: “I couldn’t help but notice that Facebook and Twitter are not on that list.“
Gerrit Eicker
Google Plus Pages
Google launches Google Plus Pages: Google Plus for local businesses and global brands; http://eicker.at/GooglePlusPages
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Gerrit Eicker
Google: “So far Google+ has focused on connecting people with other people. But we want to make sure you can build relationships with all the things you care about – from local businesses to global brands-so today we’re rolling out Google+ Pages worldwide. … Google+ has always been a place for real-life sharing, and Google+ Pages is no exception. After all: behind every page (or storefront, or four-door sedan) is a passionate group of individuals, and we think you should able to connect with them too. … For businesses and brands, Google+ pages help you connect with the customers and fans who love you. Not only can they recommend you with a +1, or add you to a circle to listen long-term. They can actually spend time with your team, face-to-face-to-face. All you need to do is start sharing, and you’ll soon find the super fans and loyal customers that want to say hello. – A number of pages are already available…, but any organization will soon be able to join the community… People search on Google billions of times a day, and very often, they’re looking for businesses and brands. Today’s launch of Google+ Pages can help people transform their queries into meaningful connections, so we’re rolling out two ways to add pages to circles from Google search. The first is by including Google+ pages in search results, and the second is a new feature called Direct Connect. … Direct Connect works for a limited number of pages today (like +Google, +Pepsi, and +Toyota), but many more are coming. In the meantime, organizations can learn more about Direct Connect in our Help Center: Google+ Direct Connect lets you quickly navigate to a Google+ page (and even add that page to your circles) when using Google Search. For example, if you searched for the query ‘+youtube’ or ‘+pepsi,’ you could be immediately taken to the YouTube Google+ page, or the Pepsi Google+ page, and given the option to add the page to your circles.”
Google: “A Google+ page is your organization’s identity on Google+. Your business, school or nonprofit can post updates and news, send tailored messages to specific groups of people, and engage in conversations with customers and followers. … Circles allow you to group followers of your page into smaller audiences. This lets you share specific messages with specific groups. … To help customers find your page and follow you, we have two buttons you can add to your website by visiting our Google+ badge configuration tool: The Google+ icon is a small icon that directly links to your page. – In the coming days, we’re introducing the Google+ badge, which lets people add your page to their circles, without leaving your site.”
Google: “To get your site on Google+, you first need to create a Google+ Page. On your page, you can engage in conversations with your visitors, direct readers back to your site for the latest updates, send tailored messages to specific groups of people, and see how many +1’s you have across the web. Google+ Pages will help you build relationships with your users, encouraging them to spend more time engaging with your content. … You can also link your site to your Google+ page so that all your +1s – from your Page, your website, and search results – will get tallied together and appear as a single total. … We want to help you get your site on Google+ as soon as possible, so we’re opening the field trial for Google+ Pages to everyone today. Creating a Google+ Page only takes a few minutes. To get started, you’ll need a personal Google+ profile. … To learn more about how Google+ works for your site, check out the Google+ Your Business site. We’re just getting started, and have many more features planned for the coming weeks and months.”
RWW: “Brand pages are one of the most anticipated Google+ features, and Google has been pulling down branded profiles in the meantime. Today’s launch initially only added pages for select partners, in addition to the major Google properties. … Google continues its pattern of rolling out features slowly and incrementally. As SVP of Engineering Vic Gundotra told the audience at Web 2.0 last month, ‘We’re going to take a cautious approach. We don’t want to make the mistakes of others.‘”
SEL: “Finally, Google is now allowing businesses, brands and any non-human entity to participate in its Google+ social network, through new Google+ Pages that are launching today, promised to be available to everyone within the next two days. … Local Is Different – If you’re creating a page for a local business, you have special options including the ability to enter a phone number. From Google’s help page on the topic: ‘Local Google+ pages are unique from other categories of pages because they have features that allow customers to easily connect with that business’s physical location. For example, local pages include a map of the business’s location and feature its address, phone number, and hours of operation.’ – Of course, many local businesses have already claimed their pages in the completely separate Google Places. Much of the information that Google+ Pages for local businesses wants – and more – are on those pages. But they remain unconnected. Google tells me: ‘Currently, Place pages and Google+ Pages must be managed separately. A Place page provides information about a business and makes it easy for customers to find local businesses on Google Maps and local search; while a Google+ page provides business owners with additional ways to engage, build relationships and interact directly with customers.’ … Another difference from personal accounts is that it’s perfectly fine for a business to have multiple Google+ pages. From the help page: ‘Pages can be made for a variety of different entities whereas profiles can only be made for people.’ … Anyone can make a business page for any URL without providing proof that they somehow ‘own’ or are associated with that URL. Potentially, that means pages can pretend to be representing a site they’re not connected with. Verification for big brands (see below) is one way Google aims to combat any problems this might cause.”
SEW: “At first glance, Google+ Pages and Profiles appear almost identical. However, in this help page, Google lays out the differences between Pages and Profiles…: Pages can’t add people to circles unless someone adds a Google+ Page to their circles or mentions (using the + or @ before the name) the page. – Pages are for entities; profiles are for people. – Pages are public by default. – Pages have a +1 button. – Pages can’t +1 other pages, play games, share to extended circles, receive notifications via email, text, or Google+ bar, or hangout on mobile devices. … Soon, advertisers will be able to link their Google+ Page to AdWords campaigns. This will provide a grand total of +1’s, taken by adding up +1’s from your Google+ Page, website, ads, and search results. Google noted that ‘your +1’s will be shown with your brand wherever it appears, including search, ads, Google+ and your website.'”
TC: “Google has made some key tweaks. The first is that a Page cannot add someone to a circle until that user has already added the page to one of their circles. In other words, a Page can’t start sending you messages until you’ve elected to add them to one of your circles. Another key change: the content on a Page defaults to public (as opposed to ‘My Circles’ for personal profiles) and Pages can’t share with extended circles. … Apparently only some users can create Google Pages for the time being – you can see if your account is enabled right here.”
ATD: “Google+ today launches a much-anticipated feature for brands, companies and other organizations to create accounts. … Direct Connect is different: Google is establishing approved relationships with brands to drive traffic to their pages and establish lasting relationships with users of its social network. It’s like a powerful shortcut version of the old AOL keywords or the increasingly ubiquitous ‘Like us on Facebook/Follow us on Twitter.’ … It’s possible that very few people will want to treat the search field as a command line interface, but it’s still highly significant that Google will be actively promoting approved Google+ pages out front of its hotly contested search results pages. … Also coming soon for Pages: Support for multiple administrators, analytics and better Circle functionality to manage millions of people.”
TNW: “How to help Direct Connect find your Google+ Page – According to Google, here’s a few steps you can follow to help the algorithm associate your website and your Page: 1. Connect your Google+ page and your website using the Google+ badge… 2. Add a snippet of code to your site… 3. Adding your website link to your Page… All these methods will help Google’s algorithm to associate content when it rolls out Direct Connect more widely.”
AdAge: “It’s official: Google’s answer to Facebook is finally here with the launch of Google+ Brand Profiles. … This may be hard to believe. Google+ has been billed as a Facebook killer, its user homepage layout borrows heavily from Facebook, and now there are free self-service branded pages for marketers similar conceptually to what Facebook introduced in November 2007 – almost four years ago to the day. … Every link shared through Google+ has media implications as well. Those +1’s appearing on natural search engine results can also wind up appearing on advertisers’ paid search ads and display ads running on Google. If Google+ achieves enough scale, and if ads with +1’s garner higher CTRs as expected, then Google+ powered ads will wind up as the most successful form of social advertising online. … To that end, a brand doesn’t need a Google+ Brand Profile to add +1’s to ads, but having a vibrant community connected to the Brand Profile could be a major driver of those +1’s. … Despite all the reasons to treat Google+ has a unique offering, marketers that decide to create and manage Brand Profiles will need to allocate resources somehow. … Realistically, in the short term, marketers who are already at capacity for social programs will shift their existing staff’s time from Facebook, Twitter, and other communities…”
TNW: “Did Google+ just bury Twitter with its Pages launch? – I’ve said it a few times, and I’ll say it again, Email is still the #1 social network in the world. Everyone uses it, it works cross-platform, and it drives businesses and personal lives. With Google+ integrated into Gmail, it makes sharing information and getting updates simple. Will people get tired of visiting yet another site like Twitter or downloading yet another app? It’s too early to tell, but at the end of the day, everyone likes things to be easy.”
FC: “Business Won’t Like +1 – Google+’s fundamental consumer action model is far more limited than Facebook’s, too. – For the everyday consumer to interact with a brand on Facebook, the only point of entry is the ‘Like’ button. It’s as simple to contract and as long lasting as any parasite. – ‘Like’ a page, and you’ll not only be marked as part of their fan base, but you’ll be subscribed to see their updates. – Google+ rips the ‘Like’ button into two devastatingly separate entities.”
TC: “How Google+ Could One-Up Facebook’s Brand Pages – Google has a chance to make Page applications more accessible to all businesses by creating official templates that can be customized with the images, copy, and functionality desired by brands. Rather than forcing admins to choose between apps built by unknown third-parties, it could give them free templates they can trust to work. This would also allow Google+ to offer Page apps without first having to create a robust set of APIs to support them. – Facebook has forged a functional model for brand presences on social networks. Unfortunately, its focus on app developers and its desire to get brands advertising in order to target specific demographics has left Google some big opportunities to create a friendlier platform for brands.”
RWW: “Day 1 of Google+ Pages: The Muppets Fall Flat, But Brands Are Trying to Engage – It is very early days for Pages with brands. Already though you get the sense that the best way for brands to use Google+ will be to truly interact with their followers. Whether by posts that solicit comments or by video hangouts, Google+ is best used to engage in conversation with other people.”
TNW: “Google’s Bradley Horowitz has fired back at Mark Zuckerberg’s claim that the company is ‘building its own little Facebook’ saying that Google is ‘delighted to be underestimated’ by its rival. … Horowitz rejected comparisons between Google, Facebook and other social networks as being little more than fodder to give the media advertising and click throughs, with the Google man insisting that the company is focused in making its services better and not watching the competition.”
Gerrit Eicker
Google: “Google+ Pages have already provided brands and businesses a new means of connecting to and deeply engaging with consumers. In the weeks since launching pages, we’ve been listening to your feedback and we’re pleased to make some of the most oft-requested features available. – You can now delegate up to 50 named managers as administrators for a page. – A new notification flow will ensure that these managers stay in the loop on all the activity that takes place on a page, giving managers the ability to stay involved in page conversations. – We’ll now show an aggregated count of users that have engaged with your page, either by +1’ing it or by adding it to a circle. This way, both you and your page’s visitors can get an at-a-glance summary of who is interacting with your page.”
Gerrit Eicker
Google Analytics: Real-time
Google Analytics goes real-time, finally: What’s happening on your site right now? http://eicker.at/GoogleAnalyticsRealTime
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Gerrit Eicker
Google: “What’s happening on your site right now? – Currently, Google Analytics does a great job analyzing past performance. Today we’re very excited to bring real time data to Google Analytics with the launch of Google Analytics Real-Time: a set of new reports that show what’s happening on your site as it happens. … One way that I like to use these reports is to measure the immediate impact of social media. Whenever we put out a new blog post, we also send out a tweet. With Real-Time, I can see the immediate impact to my site traffic. … You’ll find the Real-Time reports only in the new version of Google Analytics. If you’re not already using the new version, you can start by clicking the ‘New Version’ link in the top right of Google Analytics. … We just turned the reports on for a number of you, and over the coming weeks, everyone will have access to Real-Time.”
Google: “We learned from some of our largest customers that they have some specific needs that the current version of Google Analytics can’t meet in their entirety. Today we’re addressing these needs by announcing a new option built for our largest customers: Google Analytics Premium. … Extra processing power – increased data collection, more custom variables and downloadable, unsampled reports – Advanced analysis – attribution modeling tools that allow you to test different models for assigning credit to conversions – Service and support – experts to guide customized installation, and dedicated account management on call – all backed by 24/7 support – Guarantees – service level agreements for data collection, processing and reporting”
RWW: “Google Analytics, the super dominant free web analytics platform, has to date offered analytics that were roughly 24 hours behind. The wait to stop waiting has come to an end and today the company announced that Google Analytics is now rolling out real-time reporting to its users. … My prediction: Google Analytics is going to become a much bigger part of the company and a much broader offering in the future than it is today. With the recent purchase of startup Postrank, Google will be able to offer real-time social media analytics soon. As the definition of the web expands into and beyond mobile, into and beyond other newly connected devices, the Google Analytics offering will expand allong with the world’s understanding of information. It will organize all that information and now it has laid the groundwork do it in real time and for a fee.”
TC: “Google Analytics, the immensely popular suite of tools that Google offers to help webmasters track their site traffic, is getting a big boost this week: the service has launched a real-time dashboard that updates with user events as they happen. – That’s a big deal, as it brings Google more in line with popular real-time analytics products like Chartbeat, which allows you to track things like how many people are currently on your site, and how much traffic each individual article has gotten in the last few minutes. … In addition to Real-Time, today the Analytics team has also announced a premium tier for enterprise companies who want more support (and datapoints tracked) than Google offers with its free service. Google says that for an unspecified price, companies will be able to get phone support, SLA guarantees, and increased data limits.”
VB: “For quite some time, Google Analytics has offered webmasters a free way to measure traffic of their sites 24 hours after the action occurs. But since real-time traffic startups like Chartbeat (a service we use) and Woopra came onto the scene, Google Analytics has looked slow in comparison. Thankfully, that’s remedied with these new stats tools, which include social media impact and campaign measurement.”
LM: “Real-Time reports do not include profile filtering. That extra processing step is currently bypassed in the interest of optimizing speed. So even if you’re looking inside a filtered profile, keep in mind that no data is being filtered out of the Real-Time reports. – Let me emphasize that this doesn’t mean that all your GA data is now real-time. Some of GA’s standard reports have deep functionality that also requires too much processing to be reported instantly. You have to look in the Real-Time reports for real-time data.”
Gerrit Eicker
Twitter Web Analytics
Twitter introduces Twitter Web Analytics: helps website owners analyse Twitter’s imapct; http://eicker.at/TwitterWebAnalytics
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Gerrit Eicker
Twitter: “Twitter Web Analytics, a tool that helps website owners understand how much traffic they receive from Twitter and the effectiveness of Twitter integrations on their sites. Twitter Web Analytics was driven by the acquisition of BackType, which we announced in July. – The product provides three key benefits: Understand how much your website content is being shared across the Twitter network – See the amount of traffic Twitter sends to your site – Measure the effectiveness of your Tweet Button integration … Twitter Web Analytics will be rolled out this week to a small pilot group of partners, and will be made available to all website owners within the next few weeks. We’re also committed to releasing a Twitter Web Analytics API for developers interested in incorporating Twitter data in their products.”
TC: “[A]t TechCrunch Disrupt, Twitter is debuting a brand new publisher analytics platform to help sites understand data around the Tweet button and sites using the t.co wrap. While the platform is still private, Twitter says it will be launched to the public soon. …Twitter is driving 100 million clicks per day to sites across the web, with 95 percent of links on Twitter wrapped in T.co. So clearly with both inbound and outbound traffic, Twitter is seeing massive traction for sites. … But while many third-party apps have tried to measure Twitter’s traffic for publishers, the best analytics always come from the source. This new product for publishers will decipher and make sense of all the inbound and outbound traffic from a publisher sites via the Tweet button and from links. … Of course, many people use Google Analytics and other platforms for their social media analytics from Twitter, Facebook and others. Luckily, you’ll be able to incorporate these in-depth Twitter analytics from your platform of choice, as Twitter will be releasing an API for this analytics platform. – The best part – all of this will be free for publishers. A few select publishers are currently testing the platform as well.”
RWW: “In August, Twitter took a big step toward cleaning up its analytics data by turning on its t.co short link wrapper for all tweeted links longer than 19 characters. T.co is still not fully implemented yet, but when it is, content providers on any platform will finally be able to accurately measure their referrals from Twitter. Prior to t.co, publishers would see different referrers if the clicks came from Twitter.com, Twitter’s client apps, third-party apps or bounced off some link shortener first. – That’s a very long tail, making Twitter referrals hard to measure. As a result of the confusion, Twitter was often discounted and discredited as a traffic referral source. But now that all tweeted links will go through t.co first, all clicks on Twitter links will come from one referrer. In short, Web publishers are just beginning to realize Twitter’s full traffic potential. – With the launch of Twitter Web Analytics, publishers will now be able to accurately measure the impact of Twitter in both inbound and outbound directions. With over 100 million active users, a number that has grown by 105% just this year so far, publishers and Twitter users are about to find out for sure about the value of this service.“
Gerrit Eicker 15:29 on 17. February 2012 Permalink |
AdAge: “Facebook will bring its Timeline profile pages to brands this month in the U.S., according to executives briefed on the company’s plans. – At its F8 conference in September, Facebook introduced a dramatic transformation of profile pages for its more than 800 million users with the Timeline format… At the time of the announcement, the company said it would wait to roll out the new feature for brands. Facebook VP-Marketing and Business Partnerships David Fischer said Timeline for brands would be ‘consistent’ with the Timeline look-and-feel, but not a carbon copy. – The new pages for brands will start in beta with a handful of partners and then be released to more marketers in stages… Timeline has significant implications for Facebook fan-page management. One top consideration is that a brand’s Facebook presence no longer must date to when it joined the site but can be represented with content populating its Timeline from throughout its history.”
RWW: “Facebook will soon bring Timeline to brand pages. Currently Timeline is only available for Facebook user profiles. It transforms the Facebook experience from a fly-by bulletin board and events site to a scrapbook-esque, lifestreaming version of a social networked reality both past and present. … On February 29, Facebook will host fMC, its first-ever event specifically for marketers – and Timeline brand pages will no doubt be a part of it. … We reached out to Facebook. Here’s what they said: ‘As we said at f8, we believe that consistency in both functionality and appearance increase use of Facebook,’ a Facebook spokesperson told ReadWriteWeb. ‘We hope to make Pages more consistent with the Timeline in the future, but we have nothing further to share at this time.‘”
IF: “Marketers have been dreaming up ways to use Timeline for businesses since the new profile debuted at f8, but Timeline hasn’t been an option for brands because the social network requires companies use pages instead of profiles. … Timeline could be a significant improvement for pages, which users typically visit once to Like but they rarely return or spend much time on them. … A big question remains: what will happen to tab applications? Many pages – from top global brands to small local businesses – have invested in iFrame apps to welcome users to their pages or provide additional experiences. The company has frequently changed the size of tabs, forcing developers to redesign their apps, and it could do so again. … The last time Facebook redesigned profile pages in December 2010, business pages got a matching update in February.“