Anatomy of a Facebook Sponsored Stories video ad.

The switch to Timeline has brands putting video and image foremost in their overall attention strategies.

Facebook’s facilitating this in their ads with the inclusion of bigger graphics & the look of inline video (not exactly, you click through, but the appearance thereof—or perhaps it’s clever use of a graphic on TD’s part).

Peppered with social proof—my pixellated friend seems to be suggesting I’ll enjoy this content and perhaps spread it with a little like—the addition of that little “play” graphic ups the ante on attention to the dreaded/coveted (depending on your position in the advertising food chain) Facebook right sidebar.

Watch for the appearance of these premium Sponsored Stories into the mobile stream—despite recent reports that over half of advertisers aren’t dipping into the social proof ad game just yet.

While Farmville loads…

I’m not saying all people of a certain generation are completely hilarious with regards to UI changes, but you have to enjoy how they capitalize It like It’s been handed down from Above.

Facebook, show brand pages some ♥.

Social media folks are saying that Facebook’s news feed favours everything but brand page content, and even suggesting that brands bump up the prominence of staff’s personal profiles through subscribers.

Does it make sense that Facebook would deprecate page updates, when surely the bulk of these brands are, have been or potentially will be advertisers on the platform? The argument I could see for that is that people prefer updates from their friends over brands, but since when does Facebook favour usability over dollars?

If that’s the way things are gonna be, Facebook needs to throw page admins a fan engagement bone. One almost universal wish in the hearts of social media managers is the ability to tag fans in our status updates. We obsess over it.

@ericaglasier Looks like this nonprofit is able to tag likers in their status updates https://t.co/CwsmfnfH

January 9, 2012 10:19 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@mikeduerksen

Mike Duerksen

@mikeduerksen I wonder if those 2 guys are admins (being founders).

January 10, 2012 7:43 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@EricaGlasier

Erica Glasier ♥

@EricaGlasier Probably, but can you tag admins? I can't.

January 10, 2012 8:10 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@mikeduerksen

Mike Duerksen

Days elapse…

@mikeduerksen Finally figured this out, because it was bugging me: the founders they tag in the update are Pages, not profiles.

January 16, 2012 8:27 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@EricaGlasier

Erica Glasier ♥

Facebook did start allowing brands to tag people in comments when those users were already on the thread, but those people were notified of comments anyway. Small victory. Brands can also tag other brands (useful in the case of a nonprofit with corporate donors), but individuals would get a big charge out of being singled out, IMO, and benefit practically from potential new followers & rise in “influence”.

Facebook, show brand pages some love. Let us tag people. We promise not to abuse it & treat it like the privileged permission marketing it is!

@EricaGlasier @mikeduerksen *you* would, but think of all the assholes out there: Thanks for liking us-enter our contest, |Erica Glasier| !

January 3, 2012 11:33 pm via Tweetbot for iPhoneReplyRetweetFavorite

@pensato

David Pensato ★

@pensato @EricaGlasier It'd be a GREAT tool to thank donors, volunteers, people doing something nice for your nonprofit.

January 3, 2012 11:33 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@mikeduerksen

Mike Duerksen

@pensato @mikeduerksen We'd use it to thank donors, volunteers etc. To shout them out, not spam!

January 3, 2012 11:30 pm via Twitter for iPhoneReplyRetweetFavorite

@EricaGlasier

Erica Glasier ♥

The social web thrives on reciprocation & building other people’s social capital. Twitter bakes in the ability for brands to shine attention on their fans. Facebook, as a larger platform, needs to catch up. Fingers crossed this is in the works.

The scummiest Facebook scam yet.

Facebook scams usually rely on minor greed, like “insert big box store is giving away $1000 gift cards to every slob who can muster the effort to click like” (but no such lavish reward for their actual, in-store customers for some reason. Realistic, right?)

Scams aren’t just annoying proof of your *friend’s lack of critical thinking skills ; sometimes they’re dangerous likejacking attempts (where you can’t see the thing you’re actually liking/sharing—potentially a virus.) They work because we trust our friends.

Which brings us to this stomach-churning hoax, “Little boy needs 100 shares for a free heart transplant”.

I mean, this scam doesn’t even make sense. How would shares benefit the hospital or donor who would pay for the supposed heart transplant? Do I need to point out they’d only get horrific PR from tying a kid’s life to “Facebook engagement”?

So, I mean, Google is your friend. Check if something’s fake. Was it Confucius, Jesus, or Elvis who said “All that glitters is not gold…?”

* I don’t blame my super kind-hearted friends for sharing this. I’ve retweeted fake amber alerts for missing kids before, because even though you know they’re probably fake, what if they aren’t? We all just wanna help.

I have an evil idea: #privacy activists could #occupy #Facebook’s Sponsored Stories ads.

Facebook is trying to mitigate how ticked off people are going to be when Sponsored Stories ads start appearing in people’s news streams, with a subtle little ad of their own at the top of the page.

It's adorable how proactive Facebook is being before the storm of anger over ads in news feeds https://t.co/65UiDLVu

December 21, 2011 9:05 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@EricaGlasier

Erica Glasier ♥

They’re anticipating the backlash & trying to gently implant the meme that “selling your private information is just the cost of using Facebook”.

It all sounds very reasonable. What exactly’s going to happen?

Your likes, posts, check-ins etc will become little ads for the brands you’re interacting with.

Facebook’s reality checking us in advance because they know people may react especially poorly to being featured in ads for businesses they don’t necessarily want to promote. And…

If people are angry the first thing they may do is unlike the brands that are using them. Besides removing the permission marketing channel created by likedom, this will no doubt create acrimony (or “a bad brand experience”) between people & the brands they formerly trusted.

But that’s Facebook’s problem. On to the evil idea.

Privacy Activists could jack sponsored stories

Here’s how I think it could work:

• Activist likes a brand & ‘publicly’ posts culture-jamming content on their wall or
• Activist @-mentions brand in a ‘public’ status update without liking
• Activist collective and/or friends of the activist ‘like’ the post a lot, to drive up its credibility
• The robots that select sponsored stories notice & repost as an ad
• A Skittles-level takeover of Sponsored Stories ensues.

Possible? It relies on mighty slack non-human CRM between Facebook & its customers, the advertisers—that is, nobody actually checking the content of the stories that algorithms think are relevant & popular. And it relies on non-anonymous collective action. But people have been in the mood to occupy lately, don’t you think?

Specious privacy alert: Facebook forces you to expose your tagged photos to ‘friends of your tagged friend.’

Ever notice that when you tag someone in a photo, you’re forced to allow their friends access to the image? Not enormously private if either tagger or taggee was trying to keep a low profile relationship with regards to the taggee’s friends.

See—so you’re choosing your friends to see your photo there—basically the most private setting without getting all specific.

But right underneath, in palest #808080, it’s noted that friends of the tagged person—not just your friends, as selected in the drop-down—will also be able to see this photo, your caption, and just generally take note of your existence. It’s not clear if they can comment on the photo or, god forbid, share it.

Optimistic investigation of the audience drop-down only reveals less privacy—the dreaded, unvetted FoFs—or specific people/lists.

Unless you make a list of all your (preapproved) friends, you can’t limit the photo to the people you’ve friended (which includes the person you’re just tryna tag). You have to broadcast your existence to the tagee’s network.

That’s unnecessarily public, don’t you think? What if you’re a minor, a mom, a lurker, or otherwise Nymmed-out individual? Facebook hobbles tagging functionality if you don’t feel like exposing yourself to FoFs. That’s a pretty specious commitment to granular privacy—technically possible but disengenously user-unfriendly.

The best thinking on Facebook’s (r)evolution right now, or “the friction is YOU”.

As our culture rapidly changes under the yoke of technology, as these changes are forced upon it, it’s heartening to see the subtleties of Facebook’s effect being discussed from the perspectives of sociology, psychology, marketing, & privacy.

Here’s some thinking on Facebook big F8 announcements. I know it’s a lot (though far from all) to take in, but hey, it’s a lot to take in.

Not Sharing Is Caring: Facebook’s terrible plan to get us to share everything we do on the Web (Facebook is Killing Taste)
Premise: Zuck wants you to share your every move, regardless of whether that move turned out to be a really good experience actually worth sharing. Frictionless sharing takes the curation element (or “taste”) out of your presentation.
UI implications: The news feed is now totally stories about your friends (status updates), whereas the minutiae of their liking & commenting has moved to the ticker.
Assessment: I don’t want you to know about every movie I watch, only the ones I liked so much I want to endorse them and thereby incorporate them into my personal brand. Media will become status, like wearing a logo, as a display of taste. People may be less inclined to experiment, because merely absorbing media now implies some sort of support for it.

What Facebook Open Graph Means for You
Premise: “You, the point of friction in their data mining, have just been excluded from the process.”
Assessment: I agree. Facebook wasn’t wringing every piece of information out of users, and information about users is the product it sells its customers, advertisers. The more it can collect about what you watch, listen to, like and use, the more money it makes.

Why Facebook Timeline Is Made For Its Youngest Users
Premise: Facebook’s Timelines is intended to facilitate the communication & sharing needs of younger users, and doesn’t really care if older folks want to ‘scrapbook’ (ie, blog) or not.
UI implications: Not everyone wants to blog or lifecast. Picking a header (‘cover’ picture) etc might be a little more tech/design-intensive than they desire, which may lead to a feeling of pressure instead of fun for some users (age agnostic). With customization comes a pressure to perform that some people might not appreciate.
Assessment: As far as I know, GenX is still the biggest participants on blogs, microblogs (Twitter) and Facebook. We’ll be ok, and the Millenials will too. Boomers who don’t work in the tech industry will not like any of this (UI changes or personal record). And GenZ? They could probably use a little MySpace. Expressing yourself is paramount in the Maslowian hierarchy of the young.

@EricaGlasier All interesting. Maybe younger gen is more willing to share in general, but less willing to share something out of mainstream?

September 24, 2011 8:19 am via Tweetbot for iPhoneReplyRetweetFavorite

@trevorpercy

Trevor Percy

@trevorpercy Our gen will be more consciously self conscious, but they'll have that judgement of their tastes built in to their DNA. Holy.

September 24, 2011 10:06 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@EricaGlasier

Erica Glasier ♥

What newsrooms should know about new Facebook stream
Premise: Getting content seen depends on quantity of interactions (like & comments). More frequent posting is going to be required to get in front of people.
UI implications: Stories need to gather the momentum of user approval before they join Recent Stories
Assessment: A commenter thinks the author of this post has it all backwards, and branded pages have a better chance of being seen in the timeline. I dunno. I can tell you that as a brand manager I was masterminding an inside liking job like no other on Thursday, trying to push my update into people’s streams. It didn’t feel good, but it did feel necessary.

As a page I feel like Facebook's new feed needs me to either create awesome content or drum up a whole lotta support to get posts seen.

September 22, 2011 9:50 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@EricaGlasier

Erica Glasier ♥

All Facebook thinks the ticker stands to be a huge force for branded page interaction, spreading social proof. This also benefits from grassroots liking, commenting, & sharing as every such action not only lends weight to GraphRank, but floods the ticker with evidence of how awesome your content is.

What Facebook Changes Mean for Marketers
Premise: Apps that provide real value, like Nike+ are going to be key; content is going to have to step up its game. Gathering likes means less than ever.
Assessment: The onus truly is on brands to earn a place in people’s lives.

@EricaGlasier I think the danger in what they're doing is it will force everyone to pump up the volume until its all too noisy...

September 22, 2011 9:52 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@pensato

David Pensato ★

The Ultimate in Privacy
Premise: The ticker is freaking people out. The “please hide my comments & likes for me” status that’s going around tries to put the onus for your privacy on your friends.
UI implications: We need to either get comfortable with all our actions being visible, or leave the system.
Assessment: The way the ticker is set up, it’s a bit of a reality check into “Hey, everyone can see what I do on the internet”. They always could, but aggregating those actions and explicitly revealing them makes people feel kinda naked.

The ticker doesn’t follow normal conversational conventions (though it does lead to new person/topic discovery, which is what Facebook is trying to facilitate to combat social graph boredom and purchasable media sharing). So I sort of see the freaked out users’ impetus for wanting to hid eall that minutiae; it isn’t actually intended for everyone; it functions beneath status updates as a subtle communication upon which it’s a bit awkward to shine a light.

There’s a distinction to be drawn between inappropriate sharing and action aggregation. When you see the sum of your actions gathered and reported by an insensitive algorithm, it seems like an unfairly black and white overview of your character.

This is precisely why the likes Sponsored Stories, Klout and retargeting bother privacy advocates so much: they lack context. They paint a partial picture by which we are judged, but that we can’t fail to own because it is, after all, constructed of our data.

We’re All Doomed: Facebook’s Giant Reality Show
Premise: “The lines between entertainment and real life disappear, as people use social media to broadcast whatever they want. Criminals like thieves and murders are followed online, given TV shows, endorsement deals as we as a culture begin to lose grip of reality. A world where everyone’s a celebrity and anything can be entertaining leads to murders and suicides for fun as advertisers monitor in-depth metrics on what we view and how. Our social lives are put in digital pens that lie to us and tell us that we are all stars”.
Assessment: No surprise: “Heavy reality television (RTV) viewers not only spend more time on sites like Facebook, they also have larger social networks, share more photos and are more likely to engage in “friendships” with people with whom they have no off-line relationship, a practice known as promiscuous friending”.

A generation is going to grow up living very public lives, because that provides more accurate information for advertisers.

Facebook is actively gathering your life story: it just suggested I add a photo of the day I was born. http://t.co/p6SiEeBs

September 23, 2011 7:52 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@EricaGlasier

Erica Glasier ♥

@EricaGlasier and how do you feel about that?

September 23, 2011 7:54 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@VenessaMiemis

Venessa Miemis

@VenessaMiemis At the moment (I might change) like it's super cute, a fun thing to share & valuable to digitize (likely 2 b a real Polaroid)

September 23, 2011 8:06 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@EricaGlasier

Erica Glasier ♥

@VenessaMiemis But is it there this memory should reside? If it does, does it become a more valuable, emotional platform for me?

September 23, 2011 8:07 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@EricaGlasier

Erica Glasier ♥

Update

More thought-provoking stuff people are sending me.

Logging out of Facebook is not enough (from David Pensato)
Facebook: “We don’t track logged-out users”
Facebook Changes Upend Advertiser and Agency Models
Facebook Disconnect Chrome Extension
Facebook’s Eerie Goal: Why Timeline Changes Everything (from David Pensato)
Facebook is Scaring Me
What Facebook’s latest updates mean for journalists
How Not To Make Music Social: The Way Spotify And Facebook Did It
Facebook confirms ‘Like’ data collection, will fix three cookie-related issues within 24 hours (from Nico Wlock)
No, you aren’t going to quit Facebook
Is Facebook trying to kill privacy?
The Pros & Cons of Frictionless Sharing
It’s the end of the web as we know it
The Problem With Facebook’s New ‘Frictionless’ Sharing
Facebook is getting too damn complicated

Twitter fights back against G+’s fancy features; adds instream images.

[edit 1] Yesterday Facebook’s news feed got all circley. Today, Twitter launches an in-stream image. G+ competition is making everyone step up their game!

[edit 2] Boo, the image appears as a link, not instream. Too little…

[edit 3] Well, it kinda appears instream. If you click on the tweet it shows like any media in the right-hand column, and if you link directly to a tweet it shows there too (I’m talking Twitter web interface here). This is the anticipated photosharing feature announced/leaked in May.

Free design download: vector Facebook like/recommend/share icons

Who doesn’t need a good vector Facebook icon once in a while? Trouble is, there are so darn many social actions on the ‘Book these days, a designer needs more than a mere ‘F’ in a box!

So download these vector (Windows AI CS4) files here, why dontcha. My gift to you!

Bonus production assistance: need to type Facebooky stuff? The Facebook font sure looks like Lucida Grande.

How many of your friends see your Facebook posts?

I tried out the “10% of your friends see your posts & 1% like ‘em” experiment, because I’m pretty curious about the way top content is selected in Facebook & wanted to see Edgerank—Facebook’s scoring system for that selection—in action.

Responses = 26% of friends.

This is a lot higher than average. Which may mean:

• Nicer, chattier friends who respond to requests like this, or
  
• My posts are showing up a lot because
  • I interact on Facebook “more than average”, or
    
  • The amount of action on the post kept it visible

The last comment came in 19 hours after the original post, suggesting it was dropped from ‘top news’ at that point.

The experiment is predicated on the goodwill & motivation of your friends, and is pretty much gaming ‘top content’, which is partly selected on amount of interaction a post receives. I also garnered 18 comments, which are weighed more heavily by Facebook Edgerank than likes are.

Two friends who ran the experiment got 10.3% + 4 comments and 2.2% + 6 comments respectively.

I’m not sure what this experiment proves beyond the 10% eyeballs theory isn’t always accurate, and that my friends are really nice.

• Recency -  which is not a word; can you believe that? Consider it coined. Newer = more weight
• Interaction - more likes = more weight; more comments = even more weight
• Affinity – the more you’ve interacted in the past with the person who posted, the more likely you are to see their stuff again. Facebook took this one way too far recently, but the concept makes sense. in a please-mediate-my-world-for-me kind of way.

How do you bring back the Facebook “submit comment” button?

I’m usually all for Facebook changes, but removing the button that submits comments & using “enter” instead counters web conventions to the point of causing errors. I don’t think it’s going to be intuitive to most users.

The idea was to make the commenting experience mimick instant messaging, where you hit “enter” to post your comment (and “shift-enter” to create a new paragraph). Psychologically, this real-timieness is supposed to make you feel closer to your friends. Marketing-wise, this enforces your desire for Facebook.

But web-wide, comment fields don’t behave like that. I can just hear the angst out there as half-written, unspellchecked comments are accidentally posted.

I actually think Facebook should work to maintain the opposite feeling. Asynchrony is part of the Facebook experience that I really like. I want to mosey past the general store & chat with the folks chewing blades of wheat in rocking chairs outside. I’m not sure we want to bring the pressure of Twitter’s highway past Facebook’s front porch.

Here’s a bunch of browser extensions (let’s call ‘em fixes, hacks, ways to revert back to having a button) to slow things down a bit.

Tumbleweed in the Facebook feed?

Ed. note: this tweet impressed upon me that readers may think the list of apps pictured below that I’m blocking notifications from are my apps.

I assure you, they are the apps of my elderly relatives and elementary school acquaintances!

Amid all the shouting about Facebook’s Pages updates, a bizarro but profound change happened to the news feed.

Facebook is hiding most of your friends & Pages updates, and only showing the few users/Pages you interact with the most.

This has the effect of making Facebook seem darn near abandoned in the past few days, which can’t possibly be what the aging social network is looking for. Users at this point need to be assured that Facebook is still a busy, happening place, or there’ll be no one left to sell stuff to.

The feed modification instead gives the appearance of all but the most active people up and leaving, resulting in a boring, mildly confusing, and certainly not cool vibe. This is a weird choice at a time when people are reacting with dismay to the faintest suggestion that Facebook might buy Twitter, bringing it’s (presumably) uncool culture with it.

Get reacquainted with your friends by scrolling to the bottom of the page (challenging because of the autorefresh; you’ll see) > Edit Options > All friends. Refresh.

Facebook working overtime to publicize your home address & #mobile number.

Update: Facebook received some “feedback” over the weekend, and changes are afoot. All I see is PR—they don’t say it won’t be happening, just that people need to be made “more clearly aware” that they’re sharing this data. @JulesPolonetsky—Co-chair and Director of the Future of Privacy Forum, former Chief Privacy Officer at AOL & a great guy to follow if you’re watching the privacy issue—says to hang on.

Some are questioning the Friday evening timing of this announcement, and some are encouraging people to remove this data from their profiles before bad things happen to it.

Facebook, on the other hand, is coming up with ever-easier one-click methods of squeezing more specific location & personal data from users. I spotted this “fun” quizvertising a day or 2 before I heard about the change in app permissions.

I underestimated it as merely pesterous, hamfisted data-mining before I understood just why they wanted to know.

Taken together it sounds like Facebook really wants to offer advertisers this data. Crank the dial on the privacy metre from “annoying” to  “ominous”. Your social norms have been warned.

My New Year’s Wish (for Facebook)

Remember the mid-December excitement when Facebook went down & top-secret page admin features were “accidentally” revealed? Here’s the gist of my delirium:

It was a glorious day. I was suddenly, magically, prayer-answeringly able to log in to Facebook as either myself or the pages I admin. Facebook was crashing all around us, though, so there wasn’t time to experiment, but I made a quick screenshot, lest these super powers turn out to be all a dream.

The chatter is that page admins will be able to comment on other pages as the brand they represent, but my New Year’s Facebook Wish is for much more than that. I hope we’ll be able to interact with our fans on our walls as either people or brands.

This would free us up to say things our brands can’t, add a human feel to brand communications, and make things not look so lonesome when there’s no conversation happening (if you have 5-10 admins in 1 organization, that’s a lot of people who can’t contribute to the conversation individually).

Fingers crossed for 2011!

If that was a little prosaic of a fantasy for your tastes, check out my New Year’s wish for all humanity. Happy New Year!

Twitter data: the swiss cheese of demographics.

Marketers know that more targeted efforts equal higher conversions. The more you know about your audience, the more you can appeal to them. In the age of content marketing, that means you get to create stuff people will actually like / use.

Digital is measurable. Psychographics and demographics can be aggregated or inferred. This is one of the aspects of digital marketing that draws me the most: the crisp, clean numbers attached to it. Ideas pass or fail. But extracting demographic data from social media profiles is just a little too emic.

What do I mean by “personal branding reasons”? The sort of stuff where you stretch the truth to indicate you’re not only from, say, Winnipeg. People trade up to more glamourous locales because, hey, they can.

In gathering Winnipeg social media demographics, I noted that it relied on self-reported location data. On Facebook this isn’t as much of an issue, because to make the most of Facebook users kind of need to associate themselves with a place (and Lord knows whether Facebook is providing advertisers with public data or, you know, the other kind. With $1.2 billion in ad revenue this year, they might not rely on self-reported stats. Ooh, imagine if they read your IP?). Anyhoo, Facebook has a very vested interest in providing accurate demographic data.

Twitter, however, is a more creative space (in that you present yourself as you want to be, not necessarily who you are) and, whether for privacy or personal branding reasons, some people don’t list an accurate location. Twitter has just released their ad platform to the public, though, so they’ll be getting serious about user demographics in the name of profit.

Sysomos recently released data (gleaned from over a billion tweets) that shows 31% of Twitter users don’t have a bio, and 18% don’t list a location. While this can’t be accurately mapped to Winnipeg numbers by any stretch of the imagination, it does highlight the need to take them as guidelines, not hard numbers. There’s a lot of (frustratingly) missing information.

What marketers need in Twitter demographic tools

Twitter is rolling out its own metrics platform now, and I’d like to see it include the following capabilites (for any @name), in compliance with ToS-determined privacy, of course:

• A guess at what % are female & male
• Accurate usercount for any location
• The top hashtags for any location over day/month/year
• The most active tweeters for any location or user over day/month/year
• Trending topics over day/month/year for any location
• Generate list or word cloud of follower’s bios
• Generate list or word cloud of follower’s top hash tags
• Generate list or word cloud of follower’s top mentioned words
• Generate list of follower’s top @replied users (who they’re talking to the most)
• Who unfollowed an account
• Tweet efffect on followers (+/-)

A number of these rely on Twitter keeping tweets longer than the 4 weeks they currently do, which wold require a server farm colonizing Mars, so I’m not hopeful for this level of robustness. A few of them are a little creepy (though highly useful). If any app developers out there want to make my day/month/year, though, go for it

How many people are using Facebook & Twitter in Winnipeg?

A recent eMarketer survey says 59% of Canadians are using social sites in 2010. What about here in the Peg? The numbers may surprise you / affect your marketing strategy.

Facebook use in Winnipeg

Here’s the demographic breakdown of Winnipeggers on Facebook, gathered from Facebook’s advertising platform. I’ve highlighted where I think the data is suspect [mainly due to teenage creativity]. Click the image to biggie-size.

What percentage of Winnipeg is that? A hefty 70%. You can make a pretty good case for your local business having a Facebook page at this point, especially with Facebook Places allowing people to broadcast the fact that they’re hanging out with you. Incentivize their endorsement with a nice coupon—Winnipeggers love that.

Twitter use in Winnipeg

And how ’bout microblogging platform Twitter? In Winnipeg, it’s not so much how many people are on Twitter as how many people aren’t.

This data is gathered from people self-identifying their location in their bios, so is subject to bullshit, but still. 6759 Winnipeggers, or 1.1% of our population, claim to be from the Peg. This is actually higher than the overall Canadian average (determined the same way) of 0.88%. [I've heard wildly different numbers for Canadian use, but this is an algorithm talking].

That said, I’ve met—virtually and IRL—lots of very cool Winnipeggers because of Twitter, and Biz Stone promised on Larry King a few weeks ago that he’s adding 300k users/day (American use is higher than Canadian at 8%). Watch for Twitter use to blow up here in the next 1-2 years, and get started buildin’ those relationships now.

Taking a bit of a stand.

I finally got the ‘make Facebook your home page’ notification (did I just call an ad a ‘notification’? Like some kind of  “important message brought to me by Facebook”? Semantics matter, folks).

I grovel—nay, weep—at the fine marketing techniques employed in this humble (Humble? It’s anything but. Let’s go with “simple”) banner ad.

Note the clear, unjargony, friendly instructions: just drag, no big deal. And it’s not about some technical, possibly virus-inducing (who knows?) “home page”. It’s about seeing what your friends are up to faster! And look at those little thumbnails…those are your friends! Your interesting, interesting friends!

Facebook already accounts for 1 in 4 pageviews in the US, so for some people, setting Facebook as their home page might be kinda useful (as opposed to sinister). I’ve always used Google (redundantly, because it’s in my address bar too) because “it loads fast”, but lately I’m feeling like it’s a real brand stand.

Tip: Market the heck out of your Facebook links

Part of interactive marketing is the subtle influence of design cues that help people notice, click and share links.

When you post a link to Facebook—say, to your brand’s blog—it’s because you’ve worked hard to create some great content or curate something perfect for your fans. You’re also affecting the delicate “do we post too much?” balance. A lot rides on how fans perceive this link.

If Facebook drags in a weird thumbnail, a senseless page title (a great way to tell if your have sad SEO), and a page-long jumble of javascript where a jaunty blurb should be, you’re posting something that will get ignored at best, and could even get you unliked.

However! You don’t have to just sit back and let Facebook uglify your precious link! You can whip it into sexy, clickable shape by modifying most of it yourself. Thanks to the original Weekend Warrior and Fishmeister General Scott Sime for showing me this tip.

What you see is not what you have to get

So you’re about to use up some precious fan goodwill by intruding upon their news stream. You’ve pasted the link in, and it’ll work and everything, but it just doesn’t shout CLICK ME.

Write a nice lead-in where I’ve highlighted the green—a meta-comment in the voice of your brand that explains why the person would want to check out the link.

Supertip: Copying and pasting here will very often bring in some weird line breaks that you won’t see until you post. Don’t take the chance. Retype if you want to use someone else’s headline.

So far so good. Now, what about all that unmarketable stuff underneath?

Hover over the headline, and you’ll see your cursor turn into a hand—the telltale sign that you can modify a field!

Click and you’ll be able to type something wittier, more informative, or reinforcing your headline’s message.

Alright. Now what about that nonsense below taking up precious real estate? Sometimes you’ll find a repetitive synopsis or copy of the headline in this space. I smell a potential sales tool! Mouse over & it too will become clickable, just like the headline.

Write a secondary headline that adds something your original comment doesn’t. It can be more factual if your personal headline was a teaser, or vice versa.

Now, about that graphic. The visual can really sell the link. A boring, irrelevant, or absent image is a missed opportunity to convey the awesomeness that’s just a click away. Use the little arrows under the post to scroll through all the available images.

Supertip: occasionally no image at all will appear, despite there being a big fat glossy photo on the page you’re linking to. I don’t know why. But I do know that if you abandon the link (you’ve to to physically leave the page, by clicking the Facebook logo or otherwise refreshing and getting your cursor the heck out of that field) and paste the link in again, eventually the image will show up. It may take a few tries, but don’t let Facebook link weirdness strip you of your eyeball-attracting image!

And we’re done! You’ve marketed the link to the best of your ability, attending to every detail/opportunity to persuade. You’re spending your audience’s patience and your content creation efforts wisely by giving your link the best possible chance of being noticed, clicked, and shared.

6 reasons I don’t need Facebook email.

I don’t want to be curmudgeonly about this, but I just don’t need Zuck’s tentacles wrapped around everything I say to other humans. You can break down my objections into 2 categories: utility and privacy.

Utility, or the lack thereof:

1. I already have 8 email addresses. I’m covered. My brain can hold no more permutations of my username/passwords.
2. Email is not an area wherein I need innovation. I’d do away with it entirely if it weren’t for business communication.
3. Facebook private messaging virtually is email, and it includes the ability to message people you aren’t friends with (so, slightly more useful than email, because I don’t need to know their address). The only thing it lacks is file attachments, which would be easy to incorporate without the new-interface-learning-curve Facebook users hate so much.

Privacy, or the seriousness of the potential lack thereof:

1. Email isn’t particularly social, as Google Buzz so dramatically underlined. I have Xobni and feel creepy enough as it is when I see people’s Facebook picture coming up in their email.
2. Let’s Google our memories for the numerous occasions where Facebook revealed private messages and photos, sent them to the wrong people, skywrote them over our hometowns, etc. Security, not their strong suit. Commitment to privacy, not their strong suit.
3. Do you want Facebook to read your email (necessary for the contextual advertising this is surely destined for)? I delete old private messages already, scared they’ll resurface in some future privacy debacle. I don’t want them to have my browsing history either, xo Rockmelt.

Facebook’s forbidden feminist fruit.

Facebook has an advertising policy that I respect: don’t use pictures of hot women to sell your product, unless your product is hot women.

It decreases the sleaze factor of advertising while serving the audience by making ad graphics more relevant, and thus less painful (in the time-wasting sense) to click.

I have sort of an augmented reality vision now, where I see social media as a layer overtop of everything, even snacks.