Facebook's new 'like' button

The game-changing feature, however, is the new ability for Web publishers to add the Like button to virtually any piece of content on any Web property. For example, let’s imagine that you operate a music blog, and you’ve posted a video reviewing the new MGMT album. You also add the Like button to this video that is associated with a subcategory “MGMT” on your site. Anytime someone comes to your site who is also simultaneously logged into Facebook, that person can Like the video. When they do this, it will show up as an item in their news feed, enabling their friends to find your content from Facebook as well. In addition, using the new plugin, it’s possible to view anyone else in their network who has liked that content without even going to Facebook (they’ll be able to see it from your music blog).

Using our example, when important news about MGMT comes out again, you could push a message into the news feed of anyone who Liked the original video and potentially drive them back to your site. They would of course be able to unsubscribe to these messages, so it will be extremely important to stay 100% on message. In other words, this enables you to send users who Liked MGMT content only that content, as opposed to also sending them content about Bob Dylan, Brahams and Ke$ha.

This is a total revolution for both market segmentation and permission-based marketing. It’s difficult to imagine, two years from now, many Web marketers who would still prefer to manage dozens of targeted email lists when it’s possible to allow Facebook users to opt into an unlimited number of topics and digest them anywhere on the Web. This is a critical addition to the social media optimization toolkit.

While embracing these concepts is important, it’s important not to get too locked into any single piece of SMO strategy or functionality in the near term. Facebook will no doubt be making many adjustments and wholesale changes to these new tentacles as they essentially focus test these on its more than 400 million users and the thousands of Web publishers that will no doubt jump in with both feet right away.

Banning social media from the workplace doesn’t only create resentment and a feeling that management is operating in an old business model. It also deprives the business of valuable exposure on social networks and also limits employees from creating valuable relationships with company suppliers, contractors and potential clients. Since many small businesses and services are placing their primary emphasis on Facebook and Twitter, rather than into traditional Web sites, it also impairs your employees from doing the type of research and due diligence that will make them competitive.

This is to say nothing about your current employees’ ability to refer new hires into the company. With an average cost of $8,000-$12,000 to make a traditional hire (add it up – creating job descriptions, posting ads, doing interviews, management time, etc), the money you’ll save when your employees are maintaining relationships online is considerable. Not only will it be easier for your current employees to help you fill positions using their network on LinkedIn or Facebook, but it’ll be far easier to land those candidates (note to overzealous IT Director: you’re scaring away the best candidates by not letting them log into Facebook at work).

Rather than distance your business from the future of business communications, create a smart, pro-business and pro-employee social networking policy as a permanent part of your company handbook.

Step 1 – Define Company-Sponsored Messaging Guidelines
Make a clear distinction between company-sponsored usage and personal usage, and create different guidelines for each group. Your employees that are blogging, tweeting, networking or posting on behalf of the company need a clear set of guidelines so that your brand and corporate image is always consistent, regardless of the channel they use. Focus first on the most likely potential areas of friction:

• Publishing schedule – Are employees obligated to create a posting plan in advance that will be reviewed by managers, or are they free to wing it?
• Authorized posting topics – Should your companies stick to company-focused topics only, or will you give them room to improvise?
• Non-authorized posting topics – Which topics should never be addressed?
• Authorized profile images – May employees use their personal profile pictures? If so, what’s acceptable and what isn’t acceptable?
• Participation policies – How to handle others that comment on your post or tweet, and define whether your employees are allowed to comment on other social sites on behalf of the company)
• Handling negative sentiment – Define how publicly visible negative comments about your company will be handled by your social media-focused employees.

Step 2 – Define Tools and Objectives
Define a common set of tools (social media management software) that will be adopted by the entire group doing social media on behalf of the company. This will make it much easier to share knowledge and be more productive. You should include at least one Facebook/Twitter management tool, such as Seesmic, as well as a social media monitoring tool, such as SocialMention. It may also be prudent to define how you will measure success. Do you care most about Fan/Follower acquisition? Retweets? Commerce derived from certain social campaigns? Traffic from social properties to your main Web site? Be clear.

Step 3 – Define Rules for Networking with Clients, Suppliers and Partners
Deepening connections with business associates can be the best thing for your business. However, it can also lead to a tremendous amount of anxiety and friction. For example, it can be extremely awkward when clients “Friend” your employees in Facebook or other sites; your employees’ first worry is that something on their personal social space might be harshly judged and cost your company business or relationships. These fears are completely legitimate.

You need to state clearly that you are fully supportive of your employees’ right to ignore or accept a social networking invitation from a colleague, client or partner. It’s their choice. You can also provide them with ideas for handling circumstances with finesse. In Facebook, it may be acceptable to Friend a client but also limit their access to less personal content. Another suggestion is to re-route the connection to a business-focused site such as LinkedIn or, in some cases, Twitter.

Step 4 – Define Rules for Limited Personal Use
This is actually the easy part, where most issues are black and white. Here are the major friction points you’ll want to address:

• Limited personal use while at work (during breaks, or at lunch) – acceptable.
• Airing grievances online with the Company or other employees (even in a closed personal network of friends) – unacceptable.
• Discussing sensitive company matters – unacceptable.
• Discussing sensitive Client information – unacceptable.
• Accepting a social networking request from another employee – acceptable.
• Ignoring a social networking request from another employee – acceptable.

As a final step, it may be wise to encourage employees to explore filtering techniques that exist within Facebook and LinkedIn so that they can handle their social networking with some degree of nuance. An example might be organizing their contacts into groups so that some more sensitive groups (clients, partners) are limited from some content.

Furthermore, year over year increases in social media spend are expected, with CMOs cited in the study projecting that social media will consume over 17% of their total budget by 2015. Much of the spending patterns between B2Bs and B2Cs are similar, with heavy emphasis on branding, CRM and service promotions. Projected B2B spend over the next 12 months to promote company services is even slightly greater than B2C spending for the same category (11% vs. 10.7%).

Much in the same way that B2Cs followed their consumers to Facebook and Twitter, B2Bs are realizing that the decision makers and business executives inhabit the same space. B2B spend in social media is here to stay and planning now to accommodate its future growth is crucial.

What’s not yet clear is whether most B2B’s have clear ROI expectations, or whether they’re making an investment simply because they need to get a foothold in an increasingly important space.

After six years, Facebook is still gathering influence. The company estimated earlier this year that out of its 400 million users, 175 million log into Facebook every day. Many users enthusiastically interact with brands and artists in Facebook as well as other Fans of those communities. Remember that all of this is indexable content, and everything you do in this realm can play heavily into your future SEO strategy. The increased emphasis on fresh content in search may also play a heavy role in search ranking.

Here are the three most important building blocks to consider right now:

Regular and Relevant Content Updates – your Facebook posts will be contextualized though image tags, keywords used on your Page, your page title and other relevant content. The more focused your posts are topically, the more likely they are to help your overall SEO strategy.

Jump-Start Fan Growth – there are many reasons to want to create a critical mass of Facebook Fans (commerce potential, for one). But knowing that Google search is increasingly personalized, increasing your social network in Facebook may prove to be incredibly important down the line. Already, Google’s social search serves up content that your friends logged into Google social products have published or interacted with, much in the way that Facebook’s post quality now partially determines the “Top News” in your Facebook news feed. It’s completely conceivable that the same effect may start happening with Facebook Pages in Google down the line.

Facebook Connect – start looking for ways to introduce Facebook connect to other social and non-social Web properties you operate (blogs, Web sites, community areas). It’s unknown how this might affect your overall search ranking over time, but it’s a good idea in general to begin weaving your Facebook presence into your other properties.

This may seem like a small development – and it was indeed a minor event in Boland’s address to OMMA Social attendees – but it is actually one of the most significant steps in Facebook’s revenue model thus far. There are plenty of businesses that are already using their own methods of conversion tracking, but this model will allow businesses of all sizes to begin to measure the effectiveness of their campaigns.

Not surprisingly, nearly all the followup questions from those in the audience were about ad conversion tracking. The product is expected to be released to the wider public in late March.

Bolan also talked up the success of “Friends of Connections,” an ad targeting feature that allows advertisers to target the friends of Fans and connections that have installed Facebook apps. According to Bolan, this feature has so far shown a huge lift in conversion rate.

See the video featuring Brian Boland here:

But as much as Facebook wants to keep the platform relatively spam-free, they aren’t about to tie developer’s hands. The app economy is simply too important. We already know that Facebook apps have proven to be a major source of online revenue with Zygna for one raking in revenues of more than $150 million from sales of virtual game-related merchandise.

Consider these major changes that will likely make it easier for apps to be used, launched and monetized:

• New Prominence – In the current Facebook interface, installed apps can be somewhat difficult to find. The applications menu is about to move up to the left hand sidebar, creating a dashboard for apps and games. This is bound to lead to increased app usage.

• Email Permission – App developers will be able to collect user email addresses and communicate with them through this medium. Previously, apps had to request special permission to do this. This makes it much easier to develop a true lead generation program through apps.

• Nixing the Verified Application Program – The intent of this program – to ensure that apps met a quality standard as well as Facebook’s development guidelines – was noble. However, the reality was something else. In our experience, Facebook charged a rather large application fee and then never carried out the promised review at all. This may have been because the platform’s constant policy and technology changes made it difficult to agree on a procedure for app reviews. In any event, it’s one less hurdle to cross.

With these changes, there will be less of a need for app developers to find gimmicky ways to remind users that the app is there after the first use. This will cut down on spam, and also cut down on the need for apps to ask for special permission to contact users outside of Facebook. Overall, it allows developers to focus more on providing great functionality and content, which will be good for everybody.

Social media marketers were already keen on Facebook because, unlike Twitter or MySpace, it has significant market penetration in virtually all age groups, ranging from teens to seniors. Now American consumer behavior analysis firm Nielsen Claritas has discovered that many Facebook users tend to be far wealthier than those in MySpace.

According to Nielsen, users in the top third lifestyle segment – or the most affluent users – are 25% more likely to use Facebook than other social networks. By contrast, the poorest segments are 37% more likely to use MySpace. Furthermore, the study showed that Facebook users are more likely to use LinkedIn and that social media users in general tend to live in urban, affluent areas.

Until now, Facebook apps have been a proving grounds of sorts for eventual iPhone apps. It’s a fast, easy platform that allows for rapid testing and feedback from either people within your own network or the public at large. This provides the opportunity to improve an app based on real user experience prior to creating it for mobile use.

But as reported by Stuart Dredge, companies including RealNetworks and Spotify are using social media as a PR tool in hopes that it will help them get on the app store in the first place. The idea, as Dredge explains it, is to provide a sneak peak to journalists and bloggers that will create advance press and demand before Apple’s own review process. Theoretically, then, this might either expedite Apple’s own review process and also make it more likely that they will experience a backlash if an app isn’t approved at all.

We’d love to hear additional examples of companies using social media – including Facebook or Twitter – to create advance buzz.

All in all, this has meant much more transparency for job searchers and networkers, allowing them to see not only who you are, but in many cases, who you know and what you care about.

The new Brazen Careerist social networking site has taken this concept much further.  It’s essentially an online resume site created for Generation Y that attempts to mash up elements of LinkedIn, Twitter, the Blogosphere and Facebook. Users signing up for the service will have the option of inviting employers into their entire world, from their traditional online resume to blog postings, professional groups and miscellaneous social media chatter. The site features an “Ideas” section that is designed to give employers an idea of the candidate’s potential and personality.

“Live Openly” is not the site’s tag line, but it probably should be. Although the site has plenty of controls for identity protection, the idea is clearly not to exercise too much control over them.

This launch should be interesting to marketers principally because of who is behind it. The site’s founder is celebrity blogger and Brazen Careerist CEO Penelope Trunk, whose online career skyrocketed overnight in 2008-2009 as she bared the details of her riveting personal life almost interchangeably with no-nonsense career advice. Her column appears in hundreds of online and offline publications. After successfully marketing herself and selling her blog, she has transformed the site into a network of more than 1000 bloggers while continuing to disclose everyday details of her personal life.

The new site’s success seems to be betting on the fact that many Gen Y job searchers crave something that allows employers greater insight into their lives than LinkedIn currently provides. At this point, Gen Yers appear to make some attempts – however unsuccessfully – to keep their online professional and personal lives somewhat separate. If this venture is successful, it will tell marketers mountains about the level of privacy that Gen Y is comfortable with.

If the Facebook popularity rankings at AppData.com are any indication, triviality still reigns supreme. Top apps still include familiar entertainment favorites “Mafia Wars,” “RockYou Live” (formerly SuperWall) and “Texas Hold ‘Em Poker.” However, recent data released by ChubbyBrain.com indicate positive signs for the popularity of apps designed for business, travel and other everyday uses.

The data tracks the popularity of several dozen 2008 Fb Fund apps broken out by category. The fact that all the apps received Facebook funding and were developed at roughly the same time, therefore giving none of the apps a significant time to market advantage, makes the group compelling to track. In the first graph, note that the single largest group of funded apps are in a category dubbed “Just for Fun.”

The next graph depicts the most popular funded apps grouped into a category called “Tier 1.” Interestingly, the “Just for Fun” and “Gaming” categories don’t dominate the popularity rankings as one might expect. Instead, the most popular apps from this group are more or less equally distributed among business, utility, travel and other categories. It should be noted that obviously, not all apps were created equal. Some apps still appear decidedly unfinished, while others hum along gracefully. Still, the chart raises several questions. With users in their 30s and 40s swelling among Facebook’s ranks, will apps that help users run their lives – and even their businesses – gain in overall popularity? Will businesses find value in Facebook beyond recruiting and advertising? There’s not enough evidence here to answer any of those questions, but as the new App Directory gains increased use, and users have increased access to a wide variety of categories, it will be interesting to see how app use in the social network changes over time.