Good.  That should have happened because analytics are important!  Below, some tips to making more out of your “new” Facebook Insights:

Get Past Total Likes

It’s easy to take metrics like People Talking About This (PTAT), Engaged Users, etc. and divide them into total Page Likes as a barometer for fan engagement levels. PTAT and Total Likes are prominently displayed next to one another on your page.  But this overstates your fan engagement, and Facebook wants you to start seeing the forest for the trees.  When grabbing reach metrics, make sure you’re looking at fans, friends of fans, and in some cases the unique visitor traffic to your page (if measuring stats at the page level.)  Engagements and stories are being created by more than just your fans, and should be measured that way.  Total Likes is important, and is just one of several metrics to use when measuring your Facebook audience.

Measure Engagement And Viral Engagement

The level of engagement with your content is the lynchpin to getting more exposure in the news feed and what better way to see that than understanding how many people interact with your content when they see it?  To get Engagement, divide Engaged Users by your Total Reach.  This will give you a % of all the unique users who potentially SAW your content that also clicked on that content in some way.

People Talking About This, a type of engagement, measures a unique user performing an action that creates a story in the engaged user’s news feed (ex – “Jane Doe just commented on Acme Brand’s post.”) Measure PTAT the same way as Engaged Users, dividing by Total Reach, to get % Viral Engagement (or “Virality” as Facebook displays it on the Insights dashboard.) Viral engagement is the more desired type of engagement in most instances, as it spreads your message through the social graph more quickly.

These metrics are helpful in understanding how well your message is resonating with the people you’re reaching.  Aim to keep engagement levels up as your fan base grows, and continue to increase the virality of your engagements by focusing on those actions that create stories, which in turn increases the distribution of your message.

Use People Talking About This For Competitive Analysis

Since PTAT is a public-facing metric, you can now take this number, divide by total Likes (I know I just advised not doing this above, but we don’t have much choice when doing competitive analysis), and trend this percentage over time for your brand and your competitors.  If you’re between 2-4% you’re on the right track (this may be higher for pages with less fans and lower for pages with more fans).  Keep an eye on this to gauge how well your message is resonating as compared to your competitors and similar brands with comparable fan levels.

Pay Attention To The Post Level

Post level metrics are the purest Insights Facebook offers for accurately measuring post content performance.  Try categorizing your post types by subject in advance, then group your posts’ performance by subject to better understand what content topics and execution tactics boost kpi’s like Engaged Users and Virality at the post level.  For example, you’re a wine brand targeting Millenials.  You may post about the properties of the wine, the brand values of the wine, lifestyle attributes of your target customers like the kind of music or food they may like, etc.  Group these posts into their respective topics, and revise your content strategy by learning how these topics generally perform by comparison.

Ultimately you’ll want to measure whatever metrics align with your objectives.  Maybe you’re looking to drive traffic to a product web site, and you want to measure reach with click through rates on sales or product announcements, or maybe your concern is awareness in which Impressions might hold more weight.  Don’t be afraid to experiment with metrics just like you would with your creative tactics.  Just remember that Facebook can, and will, manipulate and change their data and metrics whenever they want and however they want, so be sure to export and store your data regularly to avoid losing anything important.

How have you adapted to the new Insights from Facebook?

While the rest of the world waits for smartphones to support RFID, which would make it more cost effective for others to implement this technology, there’s no excuse for you to not start think about implementing RFID into your business. There are a lot of benefits that come from using RFID technology: from creatively engaging with new and existing customers, understanding and meeting your customers’ habits and needs, and overall creating a unique service and experience. Many companies are missing out on a special opportunity, while a select few are using it as a chance to create an effective offline and online customer and branding experience. It’s an investment like with anything new, with a bit of risk, but a successful implementation of RFID could pay off in the short and long run.

Here are a few brands that have used the technology to bridge the gap between offline and online activities and marketing:

Vail Resort’s Epic Mix

By having a RFID tag in your ski pass or lift ticket, you’re able to track your ski stats, share accomplishments, and connect with others seamlessly. With the introduction of Epic Mix Photo this season, resort photographers now have the ability to post photos while you’re on the slopes directly to your Facebook account. For casual and serious skiers, Epic Mix offers a ton of value by tracking each person’s ski adventure and gets friends involved with updates to Facebook and Twitter.

The Ushuaia Beach Hotel

By setting up RFID readers (Facebook pillars) throughout the hotel, visitors are able to share their whereabouts and activities on Facebook by swiping their RFID installed wristband. This features a camera that allows you to take and share photos, check-in through Facebook Places, and posts updates to your wall. Events such as the Facebook F8 Conference have done similar work using RFID enabled passes.

Coca-Cola and Google Wallet   

Google has invested heavily in this technology, blazing a trail to bring payments to mobile using NFC (Near Field Communication), a form of RFID. If you haven’t looked into Google Wallet yet, you can watch this video to learn more. This technology does more than just replace a credit card with your smartphone (nobody wants an exploding wallet). It allows you to redeem Google Offers, special savings both online and offline, and also store reward cards so you don’t have to lug those around anymore. It’s quick, convenient, and safe.

In the end, the possibilities for RFID use are endless. When researching RFID and how it’s been steadily implemented and utilized more and more, you’ll find some pretty amazing examples out there. I’m interested to hear what you think about RFID and when you think it will catch on.

Have you seen any examples of RFID being linked with social media? Please feel free to share below!

@BarackObama joins Instagram
Social media savvy President Obama has furthered his online presence yet again this time by joining Instagram as @BarackObama. The president and his team are no strangers to utilizing various social media platforms (most recent forays being Tumblr and Flickr), although Instagram is their first mobile only platform. While it’s hard to figure out how the photo sharing nature of Instagram plays into the upcoming 2012 campaign, it’d be foolish to dismiss it completely either as more news organizations – such as the Washington Post and NBC World News – have opened accounts to share behind-the-scenes snapshots. Take a look at Obama’s first photo here and leave a tip on which filter would suit him best!

Facebook App Profile Pages to Disappear on February 1^st
Page managers should be noticing banners on their application pages  kindly notifying them that:

“By February1, 2012, we are removing app profile pages. You can migrate likes and the vanity URL of this page to an existing Facebook page with the same name and product/app category.”

These banner notifications come six months after the initial announcement that Facebook would phase out its App directory  and it appears to be an effort to encourage both app developers and users for more search-friendly (and search reliant) apps. A Facebook Developer blog post credited the move to inconsistencies between app profile pages and regular pages concerning insights, APIs, and distribution channels. Admins will be able to transfer likes to new pages, but unfortunately this does not apply to content. You can read further on the matter here.

Google + Sees Member Growth
Google +’s growth in 2011 hasn’t been as fast as some had initially speculated or hoped. Although Plus  has yet to gain footing as a serious Facebook contender, December saw its strongest month, member growth-wise, with US visits reaching over 49 million, and up by 55% since November, according to Experian Hitwise.  According to analyst Paul Allen, Plus just passed the 62 million mark, compared to Facebook reaching 60 million four years after its debut. While Facebook still reigns with a whopping 800 million active members, Allen predicts that Plus will reach 400 million by the end of 2012.

Post Your Instagram Pics to Facebook
Candid photographers rejoice! Thanks to a small tweak on the mobile photo platform, users can share full sized Instagram photos in all their filtered glory directly onto Facebook, utilizing Timeline’s aesthetic value to the max. While all Instagram photos end up in a designated “Instagram Photo” album, they’re published onto Timeline with its original caption and a public URL. If you want to get a headstart and start sharing photos you’ve already uploaded, follow these instructions. For more old fashioned users who want the print experience, you can check out these services that’ll print your Instagram pics in various ways.

Groupon Introduces a New Merchant Center 
Groupon rolled out a new merchant center that’ll allow for more transparency concerning customer deals, available to all merchants. Features include real time percentages of customers who’d recommend the business and their comments, although data on satisfaction rates is a little scarce. The dash also includes the deal statistics that launched last month, and aggregates buyer demographics such as zip codes, genders, and ages. To read up further on Merchant Center’s features, you can read Techcrunch’s breakdown here.

Facebook’s Daily Deals, Revisited
When Facebook announced the end of its daily deals service back in August, it was a quiet concession to Groupon’s dominance in that area. It seems however, that the Daily Deals Agency is reattempting another go, launching a Facebook Marketplace Network  in over 40 U.S cities with over 500 sources of daily deals, offers, and steals – all sortable by category and location. Better luck this time!

Did we miss anything? Let us know here and join in on the buzz!

With 40% of U.S. individuals utilizing second screen devices, it is tough to ignore the over-saturation of trending topics revolving around the big game, the star athlete, or the Twitter-revoked and tackle-taking cheerleader with weeklong glory. Sports fans are verbal, they are passionate, and they are opinionated, which presents a unique opportunity for leagues and brands to create brilliant examples of social media campaigns, contests, case studies, and even now, on-field tangibles to leverage this enthusiasm. With that, I bring you some spectacular examples of social media implementation into the sporting world.

MLB FanCave: An Offline-to-Online Content Powerhouse

Major League Baseball introduced in 2011 their Downtown Manhattan, New York based social media hub called the FanCave. The idea: two fans, fifteen big-screen TV’s, and a season-long journey to watch every MLB contest (that’s 2,430 games) of the 2011 season. With the help of over 150 visits from professional athletes, musical performances from top artists, and TV and movie star appearances, the 15,000 sq.-foot space played host to a social media content beast.

Through 300 blog posts, 200 videos of celeb skits and interviews, and most of all, good ole’ baseball banter, it all merged together and led to a sizeable social media boom: a 200,000+ “Liked” Facebook page, a nearly 57,000 “Followed” Twitter account, and over one million social media impressions.

While not every brand has the mass appeal and last minute resources to construct their very own marketing control center, the FanCave showed us that rich, engaging content can give you an edge over competitors who may not be utilizing their online space. Major League Baseball spiced up their social media presence; they threw a few curveballs with attention-grabbing videos, shared behind-the-scenes photos, and strayed away from the traditional status update.

 What works so well with ESPN Sports Bar is a combination of sponsorship integration, brand centralization, and mood-boosting gaming. Samsung, a sponsor of Sports Bar, has its products featured and integrated into the game. The Samsung Galaxy Tab is one of several products that users can unlock by completing missions and challenges. The game also revolves around the user by allowing full-on personalizing in their bar, from colors and menu items, to employees and TV channels.

Client Name

Solution Type — Digital Promotion

Objective — Promote the release of Chrysler’s 2012 Jeep Call-of-Duty edition Wrangler through an immersive, social-driven consumer promotion within Facebook around Activision’s much-anticipated release of Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3.

Activation — Jeep Ops, an immersive Facebook sweepstakes game, asked fans of Jeep to play the game, mimicking the in-game Call of Duty story to earn entries into the contest by completing Missions in order to win the first-off-the-line 2012 Jeep Wrangler COD version.

Results
•       453,842 Visits | 940,964 Page views
•       51,569 Total submissions | 46,592 Playing the game
•       2,435,164 total ballot entries

Campaigns/Initiatives

Engage users by creating a Call-of-Duty themed virtual scavenger hunt on Facebook that highlights both the capabilities of the new Wrangler Call-of-Duty MW3 Edition and the game locations.  Users earn “ballots” for participation, solving clues, and referring friends that result in additional chances to win.

Services Provided

•       Social Media Sweepstakes
•       Social Media Monitoring
•       Technical execution of Facebook Application

Notes
This effort was a highly technical one, executed under a tight timeline. Affinitive, as a Facebook Preferred Developer Consultant (PDC), leveraged its extensive expertise with Facebook Platform among a collaborative team of several other creative and media agencies, including Sapient Nitro.

How it Works

Once a user has "Liked" the Jeep Facebook page, they are directed to a Call-of-Duty-esque commander module where they receive instructions on the game.

Next, users were led through four different "missions", where they were given clues about a specific location they that they must solve—by any means necessary—to locate various parts of the vehicle.

Completed missions earn achievement badges and bonus ballots for the sweepstakes to win the first-off-the-line 2012 Jeep Wrangler Call of Duty: MW3 Edition. The farher along users advance through the four stages of training, the greater the number of ballots earned.

Ballots will be tallied after midnight on December 31, 2011 and the winner will be drawn at random for the new Jeep Wrangler, Call of Duty: MW3 edition.

Twitter is a wordsmith’s best friend, so it’s no surprise that authors flock to the micro-social networking service to help launch their books. While most book launch campaigns on Twitter go under the radar, every once in awhile a hashtag will hit it big, or at least be so interesting that you can’t help give it some props. There are no hard or fast rules when it comes to successfully building awareness about a book through Twitter, but by looking at two recent examples, we can glean some insights on how to run a successful Twitter campaign.

ROUTE #1 – Connect with the people

Back in September, British author (and Twitter addict with over 1 million followers) Lord Alan Sugar took to Twitter to launch his new ebook The Way I See It, a non-fiction anthology of his rants and ravings about everything. Using the hashtag #thewayiseeit, he called upon his followers to use the hashtag to tweet their rants at him so he could use them to sign copies of his book. For a more in-depth look at the campaign that was considered “the first Twitter book signing” watch the brief video below.

So why did this work? For starters, the author already had a built in audience – which always helps – but what he asked Tweeps to do was already a natural extension of something that happens on Twitter – ranting. That’s it. All he wanted was for people to use the hashtag and to Tweet their rants in 140 characters or less.

The results? Within 24 hours there was a grand total of 350,000 tweets using that hashtag and over 2,500 mentioned Lord Sugar directly. For more, read this article. 

Route #2 – Be Creative

When in doubt, do something funny. Twitter is a place where witty people come together to show how funny they can be. Why? People love it. So it was no surprise that the Random House Twitter campaign for the release of their zombie apocalypse book Zone One by Colson Whitehead was a success.

Utilizing the hashtag #RHZombies, Random House and ALL of their imprints took to Twitter to broadcast the publisher-wide zombie attack.

In total, the hashtag #RHZombies was used 211 times and even noted for it’s cleverness in some major book blogs like GalleyCat and BookRiot.

So, my advice for your soon-to-be-published book? Get your publisher involved! The Twitter campaign for Zone One was led by publishers, who on average usually have more followers and Klout. Getting them to launch a hashtag campaign on your behalf is always a great starting point.

If you aren’t as lucky to have the backing of a big name publisher or are self-publishing,  go the Alan Sugar route and make your hashtag relevant to the world. Be creative but simple. Make sure your hashtag is short enough so people can incorporate it into their own tweets (space is prime real estate!) but creative so that it will incite others to participate in the conversation.

Having a personal assistant would be nice. Instead of managing my own calendar, I’d have someone that keeps my contacts up to date, remembers all of my important events, alerts me when things come up, and even knows my interests so well that they could point out a special sale that I’d be interested in. That personal assistant could cost thousands of dollars a year, or I could visit UPlanMe and open an account for free. While still in its infancy, currently in beta, UPlanMe provides all of the tools anyone would need and want in a calendar, plus more. It also offers businesses a new way to connect with current and future customers. After UPlanMe develops a larger user-base, and a mobile application, this smart calendar has all of the tools necessary to become a central part of your life.

When it comes to productivity and calendar tools, there’s no shortage of options to choose from (there really is almost always an app for that). UPlanMe is unique. While some calendar apps require you to manually log events and other to-do items, UPlanMe does all of the work for you. All you have to do is complete your profile and sync your Facebook account. UPlanMe then goes to work, creating a calendar full of suggested events based on all of the interests you noted, events you’ve been invited to on Facebook, and occasions for any brands you like. When you see something you want to attend, you add it to “My Calendar” and you’re left with less clutter and only the events that really fit into your plans.

While it can be a hub for every sports, music, food, nightlife, shopping, and television related event, I’m more excited about the potential this platform has for brands. It’s a new opportunity for businesses to market themselves and become a mainstay on people’s everyday schedules. Here are just a few ways businesses stand to benefit from UPlanMe:

• UPlanMe Brand Pages
  If you don’t have a Facebook brand page, or you find that a lot of your customers begin using UPlanMe, you can create your own page on the site. This soon becomes a hub for all of your events and specials.  It also allows users on UPlanMe that don’t know about you to find your business by doing a simple search in the category that describes you best. If you can stand out with exciting events and a well-managed page, you’ll earn new business.
• Calendar For Your Website
  UPlanMe makes it easy to bring all of the features of their smart calendar to your own site. When businesses publish a calendar, it usually serves one purpose and that’s to keep their visitors up to date on upcoming events. UPlanMe takes it one step further. Once a user “follows” your calendar, opting in to receive regular updates on new events, you’ll also have access to their demographic info. This includes age range, male/female ratio, occupation, and salary. You can now better cater your events to your followers.
• Facebook Integration
  If you manage a brand page and currently use the “Events” application, it’s an easy way to expand the reach of your events. If the event details didn’t show up in someone’s news feed, or they don’t regularly visit your page to see your posts, there’s a good chance they never saw the invite. UPlanMe brings that event into a user’s “Suggested Events”, along with all of the event details that would be found on Facebook.

You can do more with your URLs and there are certain steps you can take to expand your reach as links go viral. Many people are already familiar with URL Shortening services for this reason. They make links easier to share on social media channels, give you insights into how they are performing, generate QR codes, and in some cases allow you to customize part of the URL. The practice has become so common that many applications now automatically shorten long URL’s for you. There are a number of services that offer the same features, but you need to go beyond the basics to really stand out. I’m talking additional branding opportunities. And the best part about it, I’m only sticking with free options in this post. Baby steps before you go for a $15/mo. service like awe.sm, right?

Below I’ve highlighted two services that create branding opportunities in addition to shortening a URL that will hopefully get you thinking about what more you can do with shortened links:

bo.lt

The term “remixing” has now made its way to URL shorteners. There’s really no better way to describe BO.LT. You have the ability to customize pages, adding your own twist to personalize the page you’re linking to.

What first caught my eyes was this example of what Virgin America did for a promotion they were running on Daily SF by using BO.LT.

The customizable button could be a great addition to any shared link, even one linking to your own site. Highlighted in the BO.LT promotion recap, “Twenty percent of the viewers of the shared link also made their way to the Virgin America web site.” That’s a lot of traffic and a high click-through rate for a little addition to a page.

In addition to building a customizable button, you also have the ability to “hack” other sites, giving you a number of options to make the page unique. It’s easy to use for someone with little web development experience by using their “edit” set-up. For those with a stronger understanding of HTML, the possibilities are endless. It will surprise you with what you’re actually able to do, adding, removing, and replacing anything on the site with your own material (including text). For instance, take our own Social Media Playground homepage:

 In just a few minutes I was able to make these changes:

 Another feature is a comment box which allows you to leave a short message (140 characters) that will appear on the loaded page. This could be a call to action related to the page, something you’d like to point out, or anything else that suits your link.

A downside to using BO.LT is that they do have their own branded bar on the bottom right section of every page. It’s understandable as the service is free. Although there is value in the bar as it includes a Twitter share link. When signing up, you should make sure your username isn’t too long. The username appears before “bo.lt” in the shared URL. If you’re looking to cut down on characters, don’t get too carried away.

bre.ad 

This “promotional” tool allows you to promote your brand on a full-page interface before the user is brought to the linked site. The page that loads first is called a “Toast” where you can create a billboard to recommend almost anything. It includes a short message (140 characters or less), and an image (720×300) which gives you the option to link to another site. The Toast loads for 5 seconds then takes you to the linked destination.

If you have a universal message that you’d like to share, whether it’s highlighting a promotion, bringing attention to your company, or telling people about a cause you’re involved with, it could be a great option. By activating a link within the larger image, you also give the user a chance to go to a page in another tab related to your message.

Here is an example bre.ad Toast from start-up Roozt.com:

Since it’s a new service, and hasn’t been widely adopted yet, people unfamiliar with bre.ad links may think they are sitting through an ad for 5 seconds. The user does have the ability to skip the page, but that doesn’t help ameliorate the distaste many people have for ads. One other downside is that you can have multiple Toasts activated, but you’re unable to specifically target them to certain links. Any link shortened through bre.ad will randomly select one active Toast.

Major brands and celebrities have used the service. PepsiCo, Hello Kitty, Britney Spears and Ryan Seacrest all have toasts featured on the bre.ad homepage. But a few things to note, PepsiCo was an early supporter along with major investors, including Lady Gaga’s business manager Troy Carter, in backing the company so it’s not a big surprise these names have used the service. It did receive a lot of attention when it was released in early June, 10,000 people signed up in the first four days, but it doesn’t seem like they’ve been able to keep up with that same momentum.

Whatever your goal may be, it’s worth looking into the value found in branding shared links. While keeping URL shortened links user friendly, these added branding efforts could lead to big returns for your social media properties and company. No matter where that unique link goes, you can still leave a lasting mark.

Many of you may have noticed the hashtag that is shown at the bottom of many TV shows recently.  If you do not have It is small, unobtrusive, and has great value to the studio. Turn on USA or Comedy Central most nights and you will see a hashtag in the bottom left of the screen with the title of the show that is currently on.  Watch a trailer for a movie, and you may see a hashtag which in some way indicates the name of the movie.  Posting with the hashtag shown to you on tv allows the studios to get a better glimpse as to how their show is doing in the public’s eye, how many are actually watching the show, and allows the show better publicity.

This has been seen to get actual real results when done correctly.  Comedy Central found that through the placement of their hashtag, their roast of Donald Trump brought about a huge surge in tweets, it actually reached 4,064 tweets per second at one point.  This caused a huge PR win for Comedy Central.  So much of a win, that scribbal wrote a post about it.  The hash tag did not even use that much of the screen, as shown here:

Learning from this, this year’s roast of Charlie Sheen had the #SheenRoast hashtags prominently displayed all over the place: from the corner of the screen, to the resulting webpage, to all advertisements I saw before and after the fact, including this image found on a redirect page before the show:

They also put each of the roaster’s twitter handles underneath them when they went up to the podium, as another way to track participation, but that’s for another post.

There are even whole companies that revolve around tracking these hashtags. Hash Tracking  allows you to enter a hashtag and see how much activity revolves around that hashtag.  This could be useful to see how long people are still talking about a particular event or how popular a television show still is.  This could also be useful to studios in the long run as they could use these services to sell more premium advertising space on the more popular television shows, and allow advertisers to see what kind of people are tweeting about the shows where their products are being advertised.  At the time of writing, which is a month after Charlie Sheen was roasted, there were 52 tweets, which generated 13,814 impressions, reaching an audience of 12,989 followers within the past 24 hours according to Hash Tracking. This data shows that people are still talking about it even almost a month after it aired.

Like all things, there is a proper way to do things and an improper way.  The reason for the massive success of showing hashtags in these shows are that they are easy to recognize and easy to type.  They are also unobtrusive yet prominent when shown on the screen and they do not take away from the experience of the non-currently-tweeting watcher.  They are also on screen for long periods of time so people have time to get on twitter and tweet them or remember them later on.

There are also many ways I have seen this done wrong.  One unfortunately popular source of bad showing of hashtags seems to be with movie commercials and trailers. Assuming I had a computer on and nearby, I wouldn’t be able to type in twitter.com and post a status before the commercial is already long gone.  They flash the hashtag as fast as most other car, airline and credit card commercials flash their small text.  This is not the way to get people talking about your movie.  In fact, I forget what the hash tag is by the time I’m done typing out my tweet.  They also seem to put hashtags in movie trailers when I am at the movie theatres.  I don’t think I need to tell you, if I can’t remember the hashtag after a minute of having to load up Twitter and write my post, I am surely not going to remember it after a full movie and the time it takes to get home.

An old advertising mantra can be adapted for hashtags.  That adapted mantra is that a bad hashtag is still a good hashtag.  I find that when I go on Twitter or Facebook, some of my friends that I follow are often saying things that only make sense if you are watching what they are watching at the current moment, but they are not posting hashtags to say what they mean.  Because I know these friends I know they are talking about some sports game that is currently on.  However sports’ games do not have hashtags that they promote frequently so my friends have nothing to rally around.  These tweets do not promote the game nor their favored team with any recognition and are thus lost.  One way they can get do this is having a hashtag with the team names and the date (ex. #yanksvbluejays916  or #subwayseries2011).  Since it costs only a few seconds to create a hashtag and there are examples of sports teams doing this for the big games (ex. #NBAPlayoffs) I don’t see why we have this for every game.

Promoting the use of a hashtag can do wonders for your studio’s publicity as well as giving you an honest, easy and cheap way to get a poll of how your television show or movie is being perceived by the general public.  But in order for it to be used by the majority of the people you are trying to reach, it has to be displayed and displayed correctly.  Bad placement of a hashtag can result in at best bad tweets or at worst no tweets.