Social Media Week is upon us! The Affinitive team will be in and out of the New York and San Francisco offices all of next week attending presentations hosted by leaders in emerging social and mobile media.

While we are all excited about the number of “can’t miss” events, especially The Interplay of Sports, Business, and Social Media featuring our Founder & CEO Bob Troia on the panel, we don’t have the time to see them all! So if you find yourself in a similar situation, and want a look at some of our favorites coming up, we’ve got a list for you. With that in mind, we bring to you Affinitive’s can’t miss events for Social Media Week 2012. Hope to see you there!

Rob Marscher’s Recommendation (NYC):
How to Embrace the Metagame to Produce Long-Term Social Engagement
As a word of mouth marketing agency, we’re always looking for ways to extend online engagement to offline engagement and word of mouth.  Gamification has been a hot topic among branded social apps.  I’m interested to discuss how “Metagaming” can be applied to social apps.

Bob Troia’s Recommendation (NYC):
J.C. Herz on Unpacking the Quantified Self followed by Panel: The Sensor Continuum
“Quantified Self” is cresting as a theme in the media, with buzz about all sorts of devices and apps logging everything from heartbeat and mile-times to sleep patterns and indoor air quality.

Margot Wood’s Recommendation (NYC):
@HAHAHAHA: How to be funny in 140 characters or less
Why do I want to go to this one? Honestly, who wouldn’t?

Christina Ku’s Recommendation (NYC):
Using Social Media to Change the Way We Do Government
Because love it or hate it, your government affects you and the way you live. It’s only logical that the next step in transparency and communicating with your representatives is through social media. What I REALLY want to go to though, is #kittencamp – memes, cats, and beer? Wish I was there!

Warren Ackerman’s Recommendation (SF):
Leveraging Gamification to Drive Engagement
Eager to hear about innovative B2C examples and how they match up against our own work for MLS, Jeep, Contiki and BlueCross BlueShield.

Erica Hall’s Recommendation (NYC):
Social Commerce Is Here, Is Your Brand Ready?
Social commerce is the future, wondering what insights these folks will have on best practices and adoption rates.

Patrick Courtney’s Recommendation (NYC):
Big Data and Bigger Conversations: Measuring Your Brand’s Social Performance
Measurement measurement measurement! I eat it up.

Andrew Fox’s Recommendation (NYC):
Consumer Engagement and Online Community in Social Media
As someone who spends his day creating and consuming branded content, and as sharable content becomes even more vital in engaging consumers and increasing reach, I’m hoping this event with Causes.com VP James Windon will provide some interesting insights and spark a few furiously scribbled down moments of inspiration.

Jon Heinrich’s Recommendation (NYC):
The Insidious Plot to Socialize the Enterprise
I will listen to anything that the Global Managing Director at Ogilvy has to say about social media.  As one of the leading ad agencies in the world, they have been around from the beginning, with David Ogilvy himself being known as “The father of Advertising”.  They are leaders in interactive marketing and known as industry innovators.  Listening to global brands like Nestle, Ford, and American Express talk about how the integrate social into their corporate environment sounds like a great way to start off Social Media Week!

Adam Kossoff’s Recommendation (NYC):
To Change Faster, We Must Decide Better
It’s a topic that can have a profound impact on anyone’s life. We make millions of decisions over our lifetime, but we rarely stop to think why we do certain things. I want to better understand the decision process, why certain decisions are made, and how I can learn to make better decisions.

Source: BusinessInsider.com

The introduction of the Ticker, a light-touch version of the news feed for less important updates, and ‘Graph Rank’, the new algorithm supporting Edge Rank that weights news feed items using your perceived interests, were also major announcements for marketers. Other updates included new permissions for ‘frictionless’ (read: automatic) publishing of content to a user’s stream, major media partnerships with Spotify, Netflix, Washington Post, etc. and more.  Catch all the updates on TechCrunch here.

This is the beginning of Facebook’s effort to create and surface ‘stories’, bite-size engagements, actions and content that together make up who you are and how you express yourself online. Facebook indexes everything you do to create a self database, your life story. Add to that the automated publishing of your expressions, and the gap between who we say we are (cognizant actions) and whom we really are (incognizant actions) begins to close.

How Does This Affect Brand Marketers?
First impressions on how these new features will affect how brands market on Facebook:

1. This will likely make it more difficult for some marketers to engage as consumers become more cautious or careful about who and what they interact with. “Does this interaction represent who I am?” Is now a more relevant question to ask as the famous internet adage that what you do and say online lasts forever becomes visible in the TIMELINE.
2. Millions and perhaps billions more stories will now be created and fed into TIMELINES, News Feeds and Tickers. Brands are now in more competition than ever reaching consumers on Facebook, meaning loyalty, advocacy and evangelism become enormous advantages for making a customer’s TIMELINE.  That, and having the money for Sponsored Stories, which will prove to play an even more important role in reaching consumers.
3. Brands will now be in the business of building stories, going beyond the one-on-one dialogue, the comment and the Like. Brands will look to build experiences that create opportunities for customers to share and populate their TIMELINE in new and interesting ways. Applications will play a key in staying relevant on Facebook (this includes integrating apps into other platforms and sites outside the Facebook environment.)

It will be important for brands to focus on the story, and provide customers with the tools, actions and experiences that empower them to tell that story. What happens on the Page Wall will always be relevant as long as you’re making real and true connections with customers, but it’s getting those customers to then go out and create more stories through opportunities you provide (apps, buttons, etc.) that will drive success on the new Facebook.

What do you think about the new Facebook changes?

I recently came across a pretty nifty widget that illustrates the exponential growth of the “social web”. Similar to the famed National Debt Clock, although the chart doesn’t pull in “real-time” data, the information it dynamically presents is based on a number of key social web data points from a number of sources, i.e.:

• 20 hours of video uploaded every minute onto YouTube (source YouTube blog Aug 09)
• Facebook 600k new members per day, and photos, videos per month, 700mill & 4 mill respectively (source Inside Facebook Feb 09)
• Twitter 18 million new users per year & 4 million tweets sent daily (source TechCrunch Apr 09)
• iPolicy UK – SMS messaging has a bright future (Aug 09)
• 900 000 blogs posts put up every day (source Technorati State of the Blogosphere 2008)
• YouTube daily, 96 million videos watched, $1mill bandwidth costs (source Comscore Jul 06 !)
• Second Life 250k virtual goods made daily, text messages 1250 per second (source Linden Lab release Sep 09)
• Money – $5.5 billion on virtual goods (casual & game worlds) even Facebooks gifts make $70 million annually (source Viximo Aug 09)
• Flickr has 73 million visitors a month who upload 700 million photos (source Yahoo Mar 09)
• Mobile social network subscribers – 92.5 million at the end of 2008, by end of 2013 rising to between 641.6-873.1 million or 132 mill annually (source Informa PDF)
• SMS – Over 2.3 trillion messages will be sent across major markets worldwide in 2008 (source Everysingleoneofus sms statistics)

Although not “real-time”, the chart still provides some interesting visual cues – for example, note that iPhone apps are being downloaded at a faster rate than new blog posts are being posted!)

If anyone has come across any similar types of charts, please let me know in the comments area below. Thanks!

One of the more commonly used functions is getInfo(), which returns almost any piece of information from a user’s profile page; gender being one of them. The value returned for gender is either “Male” or “Female,” which is fine – but they are localized in the user’s language. So does this mean you have to check for “Female” if the user is using Facebook in English and “Weiblich” if the user chose German? Yes. It also means you have to check for imaginary languages. “Lass” is what you get if the user has his language preferences set to Pirate (English). You can see the headache this causes a developer if they are asked to report on the demographic of users of your app.

Another problem plaguing developers is the lack of organization for the documentation. The bulk of documentation exists on their developer wiki. This works well enough if you know exactly what you’re looking for, but if you don’t know the name of a function you’re better off using Google. A wiki format is more conducive to separate pages. So for a new developer stumbling on to the wiki, aside from a few copy-paste tutorials, there is no clear path of where to go. Only recently, with the release of their Javascript SDK, have they created a concise page containing documentation. Facebook officially supports 5 client libraries. For some of the libraries, documentation exists on the wiki and is shared amongst one another. All of the functions are typically the same for every language, so only one wiki page exists. PHP as well as Connect for the iPhone use the wiki pages, while the ActionScript library documentation is housed on Google code. This is because a lot of these libraries were contributed by the community and not officially created by Facebook, but this can be a large annoyance if you automatically assume that the function you’re using in a particular language is described by the wiki. Forcing people to scour multiple sites and forums for documentation is never a good idea if you are trying to build a good developer community around your platform.

The Facebook Platform status usually states “Facebook Platform is Healthy”. Occasionally it displays messages about performance issues, but that doesn’t help you much. Chances are, if you’re looking at Facebook platform status, you noticed the performance issues on your application. Looking at the “Average API Response Time” and “Error Count” doesn’t reveal much because there are no units on the y-axis. However looking at Developer Updates and Top Life Platform Bugs mights shed a light on the current status of Facebook. So what is the state of Facebook? Developer Update states they are changing profile picture sizes. So everyone who ever uses a profile picture in their application should go and double check that the new sizes will work. Existing Facebook applications constantly need to be updated to simply work. The bug list is as expected; there are a few major bugs, e.g. suggest to friends does not work (opened 29 December). And less critical but still annoying ones, e.g. request-form action opens a new window (opened 07 April 2009). The platform is in a state of constant flux with backwards incompatible updates being released and bugs for old features being introduced. If you create a Facebook app, you can’t just “set it and forget it.” You must monitor for changes to the platform and update your app as needed. You must also expect that there will be periods where your app won’t operate due to internal problems with Facebook’s system.

So where does this developer hell leave us? It actually promises a brighter future. The reason the API is broken is due to Facebook constantly working on it and bringing more enhancements to users and developers. They are rolling out new features such as allowing applications to gather a user’s email if given permission and giving more control to users over their privacy settings. Yes the platform is immature, but it’s certainly not stagnant. So what can a developer do to make things smoother? There are certainly enough complaints out there, so that path won’t lead anywhere. Trying to write more on the wiki and help the community won’t be very fruitful, because the API changes quickly enough that your notes may be soon outdated. In fact, the abundance of notes like this on the wiki makes it confusing as to who is right. Here are some suggestions for developers to cope with the situation:

1. Manage your client’s expectations. Make them aware that Facebook encounters issues periodically and this is out of your control. Give them the link to the Platform Live Status page so they can check that before coming screaming at you.
2. Subscribe to the Platform Live Status Feed, Developers News Feed, and Facebook Pages Notes. This way you should always be aware of a problem or an upcoming change before your client. The feeds are available via RSS or email except for the Pages Notes which seems to only be RSS.
3. Stay up to date with the Developer Roadmap in the wiki. You can create an account in the wiki and “watch” this page to get notified of changes.
4. If the client library you’re using has a svn repository, you can check the log to read about changes. For example, this command works for the PHP library – svn log -v http://svn.facebook.com/svnroot/platform/clients/php/trunk/. The ActionScript library on Google code page has a web interface for browsing changes – http://code.google.com/p/facebook-actionscript-api/source/list. There are some tools for automatically getting notified of an update to the code: SVN-Monitor, CommitMonitor, and SVN Notifier. Unfortunately, these are all Windows programs. Leave a comment if you know of one for Mac or Linux (yes, we know you can easily write a cron script to do it

In summary, at this stage if someone says “We want to do this and that with Facebook,” the best thing to do is say “I can try but I make no guarantees” instead of “Sure, it’s totally possible” because with Facebook you never know if what is available today will be still available by the time your application is ready to launch.

When you are the voice of a brand, either through a blog, Twitter or Facebook, it is important to make sure that the voice is unique, polished and genuine. When interacting directly with a consumer, you need to make sure that the brand sounds like someone the consumer can trust, be friends with. You’re representing a brand, so if that brand were a person, what sort of characteristics would he/she exhibit? How would this person sound, literally?

I find that it is immensely helpful when trying to mold the voice of a brand to create a voice sheet and refer to it when blogging, tweeting or updating the Facebook status. When creating a voice sheet, think of the target consumer and try to match your voice to theirs—it would be best to read Tweets, status updates and blog posts that your target demographic has written to gain a better understanding of the type of language your consumer uses. Here are some things your voice sheet should include:

• Adjectives – List of adjectives your target commonly uses
• Key Phrases – List of key phrases or expressions used by your target
• Tone – What is the overall tone of your voice? (Example: Intelligent, humorous, approachable, youthful, worldly, etc.)
• Writing Style – When writing, should grammar be more formal or laid-back?

Remember, the key to strong, fruitful interactions with the consumer is developing an authentic voice that people will come to recognize, trust and love.

In our experience, many of the Twitter trackers currently on the market do not have the capacity to accurately monitor the exact number, nature and content of Twitter user name mentions on a daily, weekly or monthly basis.  Luckily, we marketers now have a few options for Twitter back-up to help us track and archive our tweets.

Some of our favorites are listed below:

1. TweetDumpr as the name suggest dumps your Twitter time line into a CSV file.  For those users with large public timelines (it cannot dump from private/protected accounts) the site will send you an email once your file is ready for download.  We also like Twitterscribe for this type of functionality as well. The main drawback of these services is that they don’t have a way to archive for anything other than your tweets—sometimes you want to find old direct messages and those elusive mentions.
2. TweetBackUp has a great and easy to use API.  Its basic (free) service doesn’t offer much more than a daily dump of the last 3,200 or so tweets; however, unlike some other services mentioned here, TweetBackUp automates this process.  TweetBackUp also allows you to review your data in a variety of forms including RSS and HTML formats.  Where TweetBackUp really shines is in its premium service offerings which allow for a CSV file dump in addition to the other formats offered with the basic service and it allows you to access more than one Twitter account, search hashtags and archives twitpic photos.  The premium service is a good value at only $12/year.
3. TweetSaver pulls in all your latest tweets (up to the last 3,200) and allows you organize, tag and search the information easily.  TweetSaver also is one of the few services that also pulls your mentions in addition to direct messages and favorites.  The main drawback of this service is that it costs money to join.  However, you can join for as low as $10 a year with their graduated pricing plans.
4. TweetTake is a FREE service that allows you to archive any of the Twitter features you’d have access to on your account such as tweets, followers, friends, direct messages and the like.  You can either aggregate these things in one search or search within a particular category.   You can download the information in an Excel compatible format.
5. Lifestream Backup is a Twitter archiving service but is much more than that.  Lifestream Backup connects to your Twitter account as well as other social accounts like Flickr, and WordPress (and in Beta Facebook, Gmail And YouTube).  This service doesn’t track mentions unfortunately, but it does allow you to access more than one Twitter account and compare it to your activity on other social networks.  The priciest of the offerings mentioned here its $30/year for up to 20GB of storage, and hosted on Amazon’s S3.

What have you found? What’s your favorite service for this functionality?

This week another candy giant, Snickers, has decided to do nearly the opposite and shut down a super-cool user-created brand experience.

As you might recall, Snickers first introduced “Snacklish” in 2006 with terms like ‘Hungerectomy,’ to mixed reviews.  Now they’re back, and a bit less medical-sounding, like Master P-Nut and Snackalicious.

And until a few hours ago, you too could have created your own Snacklish Snickers logo.  Located at http://www.snckrz.com,  the simple interface allowed any visitor to type in a term or phrase and magically transform it into the signature Snickers typeface.  At the time of this post, the site currently has an ominous countdown to shutdown and a twitter stream of all the unhappy customers who enjoyed this unique brand interaction.

I played around with the app myself a bit before it shut down, and plan to use my personal “PatrickCourtney” Snacklish logo to send to my snicker-loving friends.  If only my friends could then visit the site and make their own.  A huge missed opportunity by Snickers.

The twist is, both Snickers and Skittles are owned by Mars.

Mars, I thought we were in the social media trust tree, with the nest, are we not?