Facebook is becoming

More and more like the Myspace of old. With the status updates shifting to the right and Facebook telling us to add Movies, Books and TV Shows right on our profile, along with the using of emoticons to set our mood and whatnot, it is almost starting to make me feel nostalgic.

Innovation much?

But then i guess a bit of inspired repackaging doesn’t hurt, though for the first time, this design upgrade made me feel a bit meh.

About you on the left and what you do on the right. 

Kind of web 1.0

I am trying to let it be, and yet there is this nagging sense of irritation.

#WonderWhy ?

Can you select your emotion?

If you ask Facebook, you can.

The verb economy which started with the Like button and has been endlessly debated on extending into “want”, “need”, “buy” territories gets one more fillip in the form of yellow smileys.

Now to wait for marketers to start having a smiley strategy. 

What’s interesting is that this was a standard feature in MySpace in its glory days, where you could choose your mood through emoticons ,while writing a status update or a blog.

Only it never made it to being breaking news.

Inspiration much?

Home

Is not really perfect. But it is where ease is. Where we can be ourselves obsessively. It is imperfect, but it works. it is where the basics are taken care off really well. It is where even our disconnected connections work in sync with the functional ones.

Facebook home is something like that. Not an application, not also quite an OS, it just gives you enough to double up your original social network (your phone) with a parallel social layer of connection in a really easy way.

So what if your home screen will now feature, umpteen meme’s on life’s advices, you will stay connected.

With ease.

And given the Android market, we are talking about a lot of potential homes.

However, for those who don’t want their home screen’s locked to endless posters with life tips, this ain’t home for them.

What is the intent of your “Like” ?

With Graph Search Facebook has entered the Search game, and it intends to make search relevant with discovery and recommendation.

That’s neat.

However, one of the prime indexes by which they can sift through data and match queries to responses will be the “Like” button.

To give an example, If I use Graph Search  with the query “Which DSLR camera do my friends recommend” - Facebook will search through my network ( maybe later extended network), gather all the instances where my network “Liked” an activity or instance related to a DSLR camera and aggregate them to give me a list of recommendations.

That’s cool.

Now here’s the caveat. Given that many brands have spent tons of money in audience acquisition campaigns- (remember ” Like this page” and you can win a free bar of soap? ) - it is very likely that many of these like’s are not genuine recommendations, but an act that was undertaken simply with the wish of winning a freebie. 

So let’s assume that camera manufacturer A ran a Facebook audience generation campaign using an app, where the sign in was to Like the fan page, then I will have a list of those from my network who “recommended” product A. 

Then let’s assume some months later camera manufacturer B ran a similar Facebook campaign for audience generation and several members of my network signed in ( by liking the page). I will also get their names recommending product B.

Now let’s say I find that a lot of similar names on these two lists.  

Which one would be the real recommendation? Which one would I really go by ? Will it even have relevance to my query ? 

Problem is marketers, agencies all colluded together to ensure that the number of ” Likes” was a metric to chase for.This was not Facebook’s doing. But it sure affects them. As the number of “Likes” grew so did the giddy excitement (amidst marketers/ agencies) of having a number to show as proof of efficacy for a campaign. More “Likes” became equivalent to more success. 

Sadly it was the wrong metric of efficacy to start with. Still is. Especially if you are paying to buy those “likes”. Through ads, apps or contests. Yes you do get people to engage with the brand, but it should not be taken as metric to define buying intent or relevance. One has to take into consideration the intent of a person who presses the “Like” button. Why did s/he hit like? For public good, or for selfish sweepstake? Or to make someone happy ? Or to buy?

When a system has to sift through this kind of data which is ambiguous, the search results can be pretty skewed in terms of relevance. 

It fits in other places as well. Just because I click on an ad word on Google and land on a  page does not give a clear indication of my intent. 

People will buy when they want/need to buy. At that moment they will search, they will read, they will read reviews, they will ask friends and then based on their need and budget, they will make an informed decision. The best we can do, is to ensure we are there in their mind and that our product has the relevance to match to their needs. 

Also, when people really need to search something, they will search. Even if the right answer is in the 20th page of the search results- they will find and use that information which matters to them. Not some paid promotion which supposedly recommends them on their next action. 

Graph Search will be important for power users and with time it will metamorphose, add functionalities and then only we can truly understand what  a game changer it is.

The consumer is not dumb.

Marketers, brands, organizations, digital ninja’s, social guru’s and agencies need to start by acknowledging that first. 

Facebook also takes on Twitters relevancy to News

Interesting post from Vadim Lavrusik on Facebook Notes where he clearly talks about the benefit that Journalists can derive from Graph Search. 

Facebook’s news feed where you can subscribe to journalists to keep abreast of the news as they break is where this is focused- I’m guessing. Using the service Journalists/ writers can search for experts, content, images on relevant topics of discussion from within a community and use it 

Interestingly he calls it a ” Rolodex of 1 billion potential searches”. 

Now imagine if you can really connect your story with user generated content/ images right from location in real time, that would truly create more engagement for users who use the subscribe feature on Facebook to discover news. 

Quoting him from his blog,

“ A “Rolodex” of 1 Billion Potential Sources

“The new search enables journalists to do richer searches when trying to find an expert for a story. For example, say you’re doing a story on a specific company and you’re looking to interview someone who works at the company in their New York office, you could do this by searching for “People who work at ACME Inc in New York” to find potential employees to reach out to. You could even make the search more specific to find people who work at the company with a specific title, for example. This could make it easier to find potential sources & experts to reach out to for stories you’re working on.

This will also make it easier for people to discover journalists on Facebook. For example, if I want to find potential journalists to follow on Facebook, I could simply type in “journalists” to find people or pages that fall into this category. By selecting people, I will see anyone who has a journalist-related public title on their Facebook profile and if they have Follow enabled, I will be able to keep up with their public updates in my News Feed.”


So if Twitter is the 140 character burst of news feeds, this would be the more detailed, community curated version of breaking news as it happens. Imagine something like a Hurricane Sandy and people’s FB updates from location on their individual experiences being community curated under the ambit of a wider news coverage -  and the image of something compelling starts taking shape.

Interesting. I would have never thought that the news angle would be played up via FB’s new search product. 

Photo Courtesy- Vadim Lavrusik

Source: facebook.com

The metamorphosis of search- FB in the ring

As rumored and expected, Facebook entered the search game today. At Menlo Park, CEO Zuckerberg, launched the new product, which was more or less created by a bunch of ex-Googlers Lars Rasmussen and Tom Stocky.

The product aptly titled Graph Search, would help you draw answers by combing your networks Open Graph. These answers can be names of people by location, images, videos et all- layered by discovery and recommendation. But it is not like web search. 

So how does it differ ? ( Phrasing from the FB blog)

Web search is designed to take a set of keywords (for example: “ SLR Cameras”) and provide the best possible results that match those keywords. With Graph Search one can combine phrases (for example: “my friends in Mumbai who like Nikon “) to get that set of people, places, photos or other content that’s been shared on Facebook. 


Another big difference from web search is that every piece of content on Facebook has its own audience, and most content isn’t public ( based on a users privacy settings) . Graph Search has been built with privacy in mind, and it respects the privacy and audience of each piece of content on Facebook. It makes finding new things much easier, but you can only see what you could already view elsewhere on Facebook.

Which means if you do not wish your photos/ content to be public Graph Search will exclude those results from the search query

The initial four areas where Graph Search is going to concentrate on are People, Photos, Places and Interests.

image

The other area of importance is that Graph Search will work in collaboration with Bing. The answers that worn be able to found via Graph Search will be handed over to bing to provide the necessary responses - but this has been built in an integrated fashion. Quoting the Bing Blog

“Now when you do a web search on Facebook, the new search results page will feature a two-column layout with Bing-powered web results appearing on the left-hand side overlaid with social information from Facebook including how many people like a given result. On the right hand side, you will see content from Facebook Pages and apps that are related to your search.”

Pretty neat.

image

Integrating search, discovery, recommendation and services all in one flow. App developers on Facebook should get a good fillip from this, given that searching for good apps can be a nightmare anywhere.

From a monetization point of view in the long run, I can imagine places and interests to be of key interest for advertisers, while from a database point of view and targeted marketing it would be interesting to know if a brand page owner can search for ” who of my fans like  or recommended products A, B or C to further customize marketing and lead generation messaging to them individually. Facebook though is not talking about monetization right now.

Big changes. New innovations. 

From indexed links to discovery via recommendations along with promoted services - search has come a long way indeed.

The true shift to semantic search via products like knowledge graph and graph search only goes to underscore that point.

Google had already done it with Search Plus Your World and they have integrated it amazingly well within the fabric of Google Plus which is truly bolstering its enterprise potential. Google Plus does not have the membership base of Facebook, but for businesses they are truly providing an enterprise solutions suite on the cloud to run basic office operations which search  and social integration baked right in. 

All in all exciting stuff. And more power to the consumer.

Now to wait for all the privacy related concerns.

Source: newsroom.fb.com

Things That Connect Us:

A nicely done video where Facebook connects the power of its social graph with the emotion of actual acts of connections that we as humans experience in our every day life. 

Launched to celebrate the epic target of one billion users per month this morning Connection here has almost been treated like a “Movement”.

Having said that, did not quite agree with the approach in messaging. It became too much of mush and sentimentalism than a celebration of an epic feat.

This morning, there are more than one billion people using Facebook actively each month.If you’re reading this: thank you for giving me and my little team the honor of serving you. Helping a billion people connect is amazing, humbling and by far the thing I am most proud of in my life.

Mark Zuckerberg, on Facebook reaching a billion monthly users. Yes that’s right ONE BILLION.

Source: newsroom.fb.com

Facebook - The slow death of freemium

How many offer related campaigns have you run on your Facebook page for free?  Remember those quickly cobbled up Facebook landing pages and apps that you used to run by getting the neighborhood coder or by paying 30 dollars to Wildfire? 

Well for this long you got the audience for free and the cost of acquisition ( if it can be defined as such) was pretty low.

Then Facebook launched Facebook Offers letting retailers and other local merchants send deals to their Facebook fans. Users could claim the offers from their News Feeds and redeem the vouchers at stores to get discounts

But freemium ain’t gonna lift the stock price anymore. And Wall Street wants to know how Facebook will make money.

So going forward prepare to send some more money.  Facebook will now require merchants to pay at least $5 on related ads to promote each Facebook Offer to a targeted audience of fans and friends of fans. The cost will vary based on the size of a company’s Facebook pages.

As Retuers Says;

“Facebook Inc said it will start charging businesses to run Offers on its social network, turning a previously free service into a potential revenue generator at a time when Wall Street is demanding new sources of growth and profit from the company.”

Now you can pay just a little more to be a little bit more social than this.

Source: reuters.com

Pay to be a “bit more” social

I get it. The FB news feed is a fantastic news aggregator. If you subscribe to the right people/ channels you can probably get the best news that you need with the visual bells and whistles right on your channel without having to open a thousand browser links. 

So how do you ensure you make your news reach the news feed of your fans/ friends/ bete noirs et al?

Facebook deploys the EDGE RANK algorithm to decide how many of your friends can see a particular news update/ status update that you post. ( there are one million articles that also talk about which time of the day and angle of the moon you should abide, to maximize the engagement of your posts). Given the mad scramble we have for “likes” for every sentimental kitsch, new hair cut, cat gif, drunk party, new job and endless sermons on how to live life that we post on our status updates, it becomes pretty pertinent that it shows on the news feed of the 893 friends that we have on our Facebook profiles.

Earlier it was open. It was simple and it was organic. You posted it. Your friends saw it. But it’s no more that simple because Facebook’s gotta monetize. With share prices tumbling and valuation falling by 40% post IPO, I cannot even blame them for this. 

So when I actually experienced the Promote your Status Update prompt from Facebook it made me smile. True to Facebook’s mission of working to integrate advertisement into the social fabric of Facebook, this one also works on user generated content that can be promoted or advertised better now, provided you have your credit card handy. Similar to sponsored stories which actually integrate ads with user content which talks about the same product thereby creating recommendation and discovery along with advertised content.

Here is how you may come across it, because FB is auto prompting this:

Just 30 cents and you are set. Now your new hair cut, new sermon on living life and new cat photos can have more likes, more engagement and your influence scores will keep skyrocketing to unfounded heights. 

I just wonder about brands. If everyone starts putting 30 cents to promote all their brand related marketing content, how is any of it going to stand out? When everything you see becomes promoted and on the same level playing field as with your competitors, how do you segregate? 

Do you then whip your credit card, or tune out and spend some time in creating awesome content?