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Highlights of the New Facebook

In case you haven’t been paying attention, you probably need to know two things:

1. The sky is falling. You should be looking out for 6-100 pound pieces of sky junk and making sure they don’t hit you.
2. Facebook is changing. A lot. We’re talking about a completely different UI, a totally altered overall experience and something that Mark Zuckerberg likes to call “Realtime Serendipity.”

The new changes were announced at the f8 conference on Thursday. While a very nice little skit with Andy Samberg introduced the keynote speech, Zuckerberg was quick to get down to business and launched right into the new profile design called “Timeline”. In essence, your Facebook profile will change drastically and become one big timeline depicting your life online and off. And when we say your life, we mean all of it.

“All the stories that you’ve shared over time just fall off a cliff at the bottom of your wall and effectively disappear,” Said Zuckerberg. The new design can show all of the Facebook activity you’ve ever had. All posts, all pictures, all likes, everything. And they’re not stopping there. Your Facebook timeline starts the day you were born and allows you to add important events (weddings, graduations, etc), pictures (of weddings, graduations, etc) and milestones in your life (you get what we’re saying).

The other big announcement made by Facebook’s CEO was the creation of “a new class of open graph apps”. These new apps will be hyper-integrated into your Facebook system and are to feature “a frictionless* experience, realtime serendipity and finding patterns”. Let’s break that down:

1. Frictionless Experience- The app will only ask once if you’d like to post updates to Facebook, eliminating the ever persistent publish-me pop-up and instead automatically publishing to the new Facebook “Ticker”, released to the public earlier this week.
2. Realtime Serendipity- Or “serendipitous discovery”. Through the Ticker and open graph apps, people will be able to explore what their friends are doing (listening to, watching, playing, etc) in real time, discovering and interacting with more forms and types of media (songs, shows, movies, etc)
3. Finding Patterns- This is exactly what it sounds like. Facebook will take the data from the Apps and find patterns in them. So you can see how many of your friends are listening to so-and-so or watching Johnny Depp movies. Pretty straightforward stuff.

Aside from the fact that you may or may not want everyone to know what you’ve been listening to (We know you love T Swift. Don’t lie.). And the fact that there may be some over-saturation issues with the Ticker. And that it may be just a bit invasive, we’re pretty stoked about the new apps.

Facebook has been hinting at these new changes for a while, and we are oh so glad they’re finally here, if only so we can tear into them and see if we like them or not. We will say that once our Agents got our new Facebook Timelines this morning, we spent quite a while playing with them. We find that the layout is clean and interesting, while the intuitive functionality is even more impressive than we’d expected.

As the new apps are built and the new Facebook layout rolls out, our Agents are interested to see what changes these will bring, not only to Facebook, but also to business marketing and services like Netflix and Spotify, which are to be prominently featured in the new experience. For now, count us happy sharing our music and changing our cover images.

*Our Agents still aren’t completely convinced that this is a real word.

When we first heard about Google’s latest foray into the social sphere, our SM Agents rolled our eyes. We’ve seen it before. And we’ve seen it fail. Google has an unfortunate history of crashing and burning whenever they try anything remotely social. Google Wave seems like the go-to tech flop of the decade, and don’t even get us started on Google Buzz. We won’t exactly call Orkut, Google’s existing social site, a fail due to it’s popularity in countries like Brazil and India But we thought about it.

So with their social reputation in mind, our SM Agents said one thing over and over: Integration, integration, integration. Google has a variety of innovative tools that are used worldwide, but in some cases their services are fragmented. Google needs to find a way to merge their products together more easily. This has been a big problem for Google in the past, almost as big as their social inadequacy.  However, with this impressive new makeover, the tides may turn for our Google friends.

Google began its new redesign with a small, but notable, change in their search homepage. A small, charcoal toolbar now appears at the top of the page with orange-accented tabs and the Google logo is slightly smaller. In the words of one SM Agent, “It’s sleek.” With this initial change was a post on the official Google blog on June 28th. It told readers to “look for a series of design improvements across all our products”.

A few days after this post, Google announced that it would be renaming popular products Picasa and Blogger. Instead they will soon be known as the more company-friendly “Google Photos” and “Google Blogs”. We now take a small break to applaud Google on it’s brand consolidation. Finally. Two days later, the Youtube blog posted a trial of its new interface, a project labeled Cosmic Panda. After playing around with the panda, this SM Agent will tell you that it was much cleaner than the past Youtube interface and definitely worth a look.

Even Android is getting a little bit of a spruce. Google just released Google Maps 5.7 for Android. The new map has a new transit feature, still in Beta, and a downloadable map that will show you distance, scale and even landmarks.

In addition to these overhauls, Google is launching some other impressive initiatives. Aside from Google+, the company is planning on launching its own travel site. Word also has it that Google has also very, very quietly acquired the Cloud platform startup Wingu. Along with these announcements comes a post from Google that tells businesses not to create a Google+ page, because a separate business experience is on the way.

All these announcements combined are making the SM Agents think that maybe Google finally gets it: Integration, integration, integration. With a separate business section on Google+, businesses can integrate Google Analytics and Adwords into their social media profile. By bumping up mobile maps, Google’s creating a perfect opportunity to integrate mobile into it’s new travel service. Buying yet another Cloud sharing company will further stretch Google’s digital reach and make it easier to integrate all of Google’s innovative services into one shareable space. Do you see where I’m going with this?

As of July 12, Google apps are not supported by Google plus. However, don’t fret. Google released another announcement saying that Google apps will soon be supported within the social site. Words out on just how involved the apps will be, but we have our fingers crossed for complete…you guessed it: integration.

The scope of Google’s reach is very broad, and it’s this Agent’s opinion that they’re just getting started with their very own “Launch Season” (Thanks, Mr. Zuckerberg). Their whole new philosophy seems to be focused on streamlining and enhancing the user experience. Google users everywhere are rejoicing! No more multiple log-ins! No more data blocking! Give us a layout we want to search from!

From what our Agents can tell, Google+ has been a success thus far. Until we get our own account, we can only speculate on how well it will compete with Facebook, but until then, we have a pretty good idea that Google is up to some very big things besides social networking. We can’t wait to see more.

Where were you when you heard that Osama Bin Laden was dead? If you were like plenty  of other Americans, you were on Twitter.

News in a World Connected by Social Media

While the news outlets were standing by and scrambling for information, the Twitterverse was on fire with speculation about what the President was going to talk about, cranking out 4,000 Tweets per second. Two hours after the information was released, the Osama Bin Laden Is Dead Facebook page had over 150,000 likes. Even as the raid was taking place a nearby Abbottabad resident was inadvertently tweeting the action. It’s safe to say that social media has changed the way that we share and collect information about our world. Sites like Twitter and Facebook are becoming wildly popular, and people are finding new, interesting ways to get their stories into the public eye. Today’s world is becoming more involved, more informed and more engaged than ever. So it begs the question, as social media continues to rise, does social obligation climb with it? The people up on Capitol Hill are hoping so.

The Social Media Layer of Politics

It started with President Obama’s innovative digital campaign for the 2008 election. 67% of Obama’s September 2008 fundraising was raised online. The current President raised almost double the amount of money for his campaign as his opponent, Senator John McCain. Not to mention he won the election. Is this a direct result of his social media campaign? Obama did have over four times the Facebook friends that McCain did. His other social media platforms show the same trends of popularity: Obama’s YouTube videos got ten times more views than McCain’s, and he had over 137,000 Twitter followers compared to the Arizona Senator’s measly 4,848.

Social platforms are making it easier for politicians to reach their constituents.

We can clearly see that the viral Obama campaign gained supporters, but did it make a difference on election day? The 2008 election had a voter turnout of 56.8%, which was the highest number since 1968, a year that had a 60.8% voting rate. However, we can take these numbers with a grain of salt, seeing as years with new presidential candidates spike in number of voter turnout compared to years when a current President runs for the office again.

So with these figures somewhat inconclusive, how can we know whether or not President Obama’s social campaign activated supporters? We know that social platforms are making it easier for politicians to reach their constituents and target audiences, but will it truly engage the voters? Regardless of past strategies and statistics, many of the upcoming 2012 candidates are hoping that it will.

Everybody Wants to Leverage Social Media

Newt Gingrich announced his run for the presidency through Twitter and Facebook a whole two days before he went on Fox News to speak. Mitt Romney used a YouTube video to launch his presidential exploratory committee, then used Twitter updates and Foursquare check-ins to create hype about the official announcement made on his family farm. Clearly the 2012 presidential competitors are jumping on the social media bandwagon. Everyone is clambering over themselves and their campaign managers to create more distance from the Palin-dubbed “Lamestream” media. President Obama’s 2012 campaign website already boasts a cool 12.3 Million Facebook followers and 8.4 Million Twitter followers. His campaign also launched with a YouTube video, and the main contents of the “Get Involved” page are blog and Twitter posts, not press releases and news stories.

Any political candidate without a heavy influence in the social sphere will be cast aside.

Social media is definitely new to the political sphere, but it is gaining some heavy support from constituents and activists. Any political candidate without a heavy influence in the social sphere will be cast aside. These interactive networks are re-defining the traditional campaigning terms of ‘grass-roots’ and ‘bandwagon’. If you see that someone has 12.3 Million Facebook followers, you wonder why you haven’t been on their fan page. And when a close friend re-tweets or organizes a rally for a candiate; well, you can’t get more grass-roots than that. Aside from Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, politicians need to see that they’ve got to be on the cutting edge to win. That means iPhone apps, Foursquare check-ins and user-generated data.

Is a fan a voter?

We can see that President Obama is on the leading end of the Social/Political merge yet again. His 2012 campaign website has widgets for volunteer opportunities and an app that allows you to find a rally or meeting close to you, not to mention landing pages and calls to action that are a marketing professionals dream. The question isn’t whether a candidate should invest in social media, it’s how they will invest in it. While traditional campaign methods are still in full swing, everyone can easily see that this is where the future political campaigns are going. But are these new methods as effective as politicians expect them to be? Or will it just prove that it’s far more easy to ‘like’ someone than to actually engage?

What do you think? Will political use of social media activate voters? Or will it just show that it’s easier to “like” someone than to vote for them?

We have found ourselves doing a lot of repetitive things when it comes to our unique niche as a New Media Agency.  A solution to these types of tasks was to create a digital library of  social web design resources for our in-house creatives that would simplify things.  This has proven to be a smart investment of our time.

Our team noticed however that there is an absence of quality tools, when designing for the social web, to be found outside of our own library.  Other than our friends at Teehan + Lax, who pioneered the PSD UIs of the iPhone and iPad, there are few that take it upon themselves to give back and share the wealth.  We decided that we are going to change that.  We are going to hand over the keys to the vault and start sharing what has helped us become better as creatives and as an agency.

Our first release is a Vector User Interface of the New Twitter

As requested here are some different versions:

• Download CS5 Version
• Download CS3 Version

We have created this file as a resourse for all the designers out there to use as they want.  We only ask that you do not repost this file for download on any site with out our formal written approval.  We do encourage others to share this valuable resource and we only ask that you redirect people to our site to download the file.  Creating resources like this, to be used for the benefit of everyone, still takes time so please give us credit and relink to our blog when possible.  We hope you find this useful and a helpful resource.

1. The Conversation

Listening, Learning, and Sharing

2. Branding

Be Consistent.

3. Creating Content

Useful, Valuable, Accurate, and Appealing

4. Motivation

The right Personality meets the right Situation.

5. Earning Every Fan

Engagement + Interaction = Brand Advocates

To get a better understanding of how you can apply these elements to your business, let’s look at each element in more detail.

1. The Conversation

The first step in creating a social media strategy is to listen. And then listen some more. This is an extremely important and if done improperly your strategy will be unsuccessful, end of story. You must make sure you are listening in on every platform your brand is being mentioned. If you don’t think your being mentioned on a certain platform, double check to make sure. Odds are you’re being mentioned across a wider range of platforms than you may think.

2. Branding

Using social media to brand your company can be a major asset if it is done right. One of the main focuses on branding is consistency. Your brand image must be the same across all platforms, otherwise it will be ineffective or even destructive to your company’s wellbeing. If people can not easily figure out who you are and what you are all about, your brand becomes inauthentic and unreliable. On the other hand, if your message is clear and unchanging, your audience will be more likely to to give you credibility and offer their loyalty.

3. Creating Content

Creating content for social media is often a hit or miss thing; either your audience takes it and eats it up, or they never even take it. Each online community will more than likely go through an experimental phase with each finding what works for them. Even if you know your audience up and down, they may often surprise you; engaging in content you though was not so good, or ignoring content you thought they would love. Though content varies across communities, this infographic points out content essentials. Your members must find your content useful, valuable, accurate, and appealing. Combining these essential elements in your content will yield amazing results.

4. Motivation

What motivates people to participate in social media? More importantly, what motivates people to participate in your online community? To answer this question you must know and understand your audience and why they are there in the first place. Are they part of your community because you an industry leader offering valuable information or maybe because are you offering your members some type of reward? Knowing the answers to questions like these is particularly important when putting together a social media content strategy. If members are joining mostly to receive valuable information, and you are only providing them with groupons; chances are they won’t be apart of your community very long.

5. Earning Every Fan

Social media can be bought, owned, and earned. Which is most important? The one you have to work for, of course. You can buy a message, you can own a message, but having a person willingly spread your message positively, is priceless. Earned media comes from those you have successfully engaged and interacted with; they are your brand advocates. They are your biggest asset in the world of social media and have the power to influence others. Always keep an eye on these people; if they’re happy, everyone will hear about it.

Putting it all together

As intricate as social media can be, it is important to never forget the basics. Create a relevant conversation full of valuable content that’s branded consistently and you will earn your customer’s loyalty.

Our new design is live!

After sharing a snippet of our new design for selectivemkt.com on forrst, someone requested that we create a full size desktop wallpaper.

So… to celebrate the launch of our new website we’re giving away these free desktop wallpapers: UFOs with Binary Code Tractor Beams

UFO with Binary Code Tractor Beam Desktop Wallpaper Background

Download the UFO Wallpaper

Invasion of UFOs with Binary Code Tractor Beam Desktop Wallpaper Background

Download UFO Invasion Wallpaper

The background design features a simple little graphic taken from the Technology section of our home page.

“We may, or may not, have reverse-engineered our technology from a UFO that crashed behind our barn. Either way, we handle the nerdy stuff so you can run your business.”

We really do work in a barn, by the way.

Enjoy the wallpapers and let us know what you think of our new site design.

Hub-and-Spoke Approach to Social Engagement

As brands begin to embrace the power of social media, many struggle to decide where to focus brand engagement. Some assert that online efforts should reach users where they are — on social networks. Others argue that brands should create unique online communities in which people can come together around a brand or a cause.

The hub-and-spoke approach to social engagement focuses on leveraging the company website while integrating social networks for greater reach and impact. This approach seeks to engage people where they are, on social networks, but provide a central “hub” for them to come to. The hub is generally the company website or blog, and it serves as the base of operations. The hub syndicates material out to all the spokes, which consist of social media, such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, FourSquare, YouTube, Flickr, Yelp and Wikipedia. The brand engages in each of the spokes, but the spokes ultimately bring the conversation back to the website and direct traffic there.

Key to this approach is the integration of the hub and the spokes. When a brand’s website serves as its hub, the brand’s social media pages and its blog should feature links to the company website. Likewise, the brand’s website should prominently display links to all the brand’s social media pages, as well as its blog. Brands should take care to avoid directing visitors away from the site without encouraging them to share content. For example, the TL Signature Salon website features a Facebook “Like” button. When viewers click the button, they are directed away from the site, but they are encouraged to “like” the brand on Facebook, rather than just visit its Facebook fan page.

Similarly, brands that host an online community, such as Pepsi’s Pepsi Refresh Project, can encourage user interactivity by utilizing a social login system. For example, The Washington Post enables users to sign into the site with either their Facebook account or Washington Post account. This encourages sharing on Facebook, and enhances the seamless integration between the Washington Post’s website and its social sites.

With this approach, both the hub and the spokes act as channels to build and measure users’ engagement. Ideally, a well-strategized hub-and-spoke system results in social omnipresence, in which brands have presence in many external communities and are fully connected with their target audiences. And as important as maintaining a solid presence in those communities, it is important for companies to maintain a consistent brand identity — so that customers feel they are relating with the company or brand and are comfortable engaging in that conversation.

So the internet at Selective Marketing’s world headquarters was down Monday morning, a continuation of an outage that most of our team endured Sunday at their homes. And as we learned by contacting more of our business associates through the morning, it was an outage that permeated much of the Tuscaloosa metro area. For those of you not familiar with our region, it also includes the campus of the University of Alabama — and its approximately 30,000 students.

What we learned beyond that, however, came from the most unexpected of places: Twitter direct messaging.

Every time we face a power or internet outage at SM, Joshua Pekera, SM’s Creative Director, exhibits the most endearing habit of calling and asking very direct questions to hapless-sounding operators at these companies who suddenly find they are the ones with the misfortune of Pekera’s verbal barrage.

Sunday being a chips-and-salsa-fueled day of rest in the Pekera household, he took things one step further — casting a verbal jab (or 12 … who’s counting) at our conglomerate-sized internet provider (which we will not name, but rhymes with “Tomcast”) via his Twitter link.

Then something odd happened, something that most customers of this massive corporation (which rhymes with “Promcast”) have yet to experience: Real, live feedback — in the form of a direct message from a person named Bill at the corporation’s Philadelphia-based offices.

Bill evidently saw Joshua’s tweet taking exception to the provider’s outage, replied directly to him Monday morning that he was gathering information on the outage and hoped to have an update soon. A half-hour later, Bill messaged again with information that there was a fiber cut in town, and that crews were on site.

Needless to say, the well-meaning operators that Joshua usually deals with in these kind of situations wouldn’t sniff this level of information. Heck, Joshua and SM now had more information about the outage than the local news outlets did. And when our service came back on a short while later, we were relieved but not surprised — because our main man Bill told us they were on the case.

What Bill did while representing his corporation (it is OK to name them now … Comcast!) was noteworthy in that it is pretty much exactly what we advise our clients to do in a crisis situation — monitor social media platforms and perform sentiment tracking to see what the world is saying about it, respond directly and honestly with pertinent information, assess the problem, then give more feedback.

“It isn’t a marketing push, but is really all about customer service,” says Jenni Moyer, Comcast’s Senior Director of Corporate Communications. “Maybe three years ago, we put a digital care team in place who are part of our national customer service folks here in Philadelphia. They are observing the conversations about Comcast in a number of spaces — on forums, Twitter, Facebook, using Google blog search tools, etc.

“If they come across one where someone is expressing frustration about us, they will say ‘Hi, I am with Comcast, can I help?” From there, they usually take the conversation offline to work with folks without the space restriction of Twitter to see if they can help with individual issues.”

“Because it is in real-time, you are in the moment and can potentially deal with it in that moment and with that immediacy. How that has evolved is a part of our digital care strategy,” Moyer says. “You used to be able to call 800 number, and now can e-mail and chat, and social media is the next progression. … These guys are out there doing what they do, and it is all about customer service. It has a halo effect, if you will, to position Comcast as listening to our customers, but that isn’t why we do it. We want our customers to have a way to contact us more directly.”

Obviously, Comcast clearly is one company that is utilizing social media correctly — both with their merry band of Twitterers and through their blog. Bill and Co. are working to respond to issues exactly by the book, and they made one customer happy. Kudos.

Social media has revolutionized how marketers communicate with consumers, and businesses are finally beginning to grasp the importance of social media. Though social media channels can be powerful tools for marketers, there are some concepts marketers must understand before they can successfully leverage the power of social media.

It’s not a one-way conversation

In order to successfully market products or services via social media, the brand must effectively engage consumers. Don’t just try to sell your products and services; canned marketing messages will do nothing to spark interest in your brand’s social media campaign. Engage in real conversation with consumers and respond to their comments about your brand, both negative and positive. Post interesting and relevant information, and join the conversation in the community you wish to reach.

It’s not free

Many companies make the mistake of assuming that social media marketing costs nothing, as establishing a social media account is generally free. However, in order to use social media successfully, companies must invest time, and a lot of it. Building a successful social media campaign requires people, technology and lots of time, all of which are limited resources that incur costs. Moreover, the better the campaign, the more time and effort will be put into it, meaning companies must be willing to invest more to see more results.

Below are 10 tips for effectively building and maintaining a social media campaign.

10 Tips for Building Your Brand With Social Media

1. Hire the right social media manager. The individual behind a business’s social media activities essentially acts as the face of the company. As such, it is essential to choose a social media manager who is not only proficient with social media, but who will represent your brand well. Brain Solis, author of Engage, recently touched on this point in an article on Mashable.com. “Don’t just put the person familiar with social networking in front of the brand,” Solis said.
2. Have a social media policy. A social media policy should introduce the purpose for your brand’s presence on social networks. It should hold employees responsible for what they write online, and lay out consequences for violating rules. The social media policy should also state that all company communications should be honest and fair.
3. Know your audience. Before you design a social media campaign, understand who you are targeting. Determine the primary, secondary and tertiary audiences for your brand, and learn more about each audience. What are their interests? What are they talking about on social networks? How is your competition communicating with these audiences online? Once you learn more about your audiences, you can design a social media strategy that interests your audiences and meets their needs.
4. Maintain brand consistency. Register the same username for all your social media accounts to make it easier for consumers to find you. Even if you are not using a social media platform, reserve your brand’s username on that platform so you can maintain consistency should your company decide to establish a presence there. Also consider the tone and voice of the content posted by your brand, and be sure these are consistent across different social media channels.
5. Specialize, don’t generalize. A host of social media platforms exist, but don’t feel the need to establish a presence on every site. Determine which social networks your target audience use the most, and focus on these.
6. Monitor the conversation. Social media allows news and opinions to spread in seconds, so it is imperative to monitor social networks for positive and negative chatter about your brand. Quickly responding to comments, both negative and positive, will foster trust and loyalty to the brand.
7. Strategically post at certain times of day. You should time your posts for the time of day your audience is most likely to use social media. This will vary greatly among different audiences. When considering the time of day your audience accesses social media, keep in mind that many U.S. businesses block social networks, such as Facebook, in the workplace. Therefore, you should post early in the morning, during lunch hour and after 5 p.m. to most effectively reach working individuals. In contrast, stay-at-home mothers are likely to use social media during the day, while college students use it late at night. You can find out when to best reach your audience by analyzing traffic statistics over a period of time. Be sure to look at statistics at each social media site your brand utilizes, as times for the highest levels of traffic differ across social networks.
8. Integrate social media into all of your communications, both online and offline. Be sure your company’s website prominently displays links to its social media pages to signal their importance and encourage viewers to easily engage with the brand. Social media initiatives should also be promoted in all print ads, promotional materials, commercials, billboards, and other communications. Include links to social media pages in your e-mail signature, as well.
9. Set specific goals. First, decide what you want from your social media efforts. Think in terms of both qualitative and quantitative results. Results may be qualitative, as in increased brand awareness, increased brand loyalty, improved brand image or increased customer feedback. Results may also be quantitative, such as increased store traffic, reduced customer support costs and increased sales. Set specific goals for these and other metrics, then assess your progress on a monthly basis.
10. Measure the results. Social media can have a tremendous impact on a business, but financial results are not immediate. Social media efforts are about building relationships and creating brand loyalty, which in the long run, should translate into solid financial returns and increased store traffic. Begin by measuring site traffic and interactions such as retweets, likes, bookmarks, etc., then go farther. Rather than looking at the number of followers, look at the number of people who filled out forms for more information, the number of customers who used a coupon offered solely online and the number of people who took advantage of a special promotion announced on social media. Instead of simply measuring how many people liked, retweeted or commented on posts, measure how many influential people talked about your brand.