Posts Tagged facebook
Twestival and social media for social good
Posted by Julie Delaforce in social media, social networks on 25 March, 2010
There are many cynics who will say that we live in a hyper-connected world and its actually over-complicating our lives, rather than simplifying them. They say social networking keeps us at home in front of the computer and encourages anti-social behaviour. Some even think that there are too many brands just pushing their advertising messages in social media. Hopefully charity events such as this week’s second annual Twestival will go some way to muting these critics.
On March 25th, more than 175 cities will participate in Twestival, a global charity event. According to the Twestival website:
“Twestival™ (or Twitter Festival) uses social media for social good. All of the local events are organized 100% by volunteers and 100% of all ticket sales and donations go direct to projects.”
At the time of publishing, Twestival had raised over $200,000 for Concern Worldwide, an international humanitarian organisation that provides access to education for poor children.
Mashable.com suggests five ways you can get involved in Twestival:
- Attend a Twestival event
- Donate online
- Bid on the Twestival eBay auction
- Tweet your support
- Listen to Twestival FM.
Can’t get involved in Twestival, but still interested in how you can do good via social media? There are many other ways you can get involved. It’s no accident that charities are beginning to make their mark in social media, it’s all about community and helping one another, so the two go hand-in-hand.
Charity: Water is one organisation who are making an impact. They do the simple things right: they’re on Facebook and Twitter to bring attention to their cause and encourage viral sharing and word-of-mouth, they have a website with rich content: counters showing how much has been raised for particular projects.
Sometimes its hard for us to relate to big, international causes. Think about how social media has helped during natural disasters, such as the Victorian Bushfires in 2009. Photos and videos were shared on UGC sites which brought attention to the disaster and lead to people mobilising on Twitter to share links to charity donation information. Many showed their support for the victims by joining Facebook groups.
So now you’re inspired to do good, but don’t know where to start? It’s easy for anyone to get involved. Here are some tips on what you can do to help humanity online:
- Update your Facebook or Twitter status about a cause to let your friends know about it, don’t forget to include a link to the site of your chosen cause
- Show your support to a multitude of charities by signing up to the Causes application on Facebook
- Create a Chip-In counter and ask friends to donate to your favourite cause
- Sign up to Yahoo! for Good and add a badge for your favourite cause to your website, social network profile or blog
Showing support for a good cause has been made much easier with social media tools and applications. Now there’s nothing from being able to do more to help.
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Facebook Pages: much-needed upgrades
Posted by Julie Delaforce in Uncategorized on 22 February, 2010
I must confess I’m a fan of Facebook Pages (bad pun!) I as use them regularly on behalf of brands. I’m a great advocate of Facebook for business, when it’s used the right way of course. That said, there are a few things that Facebook could improve when it comes to the Pages product that would make a big difference to the way brands can engage via Facebook Pages.
The ability to choose whether you post on behalf of the brand/page or as yourself – for example, it would be great if you could post with a Julie via Brand signoff or similar. This provides two key benefits:
- More engaging / transparent for fans as they know exactly who it is they’re dealing with
- Better security management for businesses as you’d be able to monitor who is speaking on behalf of the company
Notification via Facebook notifications and/or email and sms for posts and comments. This would assist with:
- Timely responses to fan communications
- Moderation of inappropriate content.
Bookmarking for pages and groups – For those who are on Facebook primarily for communicating with others and don’t wish to bookmark applications.
Extended HTML/rich text formatting – Facebook would really benefit from a WYSIWYG text editor (most people don’t know HTML, and Facebook is a mass market product. This means they could choose to employ FBML for text editing rather than HTML as well). The ability to do simple things like bold, italics and linking emails would be really useful (not for pages alone, but on the entire Facebook platform). It would also be fantastic to be able to use tables, insert alt names into images (great for SEO since the pages come up in Google) and a variety of fairly basic rich text and HTML editing options.
Facebook provides excellent reporting with their Insights tool, and I especially like the new post insights. That said, there is no functionality to allow export of data from Facebook Insights to incorporate into social media monitoring and measurement. This is key for any brand engaging in social media, we NEED to be able to report our successes to management to prove the value of social media. It would also be great to have retrospective data, and the ability to conduct a search of the insights by a specified date range. A customisable insights dashboard would be very convenient.
I’m not the first to suggest this, Facebook need to provide the functionality to send messages to fans. There used to be an ‘update’ option which generally resulted in the messages being ignored. It seems as though messaging to fans is now restricted purely to status updates. Facebook groups allow you to send a message to all members, so it seems odd this option doesn’t exist for Pages. The ability to send updates either via Facebook messages would be a massive improvement. Targeting of messages would be key (updates and statuses can be targeted). I’m finding it increasingly important to be able to be able to send direct messages to fans as well, someone may ask a question that is better answered confidentially, or you may want to send some sort of a moderation warning to a fan instead of just immediately blocking them.
That’s just a few improvements that I think would greatly improve Facebook Pages. Are there any more you can think of?
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A rant about social media experts: mach I
Posted by Julie Delaforce in Uncategorized on 3 February, 2010
One thing that really bugs me about social media, is all the self-proclaimed experts out there. Just because you have your own blog or work in the digital space, does not mean you are an expert on social media. I’ve called the post ‘mach I’ because I’m sure I’ll have further comment on this topic in the future.
This was highlighted to me last night when I attended the Anthill/Mumbrella event “Online Marketing by Design” – which was actually a talk about social media.
I was really disappointed by this event, and found it boring, with the same sort of discussions that have been rehashed for the past 18 months. It was a ‘for the dummies’ approach for marketers and SMEs who could’ve been provided with much more valuable insights.
There were a couple of questions their four-member panel stumbled over that weren’t that difficult if you actually have practical working experience with social media rather than just proclaiming yourself as an expert because you have a blog or work in digital *big eye roll*
One of these questions in particular was around metrics and campaign measurement. The specific question was (paraphrasing): “If a marketer came to you and told you they wanted 1,000 Facebook fans by next week, what would you do.” There was a lot of, ummm I don’t really know answers. Tim from Mumbrella said something about wondering if measurement was actually required or not before starting a campaign. Of course it’s required! How are we going to show people marketing is a valid option for their business?
If a marketer told me this (back in my agency days ;o) ) I would have educated them on the fact that this is not in fact a useful measure. I’d advise them on the myriad options they have in social media, which extend far beyond Twitter and Facebook. If they pursued the Facebook idea I’d assure them that yes I can get them 1,000 fans, but would that be meeting their objectives? If I simply agreed with said marketer and got them the 1,000 fans they’d look back in a few months and wonder what that is actually doing for them, and doubt that social media is in fact an area they should invest further time and money in. This would be bad for social media marketing as a whole. What I would do would be to talk to the marketer about other useful measures within Facebook, such as their engagement score, number of likes, comments, fan-initiated comments and content. Social media is about ENGAGEMENT, old metrics based simply on a number of hits, views, eyeballs (or Facebook fans in this case) are simply not providing a valuable measure on their own.
Why should you listen to what I say instead of these ‘experts’?
1. I don’t claim to be an expert, it’s hard to be an expert on something that changes from hour-to-hour, day-to-day. I’m a social media enthusiast and evangelist.
2. I’ve been working in online PR specifically on social media for almost two years now. Day in, day out.
3. I’ve been interacting in social media since before that phrase existed, in online communities before they were even called that. Think bulletin boards, IRC (Internet Relay Chat) and all the very basic forms of online communication that existed when the internet was first born.
4. I KNOW that social media can work for businesses both large and small, brands just need to work with someone who’s passionate about social media and what it can do for them, NOT someone who wants to further their own public persona.
If you’ve made it this far, congratulations.
I also saw a great graphic by mashable today on The State of the Internet, I love the section on how bloggers categorise themselves. I really think that 99.9% of those who think their style is ‘journalistic’ or ‘expert’ are deluded 
)
I wonder how many other people there are out there ‘working in the trenches’ as a former colleague commented on Facebook earlier today, who think the big-name bloggers out there are full of crap? Roll call please!
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Best of the best in social media, web & tech 2009
Posted by Julie Delaforce in lists on 6 January, 2010
Rather than starting my own list, I thought I’d share a few of the lists I’ve seen relating to ‘Best of 2009′.
Ten most popular Facebook games of 2009
Top Facebook status trends of 2009
Best celebrity Twitter stories of 2009
Social Media & Tech
Gizmodo’s best iPhone apps of 2009
Most watched and searched on YouTube in 2009
Australia’s most popular Google searches of 2009
The best social media campaigns of 2009
Best social media blog posts of 2009
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Trends: Most popular social networks of 2009 by search queries
Posted by Julie Delaforce in trends on 18 December, 2009
Here’s a quick insight into the popularity of some of the best known social networks and social media platforms.
The below shows the Google search volumes of Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, YouTube & Flickr in Australia for 2009.
Facebook clearly dominates the search queries and has grown steadily in popularity throughout the year. YouTube is a distant second with less than half the volume of searches, which have remained fairly steady throughout the year. It’s interesting to see that as Facebook has grown in popularity, MySpace has decreased in popularity. MySpace garners only about one in four as many queries as Facebook. Twitter and Flickr seem to get a fairly negligible portion of the search volume.
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Facebook: why can’t apps give more information before you hit ‘allow’?
Posted by Julie Delaforce in social games, social networks, user experience on 15 December, 2009
The answer is: they can! I haven’t seen it on many apps, only one in fact, Treasure Madness.
I’m sure many of you, like me, are reluctant to click through on the ‘allow’ button before knowing what a Facebook application is all about. There is rarely enough information on the application page to let you know exactly what the game /application involves, if you need friends using the app to make it effective and the many other factors you might consider.
Treasure Madness addresses this issue by showing the user a simple introduction to the game and what’s involved in two well-laid-out pages. After viewing these pages, the user then has the option to ‘play now’. It’s at this point the user sees the ‘allow’ screen. In my book, this gets the app a big thumbs up in terms of user experience as it greatly decreases the barrier to entry other Facebook app I’ve seen has.
Well done, Treasure Madness!
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Weight Watchers: global firsts in digital marketing
Posted by Julie Delaforce in Uncategorized on 14 October, 2009
I’ve spent the last few weeks contracting with Weight Watchers Australia’s online marketing team. I’m really impressed with their committment to the digital space, and especially the direction Online Marketing Manager, Reichel Cheslett is taking their digital strategy.
The work they’re doing online is a first not only for Weight Watchers globally but also within the weight loss category. What are they doing at the moment? They have some great forums as part of their website. This year for the first time they are running a people’s choice vote online for their Healthy Life Awards. You can also participate in Weight Watchers Online - you get just about all the benefits of going to traditional meetings, along with a great assortment of tools such as recipe and food planners, points tracking and weight loss goal tracking.
Weight Watchers have not delved too far into social media yet, which is what I’ve been helping them out on. I’ve helped them to conduct an uncomplicated social media trial based around the Healthy Life Awards. I’ve created a Twitter account and Facebook page and also done a few other things like placing some competitions with online properites important to their female demographic. I’ve also done some peer sharing placements around the HLA site and the competitions to increase traffic being driven to the sites. It’s never enough just to set these things up for a client and hope for the best so I’ve also done some mentoring and pulled together some social media guides to help them understand how to interact on Twitter and Facebook to best engage their audience.
I wish them well with their digital marketing plans for the future, and I’ll be keeping an eye out to see how they do in the coming year.
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Social media wrap
Posted by Julie Delaforce in Resources & reading on 13 October, 2009
Here are a few news items and links I’ve found interesting reading in the past few of weeks:
- Chris Boudreaux shares the social media policies of 82 companies on his Social Media Governance site
- Online PR spending has grown in the past year (against the trend of a decreased spend on online advertising spend) and the growth is expected to continue
- Companies to invest in social networks and email marketing in the coming year
- Rewarding your customers: HMV’s new CRM/eCRM plan with pureHMV
- Coming soon to Twitter: Lists
- Facebook releases a new ‘happiness’ guage and a Gross National Happiness (GNH) index for the USA
I’m endeavouring to do this social media wrap about twice a month, more frequently if there is more content I’d like to share with you.
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Online buzz around Twitter: Australian blogs vs traditional media
Posted by Julie Delaforce in social media monitoring on 28 April, 2009
Originally posted at freshchat.com.au
Following on from my last post about the explosion of interest in Twitter this year, I was interested to find out a bit more about who is instigating these conversations. I ran a couple of queries with our online monitoring tool Social Radar.
A survey of over 600 Australian blogs reveals that interest in Twitter has increased steadily over the past six months, but there is not the exponential increase one would expect to be generating the increased search volumes reported by the likes of Compete.
In contrast, a survey of over 100 Australian traditional media publications (online) reveals an exponential increase in mentions of Twitter in the past three months, with other key social media sites Facebook and MySpace warranting little mention.
This confirms my suspicions that early adopters, such as those who blog, have been engaging in Twitter for some time and are not creating the current online buzz. The chatter being generated online is by those in the traditional media with the general public as their key audience. So what is it about Twitter that has garnered this attention in recent months? I suspected it was something inane such as Ashton Kutcher or Britney Spears tweeting forays, but no, apparently the key topics of conversation in relation to Twitter included the Fake Stephen Conroy and the Victorian Bushfires.
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Facebook privacy and the social network fear factor
Posted by Julie Delaforce in social networks on 2 February, 2009
I’m the first to admit I’m totally addicted to social networks and online communities, when I talk to friends and family about my online involvement, they often worry that I have such a heavy online presence that anyone can discover all my dirty little secrets (not that I have any, of course). My mum told me a story of a friend’s daughter who didn’t get a job she applied for because the prospective employer did a search for her online and found her Facebook profile, which contained details they weren’t happy with (i.e. photos of her partying, when she was applying for a teaching position).
The fact is, these are unneccessary fears, most social networks have very comprehensive security and privacy settings. I’d like to use Facebook as an example of the security you can apply to your online presence.
Firstly, in regards to the story above the easiest way to keep your profile private is to ensure that your privacy settings restrict who can view your profile. The options include: My Networks & Friends, Friends of Friends and Only Friends. If you’re a member of the ‘Australia’ Network and you choose the My Networks & Friends options, there are 2.5 millions Australians who can see your whole profile. You can also choose whether or not you’d like your profile to appear in public searches (eg. Google).
It’s also important to check the settings for photos and videos when managing your profile, for example, do you want everyone to be able to see any photos or videos tagged of you? If not, change the settings. When creating photo albums on Facebook, the automatic privacy setting is ‘Everyone’ this doesn’t just mean all of your friends, it means EVERYONE on Facebook. I always change the setting to Only Friends so that only people I know have access to my photos.
Facebook has the option of creating Friends groups, so you can choose to have a ‘personal’ and ‘work’ group and limit what information is available to your colleagues. For example, you can restrict colleagues from being able to read your wall posts and seeing your photos.
There are endless privacy and security settings on Facebook, and all other social networks and online communities. As you add information to your profile think about who that information is available to and ensure your privacy is protected.
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