November 25th, 2009

Facebook as a living obituary aka 'goodbye old friend'

Posted by Jennifer Leggio @ 12:03 pm

Categories: Facebook, Social Media

Tags: Facebook, Social Networking, Intellectual Property, Online Communications, Marketing, Advertising & Promotion, Research & Development, Business Operations, Jennifer Leggio

A few weeks ago I got word that an old college friend had passed away quite unexpectedly. A mutual friend notified a group of us, as she learned by visiting his Facebook page that he was gone. None of us were close enough to be notified by the deceased’s family, yet we all revered this man as one of the greatest hearts we’d ever met.

I immediately rushed to his Facebook page, which was still there and more active than ever. Friends and family had linked to dedications and obituaries and had been writing messages to him as if he was still here. While we knew that he was an inspiration to many — a strong man with the most gentle nature — I was blown away by the amount of people who had come to remember him. It was more moving than I was expecting.

So, after a sobbing phone call to a dear mutual friend, I started thinking about the bigger picture.

There’s been a lot written about what happens to our social network presences after we die. As a matter of fact, my friend Adele McAlear has proposed a compelling South by Southwest Interactive (SXSW) session on the matter it’s so top of mind. But most of the existing discussions I’ve read circle around what happens to your intellectual property, who manages the accounts, etc. Legalities and technology questions aside, what happens to the online memory?

In the case of Facebook, they were already a step ahead. As a matter of fact Facebook director of security Max Kelly blogged just a couple weeks earlier about Facebook’s feature that allows loved ones to report people as deceased so that the profile can stay on a site as a living memorial. Kelly said that the discussion of what to do with profiles postmortem came up after his best friend, a fellow Facebook employee, passed away four years ago.

“When someone leaves us, they don’t leave our memories or our social network,” he wrote. “To reflect that reality, we created the idea of ‘memorialized’ profiles as a place where people can save and share their memories of those who’ve passed.”

The wall remains, as do photos, but Facebook removes other sensitive information and also ensures that the profile does not show up in the “suggestions” section of the news feed, and so on. It’s just a small form, and it’s somewhat hidden on the site, but could make the world of difference to someone wanting to memorialize a dear friend or family member.

What do you think of Facebook as a living memorial?

November 12th, 2009

What the duck? Aflac gets quackin' on Facebook

Posted by Jennifer Leggio @ 12:49 pm

Categories: Corporate Social Networking, Facebook, Fortune 500 Series, Social Business, Social Media, Social Networks

Tags: Facebook, Aflac Inc., Branding, Benefits, Vertical Industries, Marketing, Human Resources, Jennifer Leggio

Usually in my Fortune 500 series I take a look at a company’s broad social media strategy. But this time I decided to have a little bit more fun with it and dig into one company’s use of Facebook in terms of supporting its brand awareness as well as its charitable giving. That company is Aflac. You know, the insurance company with the endearing little duck.

Whether or not you are an Aflac customer, you’ve at least once tried to mimic the Aflac duck’s quacking of “Aflac” at the end of its commercials. After its commercial success, Aflac has taken to Facebook with a two-fold approach: increase its brand awareness through a fan page for the famous Aflac Duck and through a presence in the “Causes” application on Facebook for the Aflac Cancer Center at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, the same city in which the company is headquartered.

The Aflac “Cause”
With the Causes application, users have created more than 300,000 charitable causes that have benefited 60,000 nonprofits in the United States and Canada, raising more than $14 milliion in total. Aflac was able to raise $1.16 million to benefit the Aflac Cancer Center at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta during Childhood Cancer Awareness Month, making it the largest sponsored campaign in the history of Causes.

The company donated $1 for every Facebook member who joined its Cause page, as well as matched all monitary donations. As of today, the Aflac Cancer Center Cause has more than 1 million members. According to Laura Kane, Aflac’s vice president of external communications, the Causes application was chosen because it seemed to have potential to reach a wide audience.

“The fundraiser was very much a test of the application to determine whether it would be an effective platform –which it clearly was,” Kane said.

The company is still determining whether or not it will use the Causes application for another fundraiser, though the Aflac Cancer Center is the company’s main charitable focus and fundraising continues year-round through other means.

Just Ducky
From a brand awareness perspective, the Aflac duck has more than 164,000 fans. The company uses this page to interact with users, disseminate company information as well information about its charitable cause, and promote contests for friends of the duck. What I found most endearing about the fan page is how the duck’s “personality” shows through with its individual updates. Some are more serious, of course, but you can get the duck’s thoughts on even mundane daily things such as Halloween candy or even fantasy football.

While the duck’s fanship might be modest in comparison to some other consumer brands, this particular fan page is an example of how using a brand’s character as a cornerstone to a social media program is better than a static corporate presence. In direct comparison, Aflac the company has a page too, but it only has just over 2K fans in comparison to the duck’s 164,000. Aflac was smart about engaging the little duck to create customer loyalty and engagement through its Facebook presence.

Aflac isn’t currently tracking how its Facebook fan interaction is turning into sales of insurance policies, but more tracking it as a brand awareness activity on its own.

“Aflac views social media as an opportunity to generate awareness and a establish an ongoing relationship with users in a way that is relevant to their lives,” Kane said. “We don’t have any numbers that we can provide in terms of how many of the Duck’s ‘fans’ go on to become Aflac policyholders, but we do measure the number of people who become fans as a reflection of our success.”

November 10th, 2009

Creepy elves and disco dancing: A business win for OfficeMax

Posted by Jennifer Leggio @ 1:58 pm

Categories: Advertising, Branding, Corporate Social Networking, Customer Loyalty, Facebook, Fortune 500 Series, Marketing, Social Business, Social Media

Tags: OfficeMax Inc., Dance, Portals, Web Technology, Internet, Jennifer Leggio

Who knew that weird dancing elves could be good for business?

OfficeMax today announced the return of its Elf Yourself portal, a silly site that allows people to create elf-like images of themselves doing a variety of dances from country to disco and even hip hop. While I’ve been a fan of Elf Yourself for some time but had no idea that it had come back for the 2009 holiday season until ZDNet colleague Jason Perlow posted his (hilarious) personalized elf last night. While all of this is entertaining, I got to wondering about what value this is really driving for OfficeMax. Last year I spoke with OfficeMax vice president of marketing and advertising Bob Thacker about the company’s social media strategy for my Fortune 500 series, and he brought Elf Yourself up as a social media success.

“Social media embraced the ‘Elf Yourself’ concept, endorsed it and readily shared it among online communities, which turned this campaign into a digital phenomenon that attracted millions, set a new viral marketing record and landed a considerable ‘win’ for OfficeMax,” he said.

I reached out to OfficeMax again today given the launch of the new site, which is now chock full of Twitter and Facebook connectivity. As a matter of fact, users of Elf Yourself can just connect to the site with Facebook Connect and select a picture from any album, saving hassle and upload time. And later today, the feature will launch that allows users to automatically post these elves to their own walls or their friends’ walls, spreading the Elf Yourself chaos even further than before. An OfficeMax spokesperson said the company selected to leverage Facebook this year to enable a deeper social media experience.

But, beyond creating giggles, what is this really doing for Office Max? The stats I received from OfficeMax are surprising:

• The Elf Yourself site has had 284 million site visits each holiday season since the tool’s launch in 2006. These site visits were measured over only a two-month period each year when the site was live.
• Of these 284 site visits, 256 million elves were created
• A study in 2007 showed that more than 1/3 of Elf Yourself users said the visit to the elf portal influenced their decisions to visit OfficeMax

What’s so great about Elf Yourself is that while it’s clearly an OfficeMax deal (powered by JibJab, of course) it’s not so in-your-face with its marketing that you grow tired of the brand. Yet, somehow it gets engrained in its users that OfficeMax is behind the whole thing.

What do you think of OfficeMax’s Elf Yourself? Oh, and here’s my terrifying Elf:

September 10th, 2009

Facebook introduces @ tagging, tapping Twitter behavior for enhanced engagement

Posted by Jennifer Leggio @ 12:54 pm

Categories: Facebook, Social Media, Social Networks, Twitter

Tags: Facebook, Twitter Inc., Tagging, Social Networking, Networking, Online Communications, Marketing, Advertising & Promotion, Jennifer Leggio

Facebook announced today that people can now tag their friends in their status messages and posts by using the @ symbol, a la Twitter. This marks yet another feature that Facebook has observed and eventually “borrowed” from another social network — with Twitter and FriendFeed (now Facebook-owned) being among the most popular feature contributors.

According to the Facebook blog:

Now, when you are writing a status update and want to add a friend’s name to something you are posting, just include the “@” symbol beforehand. As you type the name of what you would like to reference, a drop-down menu will appear that allows you to choose from your list of friends and other connections, including groups, events, applications and Pages. Soon, you’ll be able to tag friends from applications as well. The “@” symbol will not be displayed in the published status update or post after you’ve added your tags.

Even though the “@” symbol does not show up after the tagging is complete, this is a very smart move my Facebook. As Twitter has risen in popularity, referring to friends with “@” in front of their screen names has become an innate cyber culture behavior (kind of in the way that people went from using “LOL” and “BRB” only in IM to email and other communications).

This allows Facebook to be even more of a connector and engagement platform than ever before. Friends of friends can now view your public Facebook page after a friend has mentioned spending time with you, and that might eventually grow networks.

There’s a business benefit here for Facebook. In addition to growing networks, it’s also going to drive page views across more profiles and profile preview pages. This is an opportunity for driving more advertising views, and with hope, more advertisers to the social network.

One question I have — and I urge anyone who has the answer to comment — is how will this affect people who automatically feed their tweets into their Facebook status messages? Since many people use different screen names on Twitter that don’t map to their real names (i.e. “mediaphyter” versus “Jennifer Leggio”) will this eventually create some identity confusion among users of both Facebook and Twitter?

Facebook is currently rolling the feature out and isn’t yet available for all users.

August 6th, 2009

After Twitter attack, Facebook investigates potential foul play

Posted by Jennifer Leggio @ 10:02 am

Categories: Facebook, Security, Social Media and Security, Social Networks, Twitter

Tags: Facebook, Twitter, Attack, Social Networking, Security, Online Communications, Marketing, Advertising & Promotion, Jennifer Leggio

Early this morning it was reported that Twitter had experienced at distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack that took the site offline for a few hours (service has since been restored). During the time rumors floated that Facebook had suffered a similar attack due to slowness in service.

According to a Facebook spokesperson:

Earlier this morning, we encountered issues within our network that resulted in a short period of degraded site experience for some visitors. No user data was at risk and the matter is now resolved for the majority of users. We’re monitoring the situation to ensure that users continue to have the fast and reliable experience they’ve come to expect from Facebook… We are investigating potential foul play at this time.

While it is possible that Facebook encountered an attack of its own (aside from a new Koobface malware run) it is also just possible that the site was overflowing with lost Twitter users who were looking for temporary social networking salvation.

Update: Facebook confirms DDoS attack:

Earlier this morning, Facebook encountered network issues related to an apparent distributed denial-of-service attack, that resulted in degraded service for some users.

June 18th, 2009

Facebook launches in Persian to support communications around events in Iran

Posted by Jennifer Leggio @ 8:47 pm

Categories: Facebook, Social Networks, Twitter

Tags: Facebook, Twitter, Iran, Language Translation, Social Networking, Online Communications, Marketing, Advertising & Promotion, Jennifer Leggio

Facebook tonight has released a test version of its site available in Persian. The social network claims that amidst this week’s Twitter use for communication around events in Iran, its users were sharing content in Persian, however the site navigation was only available in English. This change will make it so that “Persian speakers inside of Iran and around the world can begin using it in their native language.

According to the company’s announcement:

Persian was already in translation before worldwide attention turned to the Iranian elections, but because of the sudden increase in activity we decided to launch it sooner than planned. This means that the translation isn’t perfect, but we felt it was important to help more people communicate rather than wait.

The language translation is now live, according to Facebook, and those users with browsers set to Persian will automatically be directed to the translated test version. Users also have the ability to change their settings on Facebook under the “language’ tab to read the site only in Persian.

Facebook stresses this is, indeed, a test version and suggests anyone having corrections or suggestions do so through the translations application.

This announcement by Facebook comes on the heels of a week in which social network communications, primarily through Twitter, became critical during the disputed Iran election. Twitter even rescheduled maintenance set for Monday afternoon to ensure that the site did not experience disruption during daylight hours in Iran.

June 8th, 2009

Facebook social ad overload, courtesy of Turner Broadcasting

Posted by Jennifer Leggio @ 11:49 pm

Categories: Advertising, Facebook, Social Business, Social Media, Social Networks

Tags: Facebook, Advertisement, Turner Broadcasting, Jennifer Leggio

Facebook social ads are a good idea, depending on your business. Facebook social ads can, depending on your business, help you garner more page views and perhaps grow your customer base. However, not used wisely, Facebook social ads, no matter what your business, could annoy a lot of people.

Case in point? Turner Broadcasting’s TNT. Apparently the network is really excited about its summer line-up of shows, because all day today, most people only saw… ads for TNT shows. As my pal Rebecca Besbris said, “One of my friends said she didn’t watch because the ads drove her nuts all day long.” I don’t know if this was part of Turner’s failed strategy or if this is a Facebook flub. Either way, it’s bad.

A quick lesson in pictures — How not to use Facebook social ads:

11:15 p.m. - Profile Page

11:18 p.m. - Viewing a video

11:21 p.m. - Commenting on wall discussion

11:23 p.m. - Return to profile page

OK, TNT. I GET IT. “The Closer” and “Raising The Bar” were on tonight. I asked several friends (I likely became more annoying than the ads were) if they were getting bombarded and I was hardpressed to find a person to say no. The only person who said no, actually, just didn’t log into Facebook today.

Facebook social ads are cool but this is absolutely a case of “too much of a good thing.” I don’t need to watch either of these shows anymore — I’ve already burnt out on seeing the characters.

Do you think this is too much?

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May 26th, 2009

Micro-presence: changing the 'status' quo

Posted by Jennifer Leggio @ 9:35 am

Categories: Corporate Social Networking, Facebook, Microblogging, Social Business, Social Media, Social Networks, Twitter

Tags: Micro-Presence, Social Business, Mobile, Network, Social Networking, Online Communications, Marketing, Advertising & Promotion, Jennifer Leggio

* Jennifer Leggio is on vacation

Guest editorial by Donald J. Patterson

There is no way that managers and their subordinates see eye to eye on social networking in the workplace.  Why should they?  To employers and employees alike, most social networking sites are about entertainment.  Tweeting about Gail’s birthday party decorations is only in the remotest sense “team-building.”  So, the question remains: at what point will consumer-oriented social networking get past the fun-factor and really become a force multiplier, driving value for business?

Most of today’s social networking sites only differ in attitude, not in deep technical ways.  Flickr, Facebook, LinkedIn, even David Hasselhoff’s fan site, all have networks of friends with whom you share digital media, status information, location and comments. So looking for innovation by comparing brands is not the place to start. The game changing transformations that businesses have to watch for now, will be found in how people begin to use these sites as tools in surprising new ways to manage and work.  Once these new uses crystallize only then will the technological support emerge that will accelerate these new usage models, dwarfing what is being done today.

Consider the simple status line made famous by Twitter.  Facebook’s recent redesign has elevated the status line to an even more central position in their user experience.  But there are subtle shifts that are beginning to appear in the way that status is being used.  The predominant use is as a personal headline that tells the world what quirky thing you are thinking about.  This is now widely known as microblogging.  But in parallel, though flying under the radar, is a shift to a less entertaining and more practical application of status updates, which is called “micro-presence.”  This type of status update got its start with IM status messages, predating micro-blogging and internet-based social networks.

More –>

May 19th, 2009

Powered steps up branded communities with Facebook Connect integration

Posted by Jennifer Leggio @ 7:35 am

Categories: Brand Management and Monitoring, Branding, Community Management, Corporate Social Networking, Facebook, Marketing, Social Business, Social Media, Social Networks

Tags: Facebook, Brand, Integration, Branding, Marketing, Jennifer Leggio

Social marketing company Powered has stepped up its offering to its branded communities with a new Facebook Connect integration feature. Companies using Powered’s community platform can now use Facebook to more easily share content with community members and expand their reach to recruit new users to their communities. This also allows community users to bring in more friends from their trusted network, thereby increasing loyalty to the brand.

According to the company:

Facebook Connect allows Powered social marketing platform users to access their Facebook account from within an online community and also enable them to share and start conversations about community content outside the confines of the Powered platform.

“By using Facebook Connect, brands can reduce registration abandonment by making it a seamless process,” said D.P. Rabalais, director of marketing for Powered. “Users can share content just as they would do with a Facebook application.”

Some of the new user features include sharing content among Facebook friends from outside communities without a daunting and insecure additional credential process; determine which other Facebook friends are members of the community of choice; personal brand consistency across multiple networks.

Some of the new brand features include establishing metrics to track users and their behaviors, track community member conversion; KPI tracking, online transactions and demand generation. Using this level of tracking allows brands to better track customer behaviors and conduct research that could be fueled into their product development and business planning cycles.

“Facebook has emerged as the top destination site for peer-to-peer social networking. By seamlessly integrating their branded online communities with Facebook, marketers can grow their customer networks by orders of magnitude, leading to significant increases in customer engagement, brand advocacy — and, ultimately, return on marketing investment,” Jeff Zabin, Vice President and Research Fellow, Aberdeen Group. “In my view, Powered has dramatically enhanced the value of its online community platform by enabling marketers to automatically plug into the single greatest source of online conversation through Facebook Connect.”

The new features and benefits can be previewed via Powered’s clear video demo of the new integration.

April 27th, 2009

Facebook opens up with new Open Stream API

Posted by Jennifer Leggio @ 10:29 am

Categories: Aggregators, Development, Facebook, Social Media, Social Networks

Tags: Developer, Facebook, API, Jennifer Leggio

Facebook historically has been the social network known for bringing lots of information in but rarely letting information out. Today, the company announced a new Open Stream API that will allow developers access the home page and profile streams. This will allow home page feed and user profile data to be fed into aggregation sites such as FriendFeed or even Adobe Air applications such as TweetDeck and mobile devices.

According to developer Justin Bishop’s blog post:

To make this work, we released new technology for developers so they can offer this option to you on other websites and applications. We work closely with third-party developers to enable intriguing and meaningful experiences both on and off Facebook.com. Since we launched Facebook Platform in 2007, developers have created 10s of thousands of applications to help you connect and share with your friends in interesting ways — whether by playing a social game, discovering new books or creating group greeting cards.

This is a big move for Facebook, which as I mentioned, historically kept a tight grip on it’s information in order to drive users into Facebook to create more visibility for its social ads. Bishop’s blog post indicates that there will be more ways to share information via more Web sites in the future.