Tag Archives: facebook

The Best Salad in Greenwich, CT

I’ve never really considered myself a foodie by any means, but it was recently brought to my attention that I describe food with the same gusto and panache with which Joan Rivers judges celebrity fashion. Alas, this brings me to today’s post.

taken with my iPhone

Taken with my iPhone

The most magnificent salad to ever gain entry to the velvet ropes of my taste buds was the Five Shades of Green salad from the recently renovated Famous Greek Kitchen (formerly known as Famous Pizza and Souvlaki) located in the Byram section of Greenwich, Connecticut. The restaurant itself has been around for quite some time and my family has always been frequent patrons of the establishment, however I haven’t been there in quite some time simply because I lived out of town. We went last week to watch my cousin Jesse perform – he’s a friend of the restaurant owners and also a big fan of the same salad.

Luckily for us, that night was a soft launch after the renovations and what we came to discover was a revamped menu! Souvlaki, as we always called it, is a traditional Greek restaurant but we always enjoyed its slight Italian influences –namely in the form of their delectable pizza. Their new menu reflects more traditional Greek plates than I previously recall it having (they could have offered only Greek plates since the restaurant’s inception, but I was an oblivious consumer in my early years). Last week’s visit was different, though, and knowing that their pizza was fabulous, I opted to try something new – especially now that I’m always interested in finding the “Best Of…” type foods, and this, simply put, is the best salad I’ve ever had.

The five greens consisted of granny smith apples, avocado, cucumbers, pistachios, and a chive vinaigrette. The salad also featured craisins as well as gorgonzola cheese. I requested they include some grilled chicken into the mix simply because after glancing at the name of the dish, I assumed it was like a traditional salad with a lettuce-type base. I came to find that it was not a traditional lettuce-based salad, and was pleasantly met with a mixture of utterly delightful greens that were light on the palate, filling for the belly, and moderately priced at $8.95. I had a house pino grigio to accompany the salad and my what a great choice that was. The wine didn’t so much cancel out any flavor enhanced by the chive vinaigrette as it actually helped to bring out the flavor even more.

The salad was so pleasant to the palate and I highly recommend checking out the remaining pieces of the menu if you get a chance – I know I sure will. You can check them out at www.famousgreekkitchen.com or on Facebook and Twitter.

Checking In…

It’s been a while y’all! I’ve been taking some time off in CT and it seems like so much has happened in the social world since I last wrote in here. Let’s ease back into things and take two topics in today and I’ll make a better effort to write more! Especially because now I have more free time :)

  1. Vine – definitely worth mentioning first. Also, if you don’t have, get it here. This app received some pretty questionable reviews early on, mostly because it was used as a market for pornographic fares. Their terms of service makes note that users might be exposed to content that might be, “offensive, harmful, inaccurate or otherwise inappropriate, or in some cases, postings that have been mislabeled or are otherwise deceptive. Under no circumstances will Vine be liable in any way for any Content…” (read on here). I, however, think that Vine is pretty sweet and a great means of weaving together interesting vignettes to share with friends, followers, whomever. It’s also a pretty interesting means for brands that are interested in conveying lifestyle ideals to show their products in real life settings and further the personification of their brands. One brand in particular that I follow everywhere is Urban Outfitters and their Vine is quite awesome and sticks to their brand tenets.
  2. Facebook - announced a new format to the News Feed today. Minimal complaints from my side. They’ve worked so hard to take a website the started off ranking Harvard girls by their hotness to one that’s now an extension of people’s lives. They completely understand their role in their users lives and have turned their website into one that helps us all tell more visual stories of our every day happenings; that’s why they integrated their Timeline product. The new layout is a more visual aesthetic focused primarily on images. It kind of reminds me more of a publishing site, which is actually rather cool. Here‘s Mashable’s live-blogging of it.

The 20% Rule and How It Applies to You

Facebook recently announced the implementation of a 20% text overlay rule when it comes to Page Post ads in the News Feed and cover photos. They’ve actually been using this to varying degrees since at least December but are now making it more wide spread. The premise behind the rule is that any image that you choose to promote or use as a cover photo cannot consist of more than 20% text.

The way that this is being determined is through a 5 x 5 grid with a total of 25 boxes that Facebook currently uses in-house during its ad approval process. The rule stipulates that text may appear in a maximum of 5 boxes.

AllFacebook featured a great infographic courtesy of ShortStack to help you envision what the 20% rule actually looks like and I’ve placed it below:

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If you have additional questions about Facebook’s Ad Guidelines, you should check out the following: https://www.facebook.com/ad_guidelines.php

Facebook’s Graph Search Says Boo-Yah to Google

Today, Facebook announced the beta version of its new product called Graph Search, which, for regular users, transitions their experience into one where they can perform searches based on their friends, but for marketers, will potentially create a whole new revenue stream which directly results in a party-girl arm raise and squeal of excitement. With the product, Facebook is effectively attempting to do what Google+ does in a limited scope, and Google’s search product is a platinum grade provider of: search.

Since its inception, Facebook has been a non-stalkery, but definitely done in the middle of the night from your dorm, way to drop friends a note and see what everyone with whom you’re connected is up to. The service they provide today is much different than the Facebook of yesteryear because they’ve added a bevy of products since that time to create a more efficient user experience. With relative success, they constantly update its systems to become a more relevant player in people’s everyday lives. This includes the implementation of the Wall, News Feed, Timeline, Brand Pages, Poke, Gifts, Games & Apps, Messages, Chat, advertising (with all of its incredible amounts of products), mobile interfaces… It feels like the list goes on and on. 

The big news with Graph Search, though, is that it’s the company’s attempt to take on a world in which they’ve only been limited-to-moderate players. Search is a whole new playing field for Zuck, and if the gold-level user experience witnessed in his company’s previous products are any indication, Graph Search will works its way into being the threshold for everything pertaining to internet searching. Those familiar with Google, (so, umm, everyone), know that Larry & Sergey’s product is the kingpin of the search world and that they’ve seemingly worked restlessly to make Google+ a more social-infused version of its premiere search product.

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https://www.facebook.com/about/graphsearch

If you check out Graph Search’s product page (seen here), you’ll see that Zuck and his crew are attempting to make Facebook the place where you search for everything you may ever want in your life. Perhaps you’re interested in seeing if any of your friends like a certain doctor, do a Graph Search. Need a recommendation on a new vacation spot? Do a graph search. These actions, then, turn Google into the secondary and perhaps tertiary path of search. You can get all of the basic information on services from their pages, but it’s not like you can book flights, reserve tables, buy a lamp, and so forth from a company’s page (yet). What’s crucial here is the level of the implicit preference provided when you’re searching for what your friends like. Through Facebook, searches metamorphose from a simple, “Who of my friends live in this city?” into inherent recommendations.

The opportunity this could provide marketers is currently speculative if anything, but I think it’s safe to say that Graph Search could become a next-life for SEO, as well as the home of Facebook’s current paid-search advertisement offerings. 

How to Effectively Reach Your Fans

Back in October, Facebook put out a report with comScore talking about the power of reach on the platform with their paper, “Understanding paid and earned reach on Facebook”. What’s important to note here is that regardless of the total amount of fans on a particular page, it’s nearly impossible to reach every single person connected to your page simply because of all of the additional brands or friends whose updates make their way into users News Feeds. Back at fMC in February, Facebook noted that the percentage of fans that organically see a brand’s content is 16% and as a result, they created a new tool called Reach Generator, to help bridge that gap of unique users exposed to your content.

The Reach Generator tool was initially designed to help marketers reach 75% of their brand’s entire fan base within a three-month time frame, but the company has since gotten rid of it. The company I currently work for, Targeted Social, introduced Audience Amplifier around the same time as Reach Generator’s inception. Audience Amplifier is a similar tool without minimum spends, and guarantees 50% unique audience-reach within just a week’s time. I personally have put together and done the optimization for many of the Audience Amplifier campaigns. Since implementing this, we have helped brands in the Entertainment, Confections, and E-Commerce industries achieve anywhere from 51%-81% unique reach within a 3-7 day time frame depending on the total size of their audience.

You’re probably scratching your head at this point trying to figure out why this is even important – stick with me here! By implementing a tool such as Audience Amplifier into your paid component of Facebook media, even the smallest of fan pages can have an astounding amount of impact by increasing the unique amount of people who see a brand’s message – both fan and future-fan alike.

CTRTo help examine this further, I decided to look at a brand whose page we helped build from zero to 200,000 fans in a few months for which we ran Audience Amplifier (AA) ads then compared it to a regular Sponsored Story (SS) initiative that we ran for a brand in a similar industry. The AA post in question was supposed to reach roughly 30,000 fans aged 13-24 and eventually reached 100,004 users in 5-days whereas the SS set out to reach roughly 1 million fans and eventually hit 291,799 of them in a month time frame.

Furthermore, we found that the Click-through-rate (CTR) on the AA story came out to be 0.395% as compared to the SS CTR of 0.077%. This isn’t to say that the CTR for the Sponsored Story is bad – it’s actually quite strong, it just so happens that the CTR for the Audience Amplifier deal is somewhat astronomical.

With a tool like Audience Amplifier, the opportunities to reach and then highly engage your fan base is seemingly endless. I’ve seen incredibly strong CTRs but the better posts run through this tool have been very colorful images, or posts that feature exclusive video content.

What are some tactics that you set in place to reach your fans? I’d love to hear!

 

 

The Power of Implied Recommendation

People are always generally apprehensive when it comes to their opinions on advertising. For the most part, people tend to find advertisements to be deceptive and have issues trusting the ads being served to them. In order to address this, Nielsen ran a study, Trust in Advertising – Paid, Owned and Earned, as sourced in the Facebook/comScore paper ranking trusted forms of advertising. For the purpose of this post, we’ll look at 3 categories from this same study. In it, Nielsen indicated that 92% of the consumers surveyed either completely/somewhat trust recommendations from people they know, 70% of them completely/somewhat trusted consumer opinions posted online and 36% of them completely/somewhat trusted ads they see on social media.

I found that last number particularly staggering mostly because one of the beneficial aspects of social media advertisements is the inherent layer of trust that ads with social context convey. For instance, we’re friends on Facebook and I’m a fan of brand X; you’re then served an ad from that brand which lets you know that I like their page and that you should as well. This implied recommendation, as discussed in Nielsen’s study, creates a threefold success story: it helps to show that the brand’s message is trustworthy simply because I, your friend, like it; it enhances the likelihood of increasing their fan base simply by saying I like it, and lastly, it helps to create a larger base of potential consumers.

What Facebook’s Q3 Earnings Mean for You

On the questions of where advertisers are, as I said before, we are asserting that we are not TV, we are not search. We are social advertising.  – Sheryl Sandberg

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via Facebook (don’t sue meee)

The Zuckster released Facebook’s Q3 earnings for 2012 yesterday, mere months after its IPO launch on May 18th. At that time, the company’s valuation was approximated at $104 billion (Wikipedia), and now has a Q3 earning of $1.26 billion. That’s a whole lotta paper and according to their press release, this is a 32% increase from the $954 million in Q3 of 2011. I actually wrote last week about how the social space has changed, and how Facebook became a whole new landscape in just a year’s time. It’s not only rolled out a full integration of Timeline, making it a curator of stories and experiences, it’s also become an advertiser’s mecca by providing integrated options for reaching finessed targeted demographics with brand’s messages in a natural, conversational manner.

This is all cool stuff, but what does this mean for all the stakeholders? Here’s a quick look:

Investors: Congrats – you did it buddy. Your investment will pay off so tell the naysayers to suck it. The stock, while quiet at first, jumped after the announcement and is currently up 3.70 as of this writing. (Click here for a real time data analysis). You’ll also receive $0.12 per share on a non-GAAP basis (whatever that means…). Now’s the time to hang that certificate and put a big LIKE thumbs up on it.

Users: Part of their earnings announcement involved readdressing some of the products that will enhance your overall experience with the site. These include the addition of Gifts, as well as a deeper integration into Apple’s new iOS 6.0. In terms of advertising, though, they’ve developed tools such as Custom Audiences, Offers, Facebook Exchange, and mobile install ads. Buzzwords aside, this means that advertisements have been (and will continue to be) served towards you in a more conversational, approachable way instead of just thrown at you, so you might not have even noticed the difference if it wasn’t for the “Sponsored” notice.

Custom Audiences, as described in further detail here by TechCrunch, allows marketers & ad peeps alike to target you through privacy-protected phone numbers or email addresses that you’ve given to a brand through signing up for their service (i.e. a Groupon or what have you), as well as through your Facebook ID. This is all on top of the standard targeted elements such as age, gender, geo-targeting. This is all information you have given out, not that was bought so rest assured, no spamming here!

Offers lets brands serve you deal via Facebook, I’ve seen cool ones like 15% off of purchase from some of my favorite brands, as well as brands that my friends follow (friends of fans targeting).

Facebook Exchange allows, among other things, ads to be served to you based off of your online behaviors, known as Retargeting. Advertisers can bid on those ads in real time, allowing them to find you and serve you an ad on a whim. Looking for a camera? BOOM! Here’s a Nikon ad. (Some more info on Exchange can be found here.)

Mobile install ads is basically a developer’s dream. This allows for mobile ads to direct you straight through to the app store to download some awesome new treat. Look for more innovations in mobile in the months to come too!

Marketers/Ad peeps: :) Sip your cocktail, as these are all more exciting ways to help out your brands and to reach your consumers in noninvasive, approachable, and friendly ways.

Some cool stuff here. So not only will you get to send your friends gifts, and have better mobile experiences, but you’ll also have more relevant pieces of content and advertisements coming your way based off of your online habits and different sets of information you’ve given about yourself to sites. On top of this, Facebook will continue to rake in the dough, as will all of their investors. Cool beans?

Let me know if none of that makes sense to you, I’m happy to elaborate.

Donnie Darko Marketing… If 2001 Was 2011

Social@Ogilvy put out a really interesting article last week about social marketing as inspired by the popular film, The Hunger Games (article can be seen here). In it, Social@Ogilvy’s VP Geoffrey Colon, @djgeoffe asks,

Does social media help drive consumption of content or does good content drive social media engagement?

Colon argued with ease how essential social media based word of mouth is when it comes to any sort of marketing initiative, and that content that supports your initiatives must be engaging to be worthwhile for consumers (duh!). He said, ”…it was the creation of some wonderful social media content that helped drive word of mouth more than simply the all too familiar promotional messaging built around trailers and games.” I’m not too sure that’s the case for this film seeing as it was already a popular literary series. Regardless…

This clearly got me thinking about something slightly unrelated to the article overall, and that was one of my favorite films as a young dewey-eyed teenager, Donnie Darko.

For those who are unaware, Donnie Darko came out in 2001 with minimal fanfare, and according to IMDB grossed only $4.5 million at the box office. The studio, though, made sure to give this dark film the social currency it deserved, and in 2001, that came in the form of a bad-ass website, www.donniedarkofilm.com. The interactive site was certainly ahead of its time and honestly still creeps the shit out of me, however, it’s maze-like qualities kept users thoroughly engaged and (for rhyming’s sake) enraged if they could not solve the next step in the online puzzle.

I didn’t really futz around much with the movie or its corresponding website for that matter until the spring of 2006. The only reason I remember this was because I was a senior in high school and became so intrigued with the site after my then-pregnant creative writing teacher decided to drop an existential bomb on us in the form of a movie about a psychologically advanced teenager. Pardon the digression – alas, the website’s content is still particularly engaging and I’m clearly still very bitter about not reaching the end of the maze. Needless to say, six years later, I’m still heavily effected by the content (and user experience for that matter) on the Donnie Darko website, so much so, here I am trying to visualize how amazing the content would have been in a social media context in 2012.

Seriously though, what would have happened if the Donnie Darko type films of the last decade had social media to help stimulate its word-of-mouth marketing? Clearly, The Hunger Games example from Colon is an edge case considering the extreme following that the book series had to help support the upheaval in its WOM, so what about the little movies that could? (See also, Twilight and the Harry Potter films.)

At a glance, it looks as though someone over at Fox is currently running the Donnie Darko Facebook page (or perhaps its Frank?). The page is more of an homage to the awesomeness of the movie and its content is based around fan art and “What’s Jake Gyllenhaal Up To These Days?!” type posts, however, could you imagine what it would be like if the film came out today? It probably would have received The Dark Knight type treatment (a reminder of what that was is here) mixed with some amazing social media type components. Holy crap, my brain is exploding just thinking about it. If the maze-like methods behind the website were incorporated into a social media boom behind the film, Colon’s article would argue that it’s hyper-fan appeasing content could have helped further not only its overall box office earnings, but the proceeding cult following as well.

Is Facebook the New Virgin?

Don’t be mistaken, the Virgin Group overseeing over 40 different businesses in seemingly every continent on the globe, headed by billionnaire founder Sir Richard Branson, once started off as a magazine, Student, then morphed into a mail-order record distributor in the 1970s. Living entrepreneurially and taking chances is something that Branson has done nearly his entire life.

We are all familiar to a certain degree of Mark Zuckerberg‘s rise to the billionnaire club, and if you saw David Fincher’s The Social Network  you now have a fictionalized perception on just how Facebook came to be. Boy from Long Island attends Harvard, drops out when his website becomes the coolest thing on earth since James Dean; website dominates college campuses, then the United States, then the world.

The shift in Facebook since its beginnings somewhat mirrors the professional trajectory that Branson chose to take Virgin. Both companies started off as a way to keep students entertained in one way or another. The Virgin Group shifted from the music industry to what feels like every apparent industry imaginable on earth – wine, air, fitness, finance, vacations, trains. Facebook, since its inception less than a decade ago, has seen a number of changes in not only its appearance, but its services as well – instant messaging, marketplace, timeline, possibly a phone, and many more of which you can learn about on their blog.

The point of it all is a good entrepreneur evolves alongside their clientele. I’m particularly interested in seeing if/how Facebook will translate its brand from the web to actual products and if it effectively takes the Virgin route and plans on total global domination.