How To Engage Customers On YouTube Without Picking Up A Video Camera

From Social Times:

More and more brands are promoting themselves by posting their own videos to YouTube, hoping they’ll go viral. However, what you may not know is that you can achieve just as much success on YouTube, if not more, without even picking up a video camera. Read on to learn how you can engage your customers and spread the word about your brand and product without creating a single video.

Whether you are trying to promote a makeup or hairstyling product, an electronic device, a food or cooking tool, clothes, or something else entirely, odds are that people are already posting videos about it and talking about it on YouTube. They may be talking about your brand specifically, or they may be talking about a similar product. So you’ve got two options—(1) You can create your own video content to add to the clutter and do what you can to promote it; or (2) you can track down videos where people are already talking about and reviewing your product or similar products and reach out to those vloggers and viewers to help them help you. Which do you think is the better option? If you chose number 2 you’re correct.

There are thousands of vloggers on YouTube from all walks of life, of all tastes and interests. If you are thinking about promoting your brand or product on YouTube then sit down, do some research and find vloggers that are in, and speak to, your target market. Check out their videos, see what viewers are writing in the comments and start engaging with the community.

Engaging With The Community

If you see people asking questions about your specific brand, or a range of products that your product falls under, answer them. Be helpful, be friendly, be appealing. Remember, the goal is to kill them with kindness and get them interested in your product. Please, please, please note that it is never a good idea to be spammy. The idea is not to go onto relevant videos and write a comment like, “If you like this video you’ll LOVE eating Bob’s Bison Burgers,” with a link to your Bob’s Bison Burgers website. Not every comment or response that you make should be about your company. Be a part of the community, rather than just trying to promote your product.

Contacting Vloggers

Once you have become active in the YouTube community you can start reaching out to vloggers. Target vloggers that have a decent following and that vlog about topics related to your brand or product. Then contact them via YouTube, or private email if they provide it, to let them know about your product and that you would like to give them a free sample or loaner if they would like to review it.

Keep in mind that you may not even have to contact a vlogger personally. He or she may see your comments or find out about your product on their own and create a video to review it. Sounds pretty good, right?

The Wall Street Journal recently published an article on this topic, and they spoke with the director of marketing for Benchmade knives who told them, “It’s cheaper and more convincing if a vlogger reviews a knife. To produce the same number of intricate 10- to 20-minute videos that [knife vlogger] Nutnfancy does for each product we make would be impossible to afford.” Benchmade offers loaner knives to vloggers for review, as well as classified information about future products, and discounts as compensation.

Lots of brands have reached out to YouTube stars to help them with their online video campaigns. Why not be the next?

Reacting To Feedback

When you engage with the community on YouTube in this fashion you are bound to get both positive and negative feedback. When a vlogger reviews your product there is no guarantee that it’s going to be a good review, and even if it is a great review there is no guarantee that people won’t criticize your product or brand in the comments. You’ve got to be ready to express gratitude for compliments, as well as to respond to criticism.

If someone makes a video saying something negative about your brand or product than respond, either with a video response or comment explaining why you chose to create your product a certain way, or thanking them for their suggestion and changing your product to accommodate, adding new features or creating additional products to fill a need that is missing. Remember, vloggers and their viewers are your customers. If they have comments or suggestions you need to hear them and react to make your product offering better and more suited to accommodate their needs.

Rick Loughery, social-media leader at GoPro, who makes digital video cameras for action sports, told the Wall Street Journal, “We have learned that listening is as important as talking.” WSJ goes on to say, “Listening to vloggers has…helped GoPro find new niches. For instance, the company learned through vlogs that people were mounting Hero cameras onto remote-controlled cars, boats, planes and helicopters—so GoPro created a kit designed specifically for those hobbyists.”

Social Business Takes a Human Touch, No Really

From Brian Solis:

The socialization of media is the undercurrent for the Industrial Revolution of our time. Yet, here we are today, forcing social media into the aging paradigms that the social revolution set out to upset in the first place.

Businesses still weigh the ROI of participation. Teams debate over who owns the company’s social presences. The parochial in middle and upper management see it as either a playground or an extension of existing broadcast channels. Champions believe it is a time to engage and improve experiences. Visionaries recognize its ability to socialize the entire business. Yet, almost every example we see today of successful social media endeavors is in reality, siloed and disconnected from the rest of the organization.

Marketing runs a creative contest on Facebook, but the rest of the business is unaware of the campaign.

Customer service reacts to customer problems, yet product development is unaware of the recurring problems and themes.

Representatives are unwittingly diluting the brand they represent with unguided tweets, updates, posts, comments, and videos.

HR monitors the mistakes made by employees, but no one guides them through training, guidelines, or branding.

Customers ask questions about products and services and while these updates show up on the monitoring reports of community managers, they do not receive a response from the sales team.

The list goes on and on with little resolution as we are focused on real-time vs. real world. We need not only champions, but we now need leaders to help us cut through the red tape and unite the organization behind a flag of relevance and evolution.

Everything starts with recognizing that we must cater to an audience where its parts are in fact, greater than its sum. We must partition our social strategy to engage the diversity of the social consumer and address the unique requirements and attention of each.

This is about humanizing not only the brand, but also the methodologies that govern customer relations and adapting the systems that support it.

Socializing CRM

sCRM is the hot ticket in enterprise 2.0 at the moment, yet its champions are mired in technology as are the champions for social media in general. In many ways we’re blinded by the networks and our need to listen, respond, and update. But, we miss the intimacy necessary to learn, adapt, and earn relevance. And now, we’re consumed with wiring Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Yelp into our existing CRM infrastructure to help us automate enlightenment and engagement. While we close gaps caused by the distribution and scale of social web and the people who define it, we fail to see the human touchpoints to connect with the right people in the right places at the right time. That is, after all, where scalability resides; the ability to engage influential consumers in a one-to-one-to-many practice to amplify intention, purpose, and value.

1+1 = Many

Essentially, we’re practically fooled into a belief that we should not over think social, but not doing so, we trivialize the opportunity, ultimately investing in a program that at the end of the day, falls short of meeting the needs of the social consumer.

What’s the value of a Like?

What is a Twitter Follower worth?

What is the significance of a Tweet, check-in, or comment?

How do we reduce the costs of support through social?

To answer these questions, we must have a vision of the experience and actions we wish to introduce into these rich and active social ecosystems. Yes, this is a “click to action” and in order for businesses to socialize CRM, they must socialize the entire business. Not all of the 3F’s (friends, fans, followers) are created equally. Individually, rarely collectively, they are looking for substance, direction, recognition and even empowerment. In order to activate the social web and unlock meaningful conversations, we must look beyond customers. We must officially recognize all those who influence their actions and introduce a conversational workflow that traverses the business chasms to learn and lead – in public.

Social Science is the Center of Social Business

Customer Relationship Management > Social CRM > SRM >Relationships > Relevance

One of the celebrated companies renown for its innovation in social customer service is actually a lesson in how social “anything” becomes great PR. When you look behind the scenes, you actually see more duct tape and rubber bands than fluidity and polish. Business units are still siloed and even the chief executives have gone on record saying that the acts of engagement do more for the company’s PR than it does for the improvement of products and services. Just look at your favorite social media source and you’ll see an endless array of examples of how brands are succeeding in social media. Again, most of them are basking in the brilliance of individual victories, some are actually breaking through the internal barriers that prevent collaboration, and others are simply stunts designed to spike conversations, sales, and PR. Nothing wrong with it…especially if it work as intended.

You and I are here together, right now, to do something greater. It’s up to us to lead the way for the socialization of business, understanding that it’s an uphill journey for the foreseeable future. But in the end, our experience and triumphs are unparalleled.

Social media are the goldmines of anthropology, sociology and ethnography. To excel here, we must embrace social science to create and earn relevance. Some businesses already get this. For example, Intel employs anthropologists such as Genevieve Bell to understand how certain cultures adopt technology and also how products should be designed with humans represented in every step of the process. I challenge businesses seeking to socialize their business to hire social scientists to not only understand culture and its role in consumerism, but also to humanize the processes and systems erecting to facilitate engagement and social CRM. It takes a human touch to embrace and inspire the social consumer, build communities, and activate advocacy. If we can hear, see, and feel the customer and all those who influence them, then why would we think social is where we can excel. Surely, it’s not because we show up. It’s only because we earn and deserve our place within each network.

We must humanize our brand, our products, and our processes to improve and influence experiences. Doing so will help us find our voice, our mission, and our purpose…our cadence. Give people a reason to connect with us, trust us, and represent us.

HOW TO: Activate Your Brand’s Super Influencers

From Mashable:

As a marketer, you’ve undoubtedly heard about the 1% rule — that just 1% of your brand’s social media followers are responsible for the majority of sharing. They share your social media campaigns with their larger social network, passing on links to your contests, promotions, deals, and other marketing campaigns. These key influencers are more than just fans — they’re brand ambassadors.

At my company, we’ve seen that brands that track and quantify word-of-mouth impact have found that these key influencers can drive 20, 30, or even 70% of all visits to their campaign pages, beating out display and search advertising as the most efficient driver of traffic to their sites. That’s pretty incredible, considering social campaigns require no media buys and cost next to nothing to implement, whereas banners and search ads are a huge expense. These “super influencers” drive an even higher share of conversion — on average influencing 30% or more of all conversions on marketers’ sites just by recommending a brand’s products, content, or promotions to their online communities.

When you see data like these as regularly as we do, you realize pretty quickly that super influencers are worth engaging. If you can reach out to this 1% directly by offering them special promotions, thanking them for their influence, and rewarding them for their loyalty, they will be motivated to share early and share often.

Identifying your key influencers is fairly straightforward. There are a wealth of social media measurement tools that enable marketers to find the people who are talking most about their brand, see what type of content they’re sharing and with whom, and how they are sharing it (e-mail, Twitter, Facebook, their own blogs, etc.). Once you find these influencers, the trick is activating them to share even more.

Here are three tips to help you activate your top influencers.

1. Reserve Your Best Content for Influencers Only

Influencers love to be an inside source of information for their friends and followers by sharing contests, information, or deals with their social networks before other people have heard about them. Create exclusive content you share only with your key influencers, and let them know they were one of a select few to receive this special offer. This makes your brand advocates feel appreciated and provides them with exclusive information they can use to boost their reputation as a source of inside deals.

One of my company’s clients decided to engage its most ardent fans when planning a large industry event. The company reached out to these key influencers, inviting them to post a “register now” button on their blogs and websites, and offering them lower-cost VIP passes if they shared the event with friends. The result was a huge uptick in sharing that significantly influenced registrations for the event. People who found out about the conference from an influencer were 37% more likely to register than direct visitors, and influencers ended up driving more than $1 million in total registrations.

2. Mine the Blogs and Forums

When you’re looking for super influencers, chances are you’ve already determined who shares the most on Facebook and Twitter. But, in many cases, the people who really influence traffic and conversion on your site are the bloggers. One of our clients launched a social media contest and found that one blogger alone shared the contest with thousands of people and directly drove 42% of all traffic to the contest page.

To find and activate the people who are truly passionate about your products, services, or sector, you’ve got to carefully monitor the blogosphere, message boards, and forums. Once you’ve used analytics tools to find exactly which individuals are driving the most traffic to your campaign sites, you need to reach out to these people individually. Treat them like the real VIPs they are. Let them know you appreciate their loyalty and interest in your products. We’ve found influencers appreciate your attention and kind words even more than exclusive promotions.

3. Differentiate the Influencers from the Super Influencers

Your top fans are so valuable they are worth the extra effort of some special attention. But, not all influencers are alike.

When you plot the influence of individuals, you’ll see a curve that looks a lot like the long tail distribution of search terms. Influence follows a “power law,” where a relatively small number of individuals influence the lion’s share of referrals. Those at the peak of this curve are the super influencers, and those in the tail are regular influencers. Super influencers have large, loyal followings and audiences who trust their insights. The latter are people who pass along info to friends and family from time to time via e-mail and Facebook.

Understanding these differences is key to crafting your influencer activation strategy. You need to interact with super influencers on a one-to-one basis, but you could target the rest of your influencers a bit more broadly.

For example, you will want to reach out directly to all your influencers by commenting on their blogs and syndicating their content via Twitter, Facebook, and your own blog. Thank them for their loyalty, and generally praise them. But, make sure to go the extra mile with your super influencers. Offer super influencers the opportunity to obtain and review your products before they hit the market, for example. Offer them after-hours shopping at your stores, a few free hours of your services, or invite them to a special VIP party. Be creative, and have fun. Remember, your super influencers, when treated right, can drive a huge percentage of your site’s overall traffic. Isn’t that worth throwing a party?

The Takeaway

Just identifying your key influencers is not enough in today’s market. Instead, you’ve got to find them and then motivate them to share. Over the long term, your goal as a marketer is to increase the size of your influencer base. By finding and engaging in a direct dialogue with your super influencers, you’ll get a clear idea of what motivates these brand ambassadors to share. Then, armed with that knowledge, you can begin reaching out to your influencers — and even your fans who never share — to offer the right kind of content and rewards to turn more “followers” into “sharers.”

Why the Best Online Marketing May Be Headed Offline

From Mashable:

The hyperlink is the fundamental building block of the Internet, and effectively ties reference points to useful content. Without the hyperlink, the web would be nothing more than silos of content lacking semantic connections.

Traditionally, hyperlinks live in browser windows on desktop monitors. Today, however, some hyperlinks are moving offline, where they can be “clicked” by people roaming the real world.

By printing a Quick Response (QR) bar code on any item — a lamp, the program booklet of an event, or a retail store window -– a consumer can quickly link from the real-world experience to rich web content via his smartphone. Using QR codes, jump points to the Internet can be placed anywhere in the physical world.

The ability to place a QR code on anything offers opportunities for businesses and consumers. These are a few examples of how a business can leverage QR codes and turn real-world “clicks” into sales:

• You have been looking for the perfect lamp for your living room for a long time. You see the perfect one — not in a furniture show room, but in a hotel lobby. At the base of a lamp is a QR code. You scan it with your phone, click a link to “buy it now,” and purchase the lamp on the spot.
• You drive across town to purchase a leather jacket from a fashion boutique. By the time you arrive, the store is closed. A retail window badge reads: “Sorry, we’re closed! Scan this code to buy online, and receive free shipping!” The free shipping offer is normally not available online, but since you made the trek, the store offers you a reward.
• You attend a musical and have a great time. Reviewing the Playbill at home, you encounter a QR code that you can scan to order tickets for the next musical at the venue. The tickets are offered at 40% off, and the offer is only good for seven days. With the offer laid perfectly in front of you, and positive memories of tonight’s musical fresh in your mind, you purchase the tickets.

Context-Sensitive Marketing

These examples illustrate the power of a new opportunity created by QR codes that we call context-sensitive marketing, or CSM.

Remember those impulse items in the supermarket checkout aisle? The savvy merchant, knowing you are likely to be hungry while food shopping, shows you quick fixes like a candy bar. CSM enables the same type of impulse buying, only this time, it’s “virtual impulse buying.” The idea behind CSM is to reach your customers when they are most likely to be interested in your product. With the knowledge of what context you’re in –- staring at furniture, attending a musical, or shopping for clothes — the ability to engage in virtual impulse buying is literally at your fingertips.

From the consumer’s standpoint, CSM is a convenience. Scanning a QR code is a deliberate act the consumer is choosing to take part in. On the other hand, GPS-triggered smartphone pop-ups are not part of the CSM playbook, because the consumer never opts-in (or out) of the content.

In addition to purchasing convenience, a real-world hyperlink can trigger multimedia or crowdsourced wisdom that can help you in a pinch. Imagine, for example, needing to re-thread the belts on a child’s car seat, but not having the manual in front of you to show you how. There is no need to Google () the product or scavenge through your file cabinet for the manual; just scan the QR code and have the manual or a how-to video appear right on your phone.

Is the Real World Ready for Contextual Links?

All of this technology may sound great, but is the world ready for QR codes? Changing consumer behavior is notoriously difficult. Will consumers find scanning items with their smartphones to be a natural and useful act?

Technologically, the convergence of three trends are equipping consumers with the tools to make QR code scanning seamless:

• The growth of wireless data transmissions through 3G+ and Wi-Fi;
• The ubiquity of Internet-connected mobile mini-computers, a.k.a. smartphones (equipped with GPS and high-definition cameras); and
• The emergence of data storage in the Internet cloud.

According to Nielsen, 51% of all Americans will be carrying smartphones by 2011. The number of QR codes in circulation is reported to increase significantly. QR reading apps are quick to launch, quick to scan and available on every smartphone operating system.

Behaviorally, the mass adoption of QR codes will depend most critically on the utility of what is behind the QR code. Businesses need to provide scan-worthy content that truly makes the lives of consumers better after taking the time — however short — to scan a QR code. To this end, businesses simply need to be creative. Provide a special offer to incentivize the scan or save time for the consumer by providing context-triggered helping hands.

As a final example, imagine discovering that the water dispenser on your home fridge isn’t working. You open the fridge and see the indicator light informing you that your water filter cartridge needs replacing. What do you do? Will you fire up your laptop and type into a Google search box the exact model of your water filter cartridge replacement, then hunt for the best deal online? That’s what I did last year. But with any luck, next time around, a QR code will be printed on the water filter with the prompt: “Scan me to reorder.” Grabbing my phone, I scan the code, pulling up a 15% manufacturer’s discount if I order the cartridge directly. I click to buy, knowing I saved time and money, which I can now spend on more worthwhile activities.

That is the power of context-sensitive marketing.

5 Reasons Web Marketers Fail With Viral Video Campaigns

From Social Times:

You’ve slaved away, put your blood and sweat into creating what you think is surely going to be one of the most popular online video campaigns of all time. You upload it to YouTube, you post it on your Facebook and tweet it to your friends and you wait. And then you wait some more. And some more. And you wonder to yourself, where did I go wrong? Why isn’t anybody watching my amazingly awesome viral video?

Unfortunately, this story is all too familiar to many online marketers and video creators. That’s why we’ve put together a list of five likely reasons why your online video campaign isn’t going viral. Hopefully this list will help you determine the problem, make adjustments or avoid creating a viral flop in the future.

Your Video Is Too Much Like A Commercial Ad

One of the biggest mistakes that advertisers and brands make when trying to market products online is that they create a video that reads as a commercial, rather than a story. When people watch videos online that look like advertisements they aren’t inclined to share these videos with their friends. People share videos that are funny, shocking or surprising. Therefore, rather than creating a commercial showcasing your product and how it works you should try to incorporate your product into something that is funny, fresh, original and doesn’t read as an advertisement.

Let’s look at Evian’s Roller Babies campaign as an example. The Roller Babies have got over 28 million views on YouTube. People know that it’s for Evian, as the video states at the beginning, “Let’s observe the effect of Evian on your body”. However, the true bulk of this video has almost nothing to do with Evian. It’s a video of babies roller skating and dancing.

Evian could have created a video in which they really educated consumers about the effects of Evian on your body—having people talk to the camera and provide facts and figures about what makes Evian so great. However, a video like that would be hard-pressed to get even a few thousand views.

Go back and look at your video. How many times do you show your product? How many times do you mention the name? Do you feel like you are watching a television commercial or like you are experiencing a funny or creative story? If it looks like a commercial ad that could be where you went wrong.

Your Campaign Is Unoriginal

There are literally hundreds of thousands of online video campaigns for consumers to watch at any given time so yours has to stand out. In the world of viral video, only the strong survive and to be strong you’ve got to be original. You want to blow people’s minds with new and interesting things they’ve never heard before, make them laugh like crazy, shock and awe or inspire your viewers with something that hasn’t been done before.

As an example, when Old Spice launched their Man Your Man Could Smell Like response campaign it received tons of attention and ultimately became the most popular web video campaign of all time. The reason this campaign was so successful (aside from the fact that it was run by Old Spice, a very well-known brand), was that it had never been done before. Many brands and people have tried to copy the Old Spice campaign since, from Cisco to politicians, but none have been able to repeat Old Spice’s success.

You Didn’t Spend Enough Time On Metadata

Another likely reason that nobody is watching your video is that you haven’t spent enough time on your metadata, or in other words, you haven’t written the best possible titles, tags and descriptions for your video. If you don’t write good metadata for your video then nobody will be able to find it when they are searching for videos in Google or on YouTube.

If you take the time to think about your metadata and utilize tools like the YouTube Keyword Suggestion Tool or guides like our own Complete Guide To YouTube Metadata to help you maximize your discoverability then you can make sure you won’t miss out on views just because people can’t find your videos anywhere. Trust us, if you put some time into coming up with great, popular keywords and phrases for your titles, descriptions and tags it will pay off.

You Aren’t Promoting It Right

A great video campaign on it’s own isn’t enough to go viral. You’ve got to promote it if you want people to find out about it. You can share your video with your own network via your Facebook and Twitter accounts, but unless you’ve got thousands of influential friends and followers then odds are this won’t be enough.

If you are promoting your video on your own then you should be doing everything you can to get your video out there and start getting views, from contacting influential bloggers to show them your video to posting it on your company blog or website, and asking everyone you know to share the video with their friends.

If you work for a big company or brand that has the budget for it then you may want to bring in an expert to help you market your campaign. However, if you bring in an outside promoter it’s important to ask them to see their previous work and how many views the video campaigns they have worked on in the past have gotten. After all, you want results!

Great Idea, Bad Execution

One possible reason that your video campaign didn’t go viral could be that you had a great idea but just didn’t do a good job of putting it together. Maybe your video failed on production quality, perhaps your actors were unattractive or not engaging. Perhaps you didn’t have a big enough budget to carry out your initial idea so you did the best you could.

Unfortunately, doing the “best you could” usually isn’t good enough in the world of viral video. For this reason you should come up with an idea that fits in your budget and then do everything you can to make it as good as possible. Don’t have money to pay professional actors? Put out a casting call for student actors who will work for free in order to get work for their reel. Need a video editor or graphic designer? Crowd source to find the best creatives for the lowest prices.

You should also ask your friends and co-workers for advice and suggestions along the way. Do they think that you are carrying out your idea to it’s fullest potential? If not, how do they think you can make it better?

Finally, if you’ve read through these five likely reasons that your online video campaign didn’t go viral and still don’t understand what happened then you just have to deal with the fact that tons of views just weren’t in the cards for this specific video. To some extent, the success of every viral campaign is based a little bit on luck and there is no avoiding that fact. Just come up with a new idea and try again. However, if you make sure to avoid the five common mistakes that were outlined here then you can greatly improve your odds of creating a video with viral potential. Good luck!

Top 5 Emerging Brand Trends on Facebook

From Mashable:


This series is supported by the Buddy Media Platform. Seven of the world’s top 10 brands drive their brand on Facebook with the Buddy Media Platform. What’s your plan? Visit buddymedia.com today.

Field of Dreams may have popularized the notion that, “If you build it, they will come,” but in today’s Facebook generation, brands are beginning to go where the masses are, instead of relying on the masses to come to them. With 500 million members, Facebook represents real-time access to the online mainstream.

For years, brands have been using their Facebook Pages to connect with customers. As Facebook blossoms, so does brand ingenuity, and in recent months we’ve seen a surge in campaigns that inspire Facebook giving, incorporate Facebook Places and feature Facebook as a prominent part of product reveals and fan exclusives. Application makers are also building tools that small and big brands alike can use to sell their products and offer Facebook-tailored customer support.

What follows is a deeper look at how and why these five emerging brand trends are bubbling up on the world’s largest social network.

In researching this piece, we solicited input from Facebook, several app makers and even our own Twitter followers. We encourage you to use the comments to share your thoughts on these brand trends on Facebook, as well as other trends we may have overlooked.

1. Facebook Exclusive

Risk-taker brands and agencies are adapting their product release cycles and marketing campaigns to account for the opportunity that Facebook’s platform promises.

Big brand names including Ford and Nike are going so far as to release on Facebook first. In Nike’s case, the athletic wear company opted to debut its three-minute World Cup () advertisement on their Facebook Page before they released it anywhere else. The ad then went on to break viral records.

You also probably recall Ford’s ambitious 2011 Ford Explorer Reveal. The car maker decided to forgo the auto show and reveal its new car on the web, with Facebook as the centerpiece of the company’s online reveal strategy.

The campaign proved to be more successful than anticipated. On reveal day, Ford produced the number one trending topic on Twitter in the U.S.; the Explorer was the number two most searched for term on Google; Ford’s YouTube reveal video garnered 11,000 views; more than 50,000 Ford Explorer Facebook “Likes” flooded in; and, perhaps best of all, 25,000 potential car buyers built and priced new Explorers on the company’s website.

Other brands including Vitamin Water and Papa John’s have handed over new product creation to Facebook fans.

Vitamin Water cooked up the “flavor creator lab” and invited Facebook users to dream up a new flavor and label design for the company’s next flavor release. Sarah, a Facebook member from Illinois, won the $5,000 grand prize for her help in bringing Vitamin Water Connect to life.

Papa John’s used Facebook to host the Papa’s Specialty Pizza Challenge. Pizza fans were encouraged to mastermind the chain’s next great specialty pizza recipe using an application custom built for the purpose. Of the more than 12,000 entries, three Facebook finalists were chosen — Blair Dial, Barbara Hyman and Kendra Chapman — and their pizza creations were featured as a part of Papa John’s menu during the month of August.

VEVO is exploring its own Facebook-exclusive opportunities, as well. The service recently launched an original web series, dubbed “ASK:REPLY,” designed to connect Facebook fans to big name artists. VEVO uses its Facebook Page to ask fans what they want to know about a top notch artist. Fans respond, and VEVO posts the artist’s video response.

“One of VEVO’s core strengths is our access to many of the world’s top artists. We’re able to let fans share in that access and peek behind the curtain with concepts like ASK:REPLY. Fans seem to get a huge kick out of watching their favorite artists call out their names and directly answer their questions. Plus, the fans come up with much better interview questions than we do,” says VEVO General Manager, Fred Santarpia.

2. Facebook Places Experimentation

The Facebook Places location product is just weeks old, but because Facebook’s checkin features integrate so tightly with the entire Facebook experience, Facebook Places is a business opportunity in the making.

One early adopter is the Westfield Valley Fair mall. The business is offering a checkin special to its Facebook members who promote their shopping behaviors through Facebook Places. The special in question offers a coupon — powered by Fan Appz — for 15% off at Betsey Johnson in exchange for a checkin. The special may resemble the variety we’ve seen on Foursquare, but it’s still an ingenious effort to turn Facebook fans into offline buyers.

Social marketing software provider Context Optional is exploring how they can serve burgeoning brand interest in Facebook’s location offering.

“Marketers have been struggling with making global brands local. Brands that have been early to the game with Foursquare, Loopt and other location-based services are now realizing that Facebook — with its population of 500 million plus — offers an invaluable marketing opportunity in the form of Places,” explains Context Optional CEO Kevin Barenblat.

To meet demand, the social CRM company released the Facebook Places Check-in Leaderboard application (as seen in action on their Facebook Page). The application is designed to help brands create their own personalized ranking system for their Facebook Place Pages. Once installed, guests who check in will have the chance to claim ownership — a feature obviously inspired by Foursquare’s mayor system. With Context Optional’s leaderboard solution, a brand can then reward top fans, based on checkins, with special deals and offers.

3. Facebook Commerce

Facebook’s brand-friendly Pages () are proving to be more than just wall-centric places for fan and brand comments and photos. Businesses of all sizes are finding that they can make their page double as a store front, and in so doing sell their products and goods to window-wall-shopping Facebook users.

Huge corporate entities like Disney and Delta are in the business of selling on Facebook. Disney, for instance, built the Disney Tickets Together Facebook application so that fans could pre-order tickets to Toy Story 3 without leaving the social network.

Even more traditional businesses are anxious to hook customers and get them to book through Facebook. Delta Air Lines released the Delta Ticket Window Facebook application in August to do just that — sell plane flights to patrons without ever forcing them to leave Facebook.

Alvenda is the application maker behind Delta’s Ticket Window. They also help power the Facebook commerce experiences for 1-800-Flowers, Brooks Brothers, Mark by Avon, and Hallmark.

The big guys aren’t the only businesses capitalizing on Facebook’s sales-friendly platform. Small businesses are enlisting the likes of Wildfire and Payvment to help them create and manage their own Facebook store fronts and deal centers.

With so many sales opportunities out there, some brands are finding that Facebook is fast becoming a shopper’s paradise and the new mall of America (and the world).

4. Facebook Support Centers

Social media has long been touted as a vehicle for brands to provide better customer service. The challenge is that so many customers are social media savvy, which means complaints and requests can get lost in the fray.

Once, a brand’s Facebook Page was a less trafficked place for a customer to get one-on-one service. Today, customers are lucky if their comment is ever seen. The customer still has the expectation of personalized service on Facebook, which makes it the brand’s responsibility to find a customer service solution that scales.

In recent months, Get Satisfaction () and Parature have stepped in to help businesses tackle this new challenge. Both companies are reporting rapid adoption for their inside-Facebook customer service platforms.

Get Satisfaction’s Social Engagement Hub, built by Involver, extends the functionality of its popular customer support service to Facebook and offers full-featured support that integrates with the client’s existing dashboard.

“Get Satisfaction has 122 clients using the Facebook integration, reaching an aggregate of hundreds of thousands of users and fans,” reports a spokesperson for the company.

Parature is a bit newer to the space, but the Parature for Facebook customer service application is already getting traction from brands hoping to channel Facebook for direct customer engagement. Recently, the company announced that 25 clients have signed on since launch to purchase Parature for Facebook. A company representative details that some of those brand names include H&M, Konami and Rosetta Stone.

5. Facebook Giving

Even for-profit businesses have an interest in the greater good, and one of the bigger trends is for them to solicit fan action on Facebook to ensure their charitable causes get greater exposure. The social good trend obviously extends beyond Facebook and to social media sites in general, but Facebook Pages and “Like” buttons are doing their part to inspire collective action.

Last year, Target launched the “Bullseye Games” Facebook application and let fans choose where the discount retailer should spend its weekly $3 million charitable contributions.

More recently, Kohl’s started the Kohl’s Cares Facebook initiative to give away $10 million to 20 schools; nearly 2 million Facebookers voted for their schools. Chase also gravitated towards Facebook to distribute $5 million to charities through the Chase Community Giving campaign.

In furtherance of the donation by action concept, Yahoo enlisted Facebook for a massive charitable undertaking designed to raise funds for Stand Up To Cancer earlier this month. Yahoo pledged $1 for every “Like” to their OMG! Facebook Page. In just nine days, Yahoo surpassed their goal, attracting more than 112,000 “Likes” and committing $100,000 to help fight cancer.

What “Like” Buttons Mean for Web Traffic

From Mashable:


The new-this-year, yet somehow-already-ubiquitous Facebook Like button has been around just long enough to generate some interesting numbers relating to Facebook users and web traffic.

The button, which launched in April at f8, Facebook’s developer conference, is now present on roughly 2 million sites around the web, from sports sites to news organizations and many other kinds of publishers.

A media analytics lead on Facebook’s Developer Network Insights team crunched some numbers and found that Facebook Likes don’t just generate interesting data about the “likers” (a.k.a. Facebook users who are also active on your website) themselves; this data also speaks volumes about clickthrough rates, time on-site and other engagement metrics.

Stats About People

On average, a Facebook user who “likes” your content has more than double the number of friends than does a typical Facebook user. This could mean the user is more “social” or more influential, but on the other hand, it could mean the user is an attention-seeking narcissist. While it’s fatuous to read too much into that statistic, the number does show that the average “liker” is more active from a social-web standpoint.

An even more interesting stat about the likers is that they click on five times more links to external sites than the typical Facebook user. If clickthroughs are what you’re looking for from your social media strategy, this is good news.

Here’s a stat just for news sites: The average Facebook user who “likes” content on a news website is 34 — that’s about two decades younger than the average newspaper subscriber. We’ve known for some time that the future of journalism and social media are, at this point, inextricably linked; this stat provides a little hard evidence for that conclusion.

Stats About Traffic

Most website owners are aware that Twitter refers a ton of traffic. It’s meant to be a content-referral network, so link-sharing and clickthroughs are a given in many cases.

The Facebook “Like” button, however, might be bringing Facebook closer to competing with Twitter in the area of referral traffic. Since the button launched and was integrated on millions of sites, many publishers are reporting large increases in traffic specifically due to this kind of social plugin. ABC News reported a 190% increase; Gawker’s traffic shot up by 200%; Sporting News said their site traffic was up by a shocking 500%; and NBA.com said that Facebook had become their second-largest referral source.

Facebook relays messages from publishers saying that these users “are more engaged and stay longer when their real identity and real friends are driving the experience through social plugins.” As an example, NHL.com reported that pages per user was up by 92%, time on-site was up by 85%, video viewing increased by 86% more videos and overall visits went up by 36%.

Clearly, Facebook is only part of social media referral traffic, but it’s becoming a larger part as the network grows and users become accustomed to interacting with third-party and external content from within the comfort of their social graph.