Interactive Marketing Sans-Fluffery

Have you noticed how sharing a link on Facebook will display a thumbnail and description?

Or, have you taken the time to look at your friend’s interests?

And have you wondered “How can I customize the thumbnails and descriptions for my links?” The answer is Facebook’s Open Graph. With Open Graph, you can put HTML meta tags on your page that supply this information to Facebook. When somebody “likes” or shares your page, Facebook will pick up the information you supplied via Open Graph.

For example, suppose you are managing a site for Aloha BBQ, Smooth Fusion’s favorite caterer of fine Hawaiian cuisine. You can use the og:type property and classify the site as a “restaurant.” You should also use the og:image property to point to a thumbnail of a hot plate of BBQ. Next, you could add a Facebook like button to the site’s home page. When you are done, fans that click the like button will have the BBQ photo show up in their list of favorite restaurants. Facebook users who send other users messages with a link to the Aloha BBQ site via Facebook will also see the BBQ photo (see screenshot above).

In the same way you identify a photo, you could identify a video.

You can classify you site content in any way you need. However, Facebook has a list of recommended object types that you should try to use first. When you use the recommended object types, Facebook will know to put the info where it is most relevant.

Adding Open Graph meta tags to your website is usually easy and will help your users share your website’s content with other users on Facebook. And, of course, if you need assistance or have questions, that is why we at Smooth Fusion are here.

Traditional Search Engine Optimization (SEO) isn’t good enough anymore. Today’s digital marketer must think beyond SEO. There are new techniques which now allow developers to link data on a page such that it can be understood, formatted, and reused. As a marketer trying to share information with the world, this is a good thing.

Let’s take a look at search results from Bing and Google for Aloha BBQ, a Lubbock, Texas eatery that caters ~80% of Smooth Fusion events.

Bing:

Google:

Organic search results are no longer just lists of page titles, descriptions and URLs. Search results are enhanced with maps, ratings, photos, contact information, and all kinds of goodies. The question is “How do I get search results for my site to display neat stuff like this?” The answer is Microformats.

Microformats are simply standardized formats for HTML that allow you to add context to existing information on a web site. In other words, you can use the technology that already exists on your site, but just tweak the formatting to allow search engines and information aggregators (e.g. TasteSpotting) to pick up on the data and format it in their results. Google calls this technique rich snippets.

There are lots of microformats to choose from. For example, hCard is a microformat used for contact information. Markup your contact us page with hCard so that your address and phone number get mapped like Aloha BBQ above. If your site has events, use hCalendar so that search engines and other event sites can pick up on it.

At microformats.org you can find peruse a full list of useful microformats. Check out hReview for reviews, hAtom for news articles, hRecipe for recipes, and hProduct for products.

Microformats aren’t just nice for search. Users can use browser plugins like Operator to do neat things with linked data like add hCalendar events to a personal calendar, or add hCard contacts to a personal address book.

Microformats come with a small caveat. When you link your data with microformats, there is no guarantee that Google or Bing will format it like you specify. But nevertheless, you should mark your site up with microformats where possible. Doing so is usually easy and can result in big gains for visibility of your content across the web.

Historically, tracking users’ behavior on Facebook tabs has been tough if not impossible. Google Analytics and other stat tracking platforms did not work with Facebook’s tab publishing platform, Facebook Markup Language (FBML). Recently, Facebook changed tabs from FBML to iFrames, allowing new possibilities for tracking.

Because I'm such a fan of Google Analytics, I'm going to give you a few ideas for interesting and helpful metrics you can now gather on Facebook. Keep in mind that Google Analytics works the same as most other metrics gathering platforms. While we at Smooth Fusion have not tested these methods with other tracking packages, they should in theory apply in the same way.

Although rudimentary metrics gathering is already available through Facebook’s Insights feature, Google Analytics provides more in-depth information. Three incredibly useful opportunities that are now available are:

• Enhanced “share” tracking
• User interaction tracking
• Audience tracking

Enhanced “Share” Tracking

Insights provides basic statistics such as number of active users and the number of times application content was shared, but only on Facebook.

Google Analytics allows you to perform Event Tracking. Event Tracking can be a variety of things, but we like to use it for tracking clicks and mouseovers. For example, we might use Event Tracking to track sharing to any social network. When someone clicks a Share link for Facebook, Twitter, or anything else, we can track it in Google Analytics.

User Interaction Tracking

Google Analytics’ Event Tracking is also used to track clicks on links or buttons and in this case, you can track clicks within the application. For example, we recently created a Facebook tab that displays products in a carousel. When users click the products, they are displayed above the carousel. In this scenario, Event Tracking could be used to determine how many times each of those products was clicked. This would equip marketers with the ability to know which of their products were most popular among Facebook users.

Audience Tracking

Sometimes you want to categorize your metrics by audience. Let's say, for example, that you manage a university website. The site has several target audiences such as prospective students, current students, and alumni. You could infer which audience the user fits into based on what actions they take on the site. For example, you could conclude that someone clicking the "Enroll Now" button is a prospective student. Google Analytics allows you to define audiences and track metrics per audience with Visitor Level, Custom Variable tracking.

In the same way, we can now track audiences on Facebook applications. We recently built a Facebook tab application that allowed users to take a quiz. The quiz had certain questions that indicated the user's audience type (e.g. "Are you a new or existing customer?") We could use Custom Variable tracking to report this information to Google Analytics and the resulting reports would tell us something like 23% of people who use this application are new customers.

Metric tracking packages like Google Analytics have, for a long time, given us ways to improve user experiences and gather business information from traditional websites. Now those same benefits are available on Facebook applications.

Google recently introduced the WebFinger protocol and enabled it for all Gmail account.

What is WebFinger?

WebFinger is a protocol that can be used to attach public profile information to an email address. Engineers have been fumbling around with ways to standardize the way profile information is shared for years. Remember OpenID? Or Facebook Connect? Many of these products have major shortcomings. With OpenID, users have to remember a provider URL and yet another account login. With Facebook Connect, we're at the mercy of Facebook with regards to how data is handled.

The interesting thing about WebFinger, is that information can be attached to an email address. Email is required for just about anything you do on the web so it makes sense that data about a profile should be attached to it.

WebFinger is about making already public information more easily discoverable, not uncovering private data.While a WebFinger profile may have information about the location of a user's Facebook profile, it won't contain data secured by Facebook.

What kind of profile data can you get from WebFinger?

WebFinger can support all kinds of data. Really, just about anything digital can in some way or another be added to a WebFinger profile. WebFinger data is delivered as XML and can include references to the source of the data, not just a copy of it. For example, if you have a public profile somewhere, and WebFinger knows about it, WebFinger would just display the URL to that public profile, not a copy of the data in it.

Google's implementation of WebFinger publishes user hCards, OpenID provider, Google public profile info, and other neat stuff.

What can marketers do with this?

What might be of obvious use is the amount of data that could be pulled down about a user. The data is public already, so there should be no problems with discovering and analyzing the data.

I think the more interesting application will be with the convenience the data can provide for users. For example, imagine a form where you want to gather a user's contact information. The form could be built so that as soon as the user enters an email address, WebFinger is used to prepopulate the form with the user's contact information.

What can be done today?

Obviously, this is still an emerging technology. However, the protocol is open and ready for experimentation. One idea is to create forms that enable WebFinger capabilities for Gmail users. Or, your organization could host your own WebFinger server to link public data about your employees. We'd love to hear from anybody building practical applications for WebFinger.

By now, you've probably heard of invite only, Google Wave.To appreciate all the new stuff packed into Google Wave, you should watch this very long video or this very short video below:

The best part about Wave is that it isn't just a Google only toy. Wave is a protocol designed such that eventually, anyone will be able to create their own Wave server. The protocol is specifically referred to as a "federation protocol" which means that Wave servers will be able to talk to each other. Eventually, Wave, or something like it, will replace email. We won't send emails, we'll start or respond to waves. However, this post isn't about future IT predictions.

Before I continue, I want to remind you about what email can do: send and receive text and attachments. Got it? 

Wave Robots

Today, I want to introduce you to the concept of Wave Gadgets and Wave Robots. First, a definition of Robots (aka: bots) from Wave Robot API documentation:

A robot is an automated participant on a wave. A robot can read the contents of a wave in which it participates, modify the wave's contents, add or remove participants, and create new blips and new waves. In short, a robot can perform many of the actions that any other participant can perform.

You can use a robot to perform actions such as the following:

• modify information in a wave
• interact with participants in a wave
• communicate and synchronize information in a wave to the outside world or to other waves
• access or modify state in a third-party (such as a database)

Here's an example. Let's say you want to tweet and view tweets from within a wave. Just create a wave, then add the Tweety Bot to the conversation (tweety-wave@appspot.com). This bot is an application that could be hosted anywhere. In this case it is hosted by Google. After the bot is added to the conversation, it first displays a Twitter login screen directly within the wave. Let's pause for reflection...

Remember before, when we discussed what email can do? Send and receive text and attachments. Got it?

After you log in with Twitter, directly from within your wave, you can send a receive Tweets inside the wave. See this post for screenshots.

Another sample bot comes from Amazon. The bot scans your wave text and converts it to Amazon links and buttons where applicable. Check out the demo.

Wave Gadgets

Now, about gadgets. From the Wave Gadget API documentation:

Wave gadgets typically aren't full blown applications, but small add-ons that improve certain types of conversations. For example, a wave might include a gadget that lets wave participants vote on where to go to lunch.

Wave can handle existing gadgets. But, creating Wave specific gadgets allows you to access things like user information and better handle wave playback.

Remember back in early 2009, when people used this archaic concept called "email"? Back then, if you wanted to conduct a poll, you had to send around the "email" which would contain links to a 3rd party site that users could interact with to cast their vote. Incredible right? Neanderthals...

With wave, you could use a polling gadget and embed it straight into the wave. Users participating in the wave vote right then, without leaving.

Marketers

Your head is probably now swimming with ideas for bots and gadgets. If not, here's one idea to get you kickstarted. Bob's Pizza has a bot that listens to wave participant's conversation about favorite pizza ingredients and disliked pizza ingredients. The bot produces the ideal order for the pizza party and provides buttons to automatically call in the order and have the pizza delivered. The bot might even display special offers or topping ideas based on the conversation.

Or Tom's Electronics wants to send out coupons to the launch of a new store. Instead of just firing off coupons in email, he sends out waves with an embedded, puzzle gadget. The puzzle gadget requires multiple participants to solve. Wavers add participants to their wave to help solve the puzzle. After the puzzle is solved, all the wave participants get the coupon. The net effect is that more people get the coupon and users engage with the brand in a fun, social way.

When?

Although the Wave protocol is federated, it hasn't yet surpassed email in adoption. Wave may never replace email completely, and even if it does, it will likely be a decade before it does.

However, Wave is already very popular and used by millions. If you are trying to market something to an early adoption type crowd, this platform seems ready to go.

Twitter recently baked in retweet functionality into their core service. Here are the notable changes:

• Retweets now display with the original twit's profile, not the retweeter's profile.
• Twits can just click a button to retweet instead of typing "RT @username"
• Retweets show retweet stats including who else has retweeted the tweet
• The API has a new method to accomodate retweeting programmatically
• The API has a new method that displays all the retweets for a given tweet.
• Twitter now has pages for "Retweets by others", "Retweets by you", and "Your tweets, retweeted"

Razorfish surveyed 1,000 U.S. consumers to cull information about the way people interact with digital branding efforts. Read the full survey here and Razorfish’s analysis here.

I found a few of these findings of particular interest to marketers. The bottom line is that digital branding, specifically through social media, is very effective. But you need to entice users with freebies to get them to participate. Here are the lessons to be learned, sans-fluffery.

Digital sweepstakes are no joke… you should use them (#21). Digital sweepstakes lead to brand awareness and the coveted WOM (word of mouth) (#21).

Most people don’t spend time producing content (like a video or essay) for a contest (#23). But when they do, the results are a WOM goldmine (#24).

Most people don’t follow brands on Twitter (#25). But when they do, they recommend the brand to all their buddies (#26). Why do people follow brands on Twitter? Because of the deals and offers (#27).

A healthy group of people will friend a brand on Facebook or MySpace (#28). And when they do, good things happen (#29). Why do people friend a brand? Because of the deals (#30)! Do you sense a theme?

Digital branding is effective (#32, #17, and #18), so use it. And don’t forget to use sweepstakes, giveaways, deals, offers, or freebies in general.