This weekend marks the beginning of summer but where I grew up (California) the school year didn’t end until mid-June so this week’s Facebook Friday looks a bit like a homework assignment. Facebook has evolved rapidly over the past six years of existence and so has it’s significance in everything from communications to government to people’s relationships. I’ve started a list of phrases to answer the question “What is Facebook?” and would like your help adding to it in the comments.

Facebook is…

• A place friends and family are connecting and sharing
• Strangers building new communities around shared passions
• A marketplace and a playground for exchanging goods and games
• People are talking to brands and about brands
• A resource for new information and content
• The portal to an online identity and social life

Have a great weekend!

The World Cup, the biggest sporting event in the world, is quickly approaching. Starting June 11^th, 32 teams representing different countries from around the world will compete for the soccer title that has been given every four years since 1930 (with an exception of 1942 and 1946 due to WWII). But 2010 is a particularly special and relevant year. Why, you ask? Because of social media!

Social Media as we know it did not exist during the 2006 World Cup in Germany. Twitter did not launch until July 2006. Facebook didn’t become public until September 2006. YouTube existed but videos looked like this #6 most popular YouTube video of 2006. Now, only 4 years later, Facebook has over 400 million members and more than 50 million tweets are sent each day. These platforms, which were infants during the last World Cup, are now globally available and hugely popular.

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We are very excited to announce that we are a proud sponsor and participant of an upcoming virtual conference brought to you by our friends at PRWeek next week. With new applications and social media tools emerging every day, staying up to date on the latest trends in social media innovation is critical to our business as PR professionals.

The PRWeek Lab will take place Wednesday, June 2 and Thursday, June 3, 2010 and will provide an online resource for PR professionals on the most recent social media trends, tools, and strategies, thought leadership, and case studies- all without leaving one’s office. The online platform includes live webcast sessions, keynote speakers (such as Jeffrey Hayzlett, CMO of Kodak and Ben Edwards, VP of Digital Strategy and Development, IBM), as well as exhibitor booth environments for follow-up questions, live chats, and material downloads. PRWeek Lab will be a fully interactive experience, with Q&A throughout, as well as polling of all participants on the quality of the content and the future of social media. No other PR event will bring you closer to the action that is driving today’s social media innovation.  Please visit here for additional details.

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Day one at the WOMMA School of WOM, and a key theme has already emerged … Advocacy.

It’s on the tips of everyone’s tongues - mentioned in every session yesterday.  What I took away …

• Advocacy is a marathon, not a sprint.  Takes true commitment.
• Scaling advocacy efforts are crucial to driving sustained WOM.
  
• Share everything that’s great about your organization (and even, in certain circumstances, what’s not so great) - the honesty and transparency will engender trust.
• You gain vocal advocates by focusing on people’s hearts/minds versus their eyeballs/ears.
• Desire + Direction = Change (per Dan Heath).  The path to success is to stir up that emotional desire ->  give people clear motivation to advocate on your behalf -> make the behavior visible to make it contagious.
  

Let’s see what day two brings …

Last week was chock full of announcements that changed the landscape in the ever-evolving partnership between brands, social networks, and game developers.
A few of the more intriguing story lines were:

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Getting jazzed for the WOMMA School of WOM confab in Chicago (my hometown) on May 24-26.  A few thoughts and tips …

Sessions

The conference is packed with great sessions.  I’m seriously impressed.  A few I’m personally keen to catch …

• Jeffrey Hayzlett of Kodak speaks on Monday from 2pm-3pm.  You might know that Hayzlett recently announced he’s leaving Kodak, which could make for a very candid session.
• Also on Monday (4:30pm-5:15pm) , Pete Blackshaw and John Stieger lead a session on P&G’s customer relations efforts as a spark for WOM.  I’ve never met Blackshaw, and am looking forward to doing so.
• On Tuesday morning, Sarah Hofstetter and Roberto Mastracola deliver a case study on Coke Zero.  When Coke speaks, I listen.
• The Tuesday keynote is from Andrew Mason, CEO of Groupon.  These guys are darlings of the Chicago scene.  Very eager to hear what he has to say.
• Ogilvy’s very own Kaitlyn Wilkins will join Ford’s Marisa Bradley on Tuesday to talk about building a more social Ford Motor Company.  This is a topic near and dear to my heart; and knowing how passionate Kaitlyn is about her Ford work, I’m sure it’ll be a great discussion.
• Jason Anello of Yahoo will lead a session called “How 20 Purple Bikes Generated 20 Million Impressions.”  I’m a big Y! fan, and I’m really looking forward to hearing Jason deliver an overview of this program.

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Join me and others today for a teleconference produced by Bulldog reporter. The full title is: New FTC, FDA and SEC Social Media Rules: How to Manage Web 2.0 in Regulated Industries.

We will be sharing the latest status on both FTC (can you say ‘Ann Taylor?’) and the FDA’s road towards guidelines (how many pharmas submitted comments to the FDA?) and more importantly, how we are applying best-practice guidelines in our work here at Ogilvy. Real-world application.

You can get more information and register here.

The teleconference starts at 1:00pm ET Today

Image via Static416

Do you love social media, marketing and PR?  Do you love to read and discuss ideas with other marketing professionals?  If so, the brand new 360DI Book Club is for you.

After our recent team retreat, I was inspired by all the great book suggestions and not only do I want to read them, but discuss and analyze them with other smart folks like you!  Luckily, plenty of my teammates agreed,  so the 360DI Book Club was born.   We will discuss a new book on the second Tuesday of  each month from 6:30-8pm Eastern Time via the hashtag #DIbooks.  The books will be about social media, marketing or business and will be voted on by the readers of the Fresh Influences Blog each month.  If you have a book suggestion, please shoot me a DM via twitter (@SarahMarchetti) or comment on a book club post.  I’ll pick four choices out of the suggestions and have everyone vote on them.

The first 360DI Book Club is on June 8,2010 at 6:30pm, four weeks from today. Since this is our first meeting, I’ll pick the book.  We’ll be reading Influence: the Psychology of Persuasion by Robert B. Cialdini, Ph.D.  This book comes highly recommended by John Bell and is about the psychological fundamentals of persuading someone, be that in a marketing, sales or personal context.  We’ll be looking at the book as it applies to our work in social media and word of mouth marketing.  Please read the book and leave any questions you’d like to discuss in the comment stream below.   Hope you’ll join us for the discussion in 4 weeks.   Happy Reading!

There has been no shortage of dialog over the privacy concerns with Facebook’s recent announcements to make any site “Instantly Social”. What this means is that Facebook is opening up much of the common wall type functionality to anyone who runs a site. The same way you can “Like” something your brother shares on Facebook is now able to be deployed on brand sites. According to the Facebook developers blog it has already been deployed on 100k sites.

While this simple feature sounds fairly innocuous it stores this connection of what you like to your profile. The idea is that it will allow Facebook to better monetize its platform by delivering extremely targeted advertising based on what you like and who you are connected to. The user benefits have not been as clearly expressed by Facebook. To me the benefits are about increasing relevance in a very noisy world that has become social media.

Ok, so what’s new. Aren’t they already doing this with their ads? Yes they do this already within the walls of the Facebook experience but now this same data can be used on external sites. How you ask? Have you ever used your Facebook profile to log in to a site? This will now take on a whole new meaning since they also lifted their previous policy of only allowing a brand to cache personal information from 24 hours to indefinite.

Besides lowering the friction of a log in process and seeing that 3 friends “liked” the same article might not be enough to avoid users skepticism.

The uber strategy is Facebook’s open graph. The open graph  is truly transformational for combining interest networks, and allowing new context to be created based on a persons digital trail. The simple idea is that the open graph will aggregate and integrate personal interest across social and media networks.  So if you like a band and a restaurant why keep these two interest mutually exclusive. Finding the intersection across social graphs can uncover a wealth of behaviorial/attiudinal never available in the history of marketing. This too has people up in arms.

Take the example of Pandora. They were one of the first to integrate the open graph into their music player. The use case here is simple; when a song from Radiohead comes on you can see that someone in your network also likes it.  No big deal most would say. The issue that many I have spoken have is that they simply did not know this information was being shared and if it is being shared here where else is it?

The new open graph API is an extremely simple interface to access data from. All you have to do it go to Http://graph.facebook.com and use some simple search logic and you can get access to almost anything that is public ranging from recent wall post, likes and events attending and the connections between them (e.g., friend relationships, shared content, and photo tags).

We have entered a new frontier when planning experiences that can deliver high levels of relevance based on consumers intent, interest and connections. But brands should be open with what is being collected and how it will be used.

Nate Ralph of Wired was on to something when he wrote in a 2008 article, “…there’s a largely untapped market that enjoys having fun, but can’t be bothered with system requirements or even plugging something into their TV.”

With Zynga, creator of FarmVille, recently valued at $4 billion dollars and established game companies such as Electronic Arts jumping on board, games are becoming a legitimate interactive social channel for the masses.

Why Would Your Brand Consider Partnering With A Social Game?

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