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In a recent Washington Post article, Polarized News Market has Altered the Political Process in South Carolina Primary, we peak into the news consumption habits of a South Carolina voter. Two election cycles ago the South Carolina native would read newspaper for political news, now she “settles in at her desktop to fire up Facebook.”

“Selective Exposure”, described by researchers from UCLA and Stanford suggests to that consumers are “tucking themselves inside information silos” and that this is compounded by the speed and like-mindedness of social networking.

New research from Facebook suggests that - despite what many instinctively believe - social networks actually expose us to new, novel ideas and information rather than polarize us. While politics indeed may be more polarizing than ever, social networks like Facebook actually perform the opposite effect. According to a massive experiment, rather than polarize us, Facebook brings us together.

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The beginning of any good social media strategy is rooted in research. Before any brand or organization decides to embark online or move forward with a new idea, it’s essential to understand what’s already out there. Who is the audience and how and where are they already talking?

Looking at the stats, the “where” will almost always include Facebook. Though it may not be the primary platform to meet every organization’s objectives, the truth is that Facebook is the behemoth. It’s the largest social network in the world, with 155 million users in the United States alone, an audience that spans all ages and demographics, visits the site multiple times a day and shares billions of pieces of content . That’s not to be ignored.

Too easily though, Facebook, the giant, can be overlooked. The majority of Facebook’s content is private, which means listening tools, such as Radian6, cannot access all of the information. Since these tools can only pull in public status updates from Facebook users who keep their privacy settings open to the web, results frequently show little conversation from the major platform. The findings skew more towards platforms such as Twitter, where more users keep a public account. continue reading

Black Friday and Cyber Monday have become synonymous with big deals… and holiday season chaos. In fact, some say that the name ‘Black Friday’ first originated in Philadelphia where it was used to describe the disruptive traffic that occurred the day after Thanksgiving. Others say it was named for the point at which retailers begin to turn a profit, otherwise known as ‘in the black’ because most retailers during the year were ‘in the red’ (ie. using red pens on their balance sheets).

Anyway you slice it, given the history of disruptive traffic (and potential in-store madness), the online and mobile shopping holiday experience is looking even more appealing as offline purchases continue to migrate online with online shopping statistics demonstrating that 71% of all U.S. adults now shop on the Internet. So, for those looking for Cyber Monday Deals, brands and social media networks are raising the bar.

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We’re all rightly impressed with social media when it activates communities to engage with a brand — when it does its job. We’re even more pleased when that community uses our social channels to lift that brand to a new level, even boost sales and profits.

I’d suggest that there’s an even greater accomplishment for social media, one that our integrated, cross-regional Ogilvy team recently saw in action. At the Opportunity Nation Summit in New York, a broad coalition of activists spent two days crowdsourcing solutions for our country’s joblessness and faltering education system. Some of the biggest names in business, media, policy and entertainment came together: Arianna Huffington, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, CNN’s Dr. Fareed Zakaria, financial guru Suze Orman, Pastor Rick Warren, hip-hop entrepreneur Russell Simmons, tennis star Serena Williams, and several business icons lent their voices at this critical moment for our country, sharing ideas and making solid commitments.

With a combination Atlanta/DC/NY/Chicago Ogilvy team at the controls and global CEO Chris Graves leading the charge, we produced an event livestream from the stage at Columbia University, live celebrity interviews from our Conversation Room, and liveblogging and tweets from Ogilvy content creators, making the conversation a worldwide talking point. And an innovative new Opportunity Index was unveiled. It was social media for a special cause, playing a crucial part in the effort, and it was an honor to be a part of it.

The conversation was built on the foundation of our New York and Washington DC offices’ remarkable work for Opportunity Nation’s new brand identity and website. We spent a month seeding conversations throughout the social web and promoting the stage and livestream events. Then, at Friday’s summit, the conversation really took off. We invite you to take a look at the video interviews, Facebook activity, and follow the continuing conversation (#oppsummit).

It is remarkable how strongly Facebook’s periodic interface changes inevitably awaken users’ passions, particularly because the company’s product design has always exhibited great aesthetic restraint. This is a clear testament to the platform’s exceptional power to engage users. The latest batch of design updates, undertaken partly in response to the new challenge posed by Google+, were no exception and have met with the usual chorus of fan departure threats.

But, from a design quality stand point, are the recent changes all that bad?

The answer is, they are mostly positive: the new Facebook Timeline, inspired by famed infographics designer Nicholas Felton feels like one of those epochal moves that open up entire new horizons and ways for people to engage with one another. Some other updates, like the new friends’ activity column (aka the Ticker) seem tactical and reactive, if not downright redundant.

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Last week, Google+ announced changes 91-107 for the platform many of which are strong indicators of a site that is listening to its users and thinking thoughtfully about use cases. Unfortunately for a fledgling social media site, the very next day at f8, Facebook shared its latest and greatest rollouts with developers and the public.

Amid Andy Sandberg appearances, Spotify integration, and a sweeping UI change called Timeline (all of which are well recapped by my colleague, John Stauffer, in his post), it was tough for Google+’s more functional changes to stand out in conversation.

In fact, if you look at online conversation about the two, Facebook conversation eclipses Google+ conversation ten to one the last two weeks.

Volume of Social Media Conversation about Facebook and Google+ from 9/14/11-9/28/11

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image by John Moore a.k.a. @BrandAutopsy

On a panel last week for a WOMMA event at Chicago’s Social Media Week, I had the pleasure of sitting with Keller Fay’s Ed Keller, Brains on Fire’s Robbin Phillips, and Social Media Today’s Robin Carey to discuss social media measurement under the heading of “Is WOM worth it?”.  In the context of that discussion, I talked about the siren song of social media counting (vs. measurement) and the trap that we too-frequently see: social media “cases” that end by rattling off 20 different social media metrics that do not track to a meaningful business metric.  To illustrate, I mentioned that no CEO is not banging the table looking for more tweets (which BrandAutopsy riffed into the above), he’s looking for shareholder value - sales, market share, preference, purchase intent and a legion of other measures that can not be ripped off the back of Facebook insights.

So, with that in mind and the voices of my esteemed co-presenters in my head, I put together a list of 4 potential measurement pitfalls that can kill your social media measurement program before the horses have left the stable:

1) Setting the wrong objectives.  This sounds silly, but often an activity or “client brief” will be mis-translated as an objective.  For example, “run a high-impact event” is an activity, but “increase consideration and share of voice among X audience” attending that event is an objective.  TEST: Can it be measured?  If the answer is no, it isn’t an objective.

2) Determine the meaningful (vs. diagnostic) KPIs before you begin:  Chances are, meaningful KPI’s will require measurement techniques beyond simple, spoon-fed social media metrics like likes and shares.  Take a walk through our Conversation Impact(TM) white paper to determine how to craft meaningful Reach, Preference, or Action KPIs.

3) Find where your audience is interacting on a relevant topic: Yes, Facebook has 800 million people and likely some of them are in your desired “audience” but they may not be on Facebook to discuss their mother’s prescriptions or whatever topic that you may have value to add.  The important second step to “going where the party” is already happening is not just determining where your audience is, but how they are using social media for different things - where do they share recipes vs. look for snowboot recommendations?  While they could light up for FB, Twitter, Flickr, etc it will be critical to understand the relevance of those platforms to their lives to put together a measurable strategy.

4) Plan to measure: If you put together a measurement plan after you’ve already begun, you have lost your chance at a baseline and being able to know the true impact of your efforts.  Ed Keller admitted that he often gets calls halfway through campaigns at which point, there are limitations on the types of measurements that can be taken.  The baseline is going to be the key to your “winning” metric such as “Increased purchase consideration by 45%”.  That is the type of metric that CEOs do care about and will keep your social media efforts on strategy and in budget in 2012.

Like most in our industry, I tuned in to the live stream of f8 to hear what Mark Zuckerberg and team have been working on and what’s in store for the brands who use the platform to build their business.

Our Ogilvy team will be looking at these changes and their impact on marketers in detail over the coming week.  In the meantime, below are five quick takes as the microphone cools down from more than 75 minute presentation:

1) Facebook Timeline

Sound byte: “It’s how you can tell the whole story of your life on a single page.”

This may be the biggest new feature since the introduction of the news feed in 2006 and the impact for brand pages is just as profound.  In short, Facebook has packaged all the activity that tends to fall off the “news feed cliff” after a few days and assembled a personal museum showcasing the highlights from a person’s Facebook life.

Presumably - though Mark didn’t mention this explicitly - brand pages, too, could have a timeline that fans could use to chart the launch of major product announcements over the course of many years, plot the rise and fall of logos, styles, and product designs, and even see a customised version of a Brand Page timeline a highlighting the history of the brand along with interaction from a specific user.

One could also imagine a timeline in which Brand Page Administrators could upload historic photos and brand history well before their plunge onto Facebook, seamlessly threading a 100-year legacy to the current day on the wall.  Imagine reading the latest news from the Ford page this week and scrolling down on the same page to see the evolution of the vehicles and the history all the way back to Henry Ford himself (disclosure: client).

This seems like a great way to craft an image-rich brand history, though it could haunt some brands with early missteps on the platform as those early posts may be easier to dig up than ever before.

2) “Lightweight” Earned Media & Open Graph

Soundbyte: “”Ticker is a lightweight stream of everything going on around you. Because it’s moving by so quickly, you will never feel annoyed by a friend. When you share a post it goes into the News Feed, but when you add activity through the Open Graph it goes into Ticker”

Research suggests many brand fans stop short of sharing content through their feed for fear of annoying friends tired of seeing your daily Nike+ Running app updates.  “I don’t care how far you ran this morning, get out of my feed!” users likely hear in their heads and opt not to share.  To address this, Facebook created a second, fast moving stream called Ticker.  Built on the back of the Open Graph, ticker is designed to launch a new form of social app relying on a set of verbs “Read”, “Watch”, “Listen” designed foster a spirit of serendipity as these help you “discover new things through your friends,” as Zuckerberg announced.

As new verbs possible come on board (imagine “drove” for an automaker, “ran” for the Nike+ running app) the power of earned media increases in both breadth as more people are likely to share if they can plop this in the Ticker versus the bright lights of the news feed and in depth as brand fans are freed from the one-word Like Lexicon and have greater degree of control in the way the share and describe affinity.

3) Longtail Lifestyle

Sound byte: “Express who you are through all the things that you do — the music you love, the recipes you enjoy, the runs you take, and more.”

Closely related to #2, Zuckerberg made reference to a suite of music and movie apps that had been given early access to the new feature set in the form of a social lifestyle app collection including Spotify, Deezer, Earbits, Mixcloud, Hulu, and Netflix.

Netflix CEO, Reed Hastings, made a brief cameo to talk about how, in an early roll out of this feature among his Netflix employees, he was more compelled to watch an episode of Breaking Bad by a friend’s ticker post alerting friends that he was “watching” breaking bad, despite months of seeing the AMC television show in his own “recommended for you” list.

4) Potential Friction for “Frictionless”

Sound byte: Mashble editor Jennifer Van Grove wrote on Twitter, “I can see a lot of users getting peeved about the “frictionless experiences” piece. Apps auto-posting to the Timeline sounds like a lot less control for the user.”

Zuckerberg pointed out his frustration with apps interrupting users to share an action in the middle of using an app as major problem.  He gave an example of a mario brothers apps that pauses in mid play to encourage users to share once Mario nabs a mushroom.  Now, those “share / don’t share” days are gone.  Apps will now make these updates “frictionless”, easier for apps to publish to the ticker without the need to prompt users. One can envision a situation in which frictionless publishing will result in a less control of what get published - newsfeed, ticker, or otherwise.

Time will tell how much of a privacy issue this becomes.  History tells us Facebook will ask us to become a bit more open with our data than we’re currently comfortable with, Facebook will hold the line, and we’ll get used to a new level of openness.  Brands will need be wary of a frictionless world for the sake of its consumers, while still using the data that pours out as a competitive advantage in the marketplace.

5) Facebook as the Preferred Social Hub for Brands

Sound byte: “For the first time ever in a single day we had half a billion people use Facebook.” - Mark Zuckerberg

Google+ has put up some impressive early figures and many have written about the superior Google+ brand pages and potential take over of Facebook.  Had Facebook remained unchanged, and Google+ scored some major brand cases in Q4 2011, there may have been the case for such an argument.

Now, with a new form of earned media on Facebook beyond “Like”, with the introduction of a lightweight stream designed for users to share everything, and with half a billion users logging in everyday, Facebook and its Brand Pages have gained greater distance from rivals competing for eyeballs.  Brands with years of experiences under their belts and in year 3 or 4 of Facebook will continue to devote more resources to the diverse forms of earned media it generates as the platform races toward the once unbelievable one billion mark.

Stay tuned for a deeper analysis of Facebook’s new features in the coming week as our f8 Live Stream attendees explore the new features and work with our clients to kick the tires on these major changes.

Sunrise over Marathon, Greece.

Even after the jetlag has subsided and you’ve had a few days to reflect, it’s nearly impossible to justly capture the sense of creativity, openness, innovation and playfulness you experience at WPP Digital’s Stream 2011 ‘unconference’.

An avante-garde mix of WPP agencies (think Ogilvy, Mindshare, Hill & Knowlton, Blue State Digital) and clients (think Ford, IBM, Unilever, P&G, Coca-Cola), communications thought leaders (think Sir Martin Sorrell, Ze Frank, Rory Sutherland) and technological innovators (think Facebook, Google, Spotify, Yoni Bloch, Innovid), the event was a shorts-and-flip-flop discussion of everything ranging from the malpractice of Dr. Google to the miner (Chilean) Twitter parody.

I had the chance to meet folks from Facebook and Google and was pleased to hear that they’re not only thinking about how to work with marketers, but also how to work with marketers in ways that make sense to their customers. The major social platforms are now putting greater resources into collaborating with agencies who they see as partners in unleashing the full potential of their platforms - not just on the media side, but now on the creative design side.

As Facebook’s Patrick Harris and Sarah Personette expressed it, Facebook is primarily a technology company - not a content company. Thus, they see agencies as the “evangelists, designers and curators” of effective social media marketing and integration.

And as we all anticipate what the Google+ platform will offer brands, Chris DiBona says they’re structuring the platform for smart, sensible, segment-able marketing that makes sense to consumers. (I swear it was just a coincidence he used one of my favorite clients, Ford, as an example.)

And because I’d love to tell you more about Stream 2011, but don’t have the time or space, here are some great recaps:

• Five-part series in the Huffington Post penned by the likes WPP’s Sir Martin Sorrell, txteagle’s Nathan Eagle, SoundCloud’s Caroline Drucker, Ford’s Alex Hultgren and Y&R’s David Sable.
• TechCrunch video interview with Sir Martin Sorrell on content valuation and the “dreadful mistakes” we’ve made in giving it away for free.
• H&K’s (and die-hard Stream-er) Candace Kuss’ amazing Storify curation of #stream11 tweets.
• WPP Stream’s YouTube channel. Especially check out the Ignite playlist. Everyone should try to do a presentation with 20 slides that advance every 15 seconds for a total of exactly 5 minutes. My favorite: Esther Dyson on paying attention.

Facebook is always making minor tweaks to its platform to enhance users’ experience and last week introduced three functionality changes that may impact the way both you and your favorite brands use the social network.

View Shares on Your Profile or Fan Page

Facebook users can now view shares from public-facing status updates on their page, friend’s pages, or fan pages. It’s important to note that you can only view who shares a status update if the post was shared publicly by a user or by one of your friends.

Now you can easily see which of your friends shared your public updates, but how will this affect your favorite brand?

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