There are alot of best practices tips out there that is worth reading again and again. Though some mistakes can be overlooked, but when it boils down to business rivalries, it may blow out of poportion. MOL, the company that owns Frienster proves once again why big businesses still have difficulties understand how the social media works.

In a bizarre move, MOL CEO Mr. Ganesh posted an unwelcoming message on a rival OffGamers Facebook page commenting on a particular product. On the comment he wrote: “buy from MOL better…”. What follow thereafter was not a repulsive response from offGamers’s staff but from OffGamers’s patrons. The initial comment spark off war of words that generate 120 comments.

The following screenshots indicate that no matter how ‘BIG’ your company may seem, it doesn’t really matter to the customers. They are more likely to work with smaller businesses with integrity and openness.

I have to give it to OffGamers because throughout the whole episode, they have not loose their cool. They responded courteously to the insults and leave the defending to the fans. If they have not yet gain any respect with their fans, I believe they already have through this scenario.

No matter what excuses you have, gatecrashing your competitior’s Facebook Page is not the best idea. Not only is it lousy and unethical, it also give a very bad image about your own company. I am  sure to use this as a case study for my workshop. In the mean time, you can read the entire drama unfolding here.

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On Wed, I shared about how Twitter rise to dominance with an infographics. In this post, I want to share with you the statistics of Facebook in 2010 also through infographics.  This Facebook infographics will showcase things like total users, global reach, mobile usage. It includes pretty cool timeline of the key milestones in Facebook’s history so far.

You might also like this album I created on my Facebook Fanpage. Interesting Infographics shows you some of the interesting, thought provoking infographics from around the blogsphere. Have fun reading.

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As we all know by now, animal-lovers all over Singapore are seeing red over the beating of a puppy by a woman. The case was exposed when the video maker, many believed to be the puppy’s owner uploaded a video on Youtube. As soon as it was uploaded, it found it’s way to Hardware Zone and the social media  mayhem begin.

Stomp, a Singapore user-generated content (UGC) site, notorious for exposing acts by ugly Singaporeans posted the video onto its site and immediately generated huge criticism from readers and animal-lovers alike. Many of the comments express their disgust with the woman beating the poor puppy and demanding that authorities step in and bring the woman to justice.

Similarly, Facebook users are also up in arms when the video began circulating on the popular social networking platform. SPCA Facebook Page was littered with comments demanding SPCA to do something about the case and eventually, SPCA announce that they will be working with AVA to track down the culprit and bring the dog  out of it’s suffering. In just one day, SPCA Facebook Page receive up to 500 comments regarding this case. Most of the comments from the users express their concern for the puppy and not only would they want justice to be done, they also want the mainstream media to be involve in this.

True enough, by the second day of the video being brought to light, AsiaOne Portal ran the story and subsequently, Channel 5, CNA broadcast the report and today Straits Times too ran an article about this case.

Some kind souls like myself (ahem) begin contributing our own effort to making sure we rally around Butters (the puppy’s name) by setting up a community page for him, while others decided to pull their resources together by raising funds for Butters’ future living expenses should he get a new home.

Social Media’s Role in This

I am convinced that social media have a profound impact on bringing this case to the general public. If you follow the sequence leading up to media reports, you will find that it was the voices of the audience that are instrumental in bringing the attention to mainstream media. Through this experience, I realize that most people (the video maker in particular) take social media platforms such as Youtube and Facebook for granted. I am sure he doesn’t realize the impact the video can have on his life and the lives of millions out there who love animals.

I will carry on updating the story at the community page as long as it goes and hopefully we have a happy ending. In the mean time, I have included the videos of the sinful acts in this post. Be warned, it’s not pretty.

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Finally, after months of waiting, the trailer is finally out. Yes, I am talking about Facebook’s very own movie, “The Social Network”. The movie is  based on the book Accidental Billionaire, which chronicles the formative days of Facebook, from its founding in Mark Zuckerberg’s Harvard dorm room through its early rise to success. Written by Aaron Sorkin and directed by David Fincher, the film stars Jesse Eisenberg as Zuckerberg and will be hitting the theaters this October.

The trailer  is about 1 min, summarizing the struggles of  Mark Zuckerberg when he was  building the social media giant. Take a look at the trailer and tell  me if you are interested in going for the movie.

Updated: The first trailer (above) of this movie doesn’t reveal much, however, the second trailer reveal lesser than expected.

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has become one of the hottest trend in social media. Among some of it’s popular features such as advertising, Groups and Pages are also considered two of the easiest ways to brand promotion. In this post, I will give you my perspective of how both Group and Page can help brand and promote an organization in the world of Social Media.

Group

Group is the original method of community building marketing. It is still popular for some of the corporations out there. Group allows you to communicate to your customers on Facebook, create discussion and sharing information with each other. However, Group do have their disadvantages. One of the biggest disadvantage is the ability to send messages with your membership base reaches 5000. yes, you would not be able to message your members once you reach that figure.

Another disadvantage is that group attract more spammer and you may find yourself wasting time dealing with spammer. The last disadvantage is that Group does not enable applications to be installed. Therefore, if you want to use widgets or applications to impress your prospects you would want to consider using Pages instead.

Page

Facebook Page is similar to Group but with some slight differences. For one, Facebook Page is customizable. You can add flash, html and applications to your Page. While Group limit your messaging ability to only 5000, using page, you can message to your entire ‘fan’ base regardless of how  many members you have.

Another great feature is the customizable url. Having a domain with your keywords is very valuable in the aspect of SEO purposes. In addition, it  also allows people to find your page easily.

You can even see visitor stats, create events and invite members, and promote Pages with social ads.

How to Choose

It seems like Facebook Page have the upper hand in terms of long term brand promotion while Group are great for organizing, on a personal level a much smaller scale interaction around a cause. So if you are thinking about building long term relationship with your prospects and customers on Facebook, you should set up a page. But if you just want a place to host discussion or organize events around a cause, a group will by no means be sufficient.

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Recently while doing a research, I have stumbled upon a report that is really interesting. Finally, after much debate about whether Facebook’s fan page is useful for business, Social media agency Syncape (pdf) revealed that the value of a Facebook fan for a consumer brand stand at $136! The study also calculated the potential earnings from a Facebook fan compared to those who are not a fan at all.

Here are some of the snapshots of what the study revealed:

• Fans spend an additional $72 than non-fans ($157 versus $85).
• Fans are 28% more likely to continue using the brand than non-fans (75% versus 47%)
• Fans are 40% more likely to recommend a product to their friends than non-fans (68% versus 28%)
• Fans are 42% more likely to feel a connection with the brand than non-fans (81% versus 39%)
• Fan interactions on the Facebook page resulted in free or earned brand impressions to their friends

In another study, Vitrue release the Social Media Evaluator. A Web application that generates an estimated annual dollar value of a Facebook page based on various factors such as the number of Facebook users who ‘like’ the page, the level of interaction and the frequency of the posts on the page.

The study from Syncape have ended months and months of debate from companies still thinking if they should invest time and money into the social network. This also clearly show that social networking sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn can and will proof that there is ROI involve. I am looking forward as Facebook continue to improve their reporting system and hopefully one day will provide us with ROI data in terms of dollars and cents with a click of a button.

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I’m not at the F8 conference today, but I have been reading the news and keeping up with the announcements.  So far, the most exciting stories I have read have to do with Facebook Insights, the dashboard for page admins. If you run a fan page (now called a “like” page, I suppose) for a brand, agency or just for yourself, this is important information.

To date, the Insights have been underwhelming.  They have covered only the most basic information, and as somebody who works with big brands to engage and guide the community, I’ve got to say they have been less than helpful.  It seems that all of that changes today, however.  Facebook has announced “Facebook for Web Sites” and have already published full documentation about it.  The insight to user behavior should be interesting, as Facebook says:

“Once your app is up-and-running, you can get detailed analytics about the demographics of your users and how users are sharing from your application with Insights.

Insights supports analytics broken down by application and by domain. The product includes rich data about users sharing content from your site within Facebook no matter where those shares originated. For example, if a user puts a URL from your site in their Facebook status message, that data is included in the analytics for your domain.

The data from Insights is also included in the Graph API so you can integrate the Facebook analytics data with your own, in-house analytics systems.”

You can read some good commentaries over at Read Write Web and All Facebook. I’m not a developer, so it’s a bit early for me to really speculate on the implications of all of this.  I am a marketer, and the implications for this are exciting.  Having access to more granular user data (for example, being able to see what happens to a wall post after it is shared) is exciting and helpful.  It will allow me to do my job far more effectively, and will help me to predict future user behavior more easily, as opposed to just looking backward at what they have done.  Privacy groups are already crying foul (which is no surprise, the tiniest change in Facebook evokes this reaction), so we’ll see how it all plays out.

I think this is the first of many steps that Facebook will take to solidify itself as the premier destination, not just for users, but also for brands.

If you want to watch the video of F8, you can do so on the Facebook page. So what do you think…is this a step in the right direction, or a slippery slope toward invasion of privacy?

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Yesterday, Facebook’s F8 conference created quite a wave of buzz when they announced the release of the Open Graph API. Personally, I’m very excited about this from a marketing point of view. But, there was another announcement that was just as exciting to me that didn’t get nearly the same coverage as Open Graph: Facebook and Microsoft have become unlikely bedfellows, rolling out the new Docs.com site.

The short version: a personalized document sharing site that lets you create, upload and share Office files with your Facebook friends. I haven’t seen a more obvious shot across the bow of Google Docs, and I think this site will only pick up speed as more people discover it.

The site is slick and simple, with headers that will let you see your docs, your friends docs, or add a new doc. The “Add a Doc” section offers to ways to share: either you can upload an existing document from your computer, or you can create a new document using the online version of Word, Excel or PowerPoint.

It’s interesting to see how the new Facebook Open Graph works in all of this…there on the right side are pictures of your friends that are already on Docs. It ads the very personal feel that Facebook is trying to push throughout the web.

You can visit the site and download existing homepage docs, but unfortunately full participation is still limited to beta users that have received an invite code. That means that until you are in the beta test group, you cannot actually upload anything…too bad.

I should also mention that I tried this site in four browsers: Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari and Chrome. It worked great in all of them except Chrome initially; I got a compatibility error in the Google-born browser. Interestingly, since I first tried (and failed) to do this in Chrome a couple of hours ago, things have changed…it now works. So much for my original theory that they were trying to completely lock out all Google products compatibility.

Give Docs.com a look and sign up for the Beta so we can all collaborate when it rolls out completely! Docs is also on Twitter, and naturally they have a Facebook page. If you want more information straight from the source, check out their blog or FAQs.

I would love to hear what you think of this service…should Google be worried?

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It’s only been a day since Facebook announced sweeping changes to their platform at their F8 conference, but already the implications are being seen around the web.  Check out what Levi’s is doing on their site…very cool stuff.  Essentially, they are personalizing each web page you visit based upon your Facebook friends and their preferences.  As I’ve pondered and discussed what this means to marketing, to brand and to consumers, one question comes up again and again…what if I don’t want to participate?

It’s a fair question.  As it stands right now, if you do connect to a web site that is using the new Facebook Open Graph Protocol you are sharing a lot of information by default, including your activities & interests, your birthday, photos you’ve been tagged in, even your family and relationship status! This can present a fair amount of concern for many people when it comes to their privacy, especially since the 24 hour caching requirement has been removed, effectively getting Facebook out of the way of the relationship between developers and their users.  In other words, your information can be stored and used in ways that are only limited by the mind of the designer and developer of a site.

If you do not want to expose your personal data to sites outside of Facebook, there are a couple of things that you need to do.

Log into your Facebook account and go to the privacy settings, which are under Account–>Privacy Settings–>Applications and Websites (you can find this in the top right corner).At the bottom of the page is an area called “Instant Personalization”.  Uncheck the box that says “Allow” UPDATE: The checkbox is no longer on this level.  Instead, you now need to click “Edit Setting”, which will take you to another page.  If you wish to opt out, uncheck the box at the bottom of this page, it will say “Allow select partners to instantly personalize their features with my public information when I first arrive on their websites”Also on that page Click back one page to Privacy Settings–>Applications and you will see a section called “What Your Friends Share About You”. Click “Edit Settings”.  Once inside, uncheck every box you see, all 16 of them! Yes, sixteen. Don’t forget to click “Save Changes” at the bottom.While you’re at it, go to Account–>Privacy Settings–> Profile Information and make sure that everything is set to “Only Friends”.  Anything that you have set to “Everyone” is open to be viewed by those outside of your immediate network of friends.

You personal details are now as protected as they can be.  Of course, if you are truly concerned about your information being shared without your permission, remember that Facebook and all other social networking sites are opt-in…meaning nobody is forcing you to use them; the choice is yours as far as what you do and do-not publish.  Think twice before publishing private information, because the internet never forgets.

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Since their announcements at F8 about Open Graph Protocol (OGP), I’ve been following Facebook far more closely that I normally do.  Why? From the moment I watched the videos about what OGP does, I knew that the way the internet works will be changed forever.  Today I saw something that confirms that Facebook now controls the internet. No, I’m not saying that to be sensational or dramatic, I believe it to be true…a shift has occurred with OGP that will forever change how brands and consumers interact, and Facebook owns it all.  How do I know? Because long time rival Google is already embracing Facebook’s new protocol.

More about that in a moment. But first, if you are not familiar with what Facebook has done, let me give you a very brief overview.

What Does Open Graph Do?

Websites can now be uniquely dynamic, not globally static.  In other words, each visitor to a site will experience it in a way that no other visitor ever will.

For example, when a visitor goes to a website and logs in using Facebook, they will see which of their friends “like” the site, a single page or even an individual product. In addition to the “like” feature, any site can customize the user experience by displaying personally relevant information like upcoming birthdays, events or hobbies of their friends. In all, there are sixteen categories of personal information that can be shared on the site, creating an experience that is unique for each visitor.

As a brand marketer that focuses on social media optimization (here is a list of companies that I currently or recently have worked for), I’m incredibly excited about how this changes the scope of how we can interact and engage with consumers.  It’s a brave new world.

Proof That Facebook Now Controls The Internet

Given what websites are now able to create unique and very personal experiences on their sites, it’s no surprise that many are clamoring to understand and incorporate Open Graph Protocol into their online communities. I wouldn’t think that every company would be anxious to use OGP, however; companies that view Facebook as competition in any way are no doubt less-than-thrilled with this announcement.  One such company is Google.

It’s no secret that there is more than a little competition between Google and Facebook.  This Wired piece from February 2010 says it well, “this time it’s personal”.  It’s not a new rivalry, there are many articles going back several years that describe a similar cut-throat mentality of competition.  Given this, I’m truly surprised that even Google has started to incorporate Facebook’s Open Graph Protocol into some of their sites.  Today, I discovered that YouTube, a company that is Google owned, is using OGP is a very creative way.

My friend and social media pro Josh Groth put up a link to a video on his Facebook page today.  I thought it sounded interesting, so I clicked the link that brought me directly to the YouTube page and started watching (the quite excellent) ukulele rendition of MGMT’s Kids.  That’s not the amazing part…what I was shocked to see was the prompt just below the video encouraging me to log into YouTube with my Facebook account! Facebook Connect for YouTube isn’t new, it was implemented last year.  However, this move appears to cement into place the premise that YouTube (and therefore Google) needs Facebook.

Although I didn’t log in, it’s a brilliant move by YouTube, and I’m sure many companies will follow.  If I had permitted the application to log me in via Facebook, I would have given YouTube full permission to contact me anytime via email, and to pull my personal information (and that of my friends) from Facebook whenever they wanted to, day or night. I would be giving them the keys to the kingdom, so to speak.

I asked somebody to log into the same video, first by directly visiting the URL in their browser without going through Facebook.  The result? There was not a prompt to log in with Facebook.  Next, they clicked through the link for the same video (same URL) that I had posted on my wall in Facebook.  This time the prompt for them to sign in via Facebook was there. Want to see for yourself? Click the link here to go directly to the YouTube video page, then click the link here to go to my Facebook social media page so you can click through to the same video, but from Facebook. Do you see what I see? The prompt to log in only displays (for now) for the traffic that comes directly from Facebook.

This means that YouTube is using referral data (how you get to there site, where you are coming from) to determine if you will see the prompt for Facebook connect.  It stands to reason that if you are going to YouTube directly from Facebook, you will be more likely to log in using the Facebook method…which of course increases the amount of information that YouTube can gather, store and use about you.  All in all, it’s very clean and smart marketing.

What This Means

As much as I can appreciate the fact that YouTube is really embracing Facebook’s Open Graph Protocol, it’s hard for me to look past that fact that it is really Google using it.  In my mind, Google’s continuing embrace and use of technology that clearly incorporates and benefits Facebook is quite telling: Facebook has rolled out something that is so beneficial to every brand and company that has a web presence, Facebook now controls the internet.

Checkmate. Well played, Facebook.

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