Erick Tseng

“Where we’re going from here is a platform strategy. We’re going away from a one-off app strategy, said Tseng, at VentureBeat’s MobileBeat conference.

What he means is that Facebook will soon allow mobile app developers to plug into Facebook’s APIs the same way web developers currently can.

Although he declined to comment on whether Facebook had been in discussions with app store operators like Apple or Google, he mentioned that part of a mobile platform strategy could include social features for app discovery and distribution.

“Inevitably, app stores will become more social. As we get more apps, that’s going to be great. But the average user isn’t going to go through thousands of apps on their phone,” Tseng said.

Facebook offers more than 550,000 applications and supports 1m developers. Their aim is to offer something similar on mobile (most third-party Facebook apps are not currently available on mobile).

facebook-zero

In May 2010, it launched Facebook 0, a text only version of the social network aimed at mobile users in developing markets with limited access to mobile data and lower-end phones. Facebook has deals with with 66 mobile operators in 56 developing countries to provide the service for free.

Tseng said that they’re using Facebook as a way to study how consumers use data services in these newer markets. “We think this will lead to more growth for Facebook, and more data consumption worldwide,” he said.

He also said the company wasn’t in any hurry to add advertisements to its mobile apps.

When evaluating the design and usability of a website, one must consider the following

• Know the user, and YOU are not the user.
• Things that look the same should act the same.
• The information for the decision needs to be there when the decision is needed.
• Error messages should actually mean something to the user and tell the user how to fix the problem.
• Every action should have a reaction.
• Everyone makes mistakes, so every mistake should be fixable.
• Don’t overload the user’s buffers.
• Consistency, consistency, consistency.
• Minimize the need for a mighty memory.
• Keep it simple.
• The user should always know what is happening.
• The more you do something, the easier it should be to do.
• The user should control the system. The system should not control the user. The user is the boss and the system should show it.
• Eliminate unnecessary decisions and illuminate the rest.
• The best journey is the one with fewest steps. Shorten the distance between the user and the goal.
• The user should be able to do what the user wants to do.
• If I made an error, let me know about it before I get into REAL trouble.
• You should always know how to find out what to do next.
• The idea is to empower the user, not speed up the system.
• Things that look different should act different.

• 43% of Australian mobile phone users can connect to the internet (Nielsen, April 2010)
• In Australia, searching is now the most popular online mobile activity: From 30% to 73% of mobile web users in a year (Nielsen, April 2010)

When designing a mobile website, a common practice is to simply redirect a mobile user to another domain through user agent detection, rather than to optimize the site for mobile searchers. Why then would one need to specifically optimize for mobile searchers, when the user is finding their content via redirects? Good question – Bryson Meunier provides 16 good reasons.

SEO tactics for mobile sites

• Normal SEO rules still apply
• Links from other mobile sites
• Different crawlers (or ‘bots’) for mobile vs web pages
• Search engines can spoof handset user agents to test compliance
• Mobile search engines can transcode pages to match your handset’s capabilities
• iPhones use standard CSS, but offer user a simpler interface
• Coding in strict XHTML is cross-platform compliant
• Mobile versions of normal sites not seen as duplicate content
• Serve your mobile version of your site consistently to mobile bots, and your ‘desktop’ version to normal bots
• Test using handset emulators and validators (e.g. http://ready.mobi/)

Generating a conversion is directly linked to the ad relevance to the consumer. For this reason, behavioral targeting, remessaging, ad content preferences and customization are attractive to digital advertisers.

Why is location king?

• Mobile has a unique approach to advertising: a pay-for-performance model, not a CPM or pay-per-click. This is possible due to tracking capabilities; advertisers can measure exactly who used a location-based coupon
• Surprisingly, 94% of retail transactions still take place in physical stores
• Over half the world’s yearly $458 billion advertising budget is spent on local advertising
• Consumers accept advertising in exchange for free content
• The objective of mobile advertising is to drive traffic to physical stores

Using your GPS location, these mobile ads have the potential to represent anything from a coupon for a restaurant around the corner from where you’re currently waiting for the bus, to details of a nearby house for sale that you’ve been looking at on real estate site. With LBA, a mobile application developer could customize the ads it displays based on a user’s location, or an advertiser could target a mobile banner ad so that it would only appear to users who are in the vicinity of its business.

In an effort to capitalize on this opportunity it’s no surprise that Apple has launched the iAd. Like iPhone applications, the ads will only be served in association with Apple products and the company claims they’ll be entertaining, increasing the potential for interaction and a click. Consumer targeting won’t be based on location alone; interaction with iTunes and the App store will also serve to provide data that can be used by advertisers, allowing them to customize ads based on users’ media preferences.
Sounds great however the solution may currently be too pricey for most agencies and clients. Apple is requiring its first advertisers to spend as much as $1 million in media. They’ll also have to pay both a $10 CPM (define) and a $2 cost-per-click fee.
Since it’s acquisition of AdMob last year, there has been much speculation that Apple’s rival in mobile technology, Google, is also a likely candidate to enter the location-based mobile advertising space. Google also recently won a broad patent for “using location in an advertising system;” how this will affect Apple remains to be seen.

While the market seems relatively small now, the potential for growth is huge. Most mobile phones (at least those sold within the past few years) include GPS technology or something comparable that can be used to pinpoint the user’s location. According to Mobile Marketing Association’s survey consumers may actually be willing to admit an ad format has value.

Understanding the differences between these media types and how best to apply them is important when developing a digital strategy.

Owned Media

Essentially, owned media are objects and channels that brands control in terms of design and content. Owned media examples are a brand’s websites, mobile sites, blogs and eDMs to their opt-in database; as well as partially owned channels such as Facebook pages, YouTube and Twitter accounts.

As brands look at options for directing traffic, the identification and creation of strategic landing pages within social hubs are being used as a bridge that connects social experiences to owned website pages containing more information.

The first step in effective social media strategies is to listen. By investing in research, brands can uncover locations where their communities are already active and from there build a strategy for where to establish social presences and the frequency, time and extent of engagements.

Bought Media

Bought (Paid) media is the exposure that brand’s purchase such as display ads (banners), paid search, and sponsorships. Bought media obviously has a role but it can at times be exaggerated by agencies who make money based on percentages of media spend. While some argue over the future and fate of digital advertising, it’s clear is that when combined with owned and earned media as part of a holistic digital strategy, online paid presences can raise awareness and benefit programs where experiences are measured and promoted through the click path.

Earned Media

Earned media is where a brand has done something so cool that people want to create their own content to tell others about it and so it is “earned”. Earned media is reflected in the tweets, status updates, blog posts, comments and ultimately actions of the brand’s community of consumers, peers, and influencers.
A misconception is that Earned media is about getting free media when budgets are tight. Earned media is a not free, you have to work for it. It is not necessarily a cheap option, and is more time-consuming than buying media with big networks. Consumers don’t trust advertising but they do trust peer recommendation, earned media is about communicating with consumers on their level and gaining trust based on genuine understanding.

While earned media is something that brands cannot control, it can however be influenced. Social influence marketing is a product that a number of agencies are now selling to incite viral and word-of-mouth activity. It can be tied to communications and public relations programs as that seek to gain the attention of journalists, bloggers, analysts, and influencers who can drive awareness and behavior.

This generally only works if there are always a significant number of projects going on, but software development is a fairly common example of this model.  Each new product, and potentially each new release is a major project, so the concept of having dedicated resources for projects can work well.  That doesn’t mean that every project uses exactly the same team – there will be differences in the weighting of front end vs. back end work which will change the balance of each team slightly, but in principle the PMO controls all project resources – allocating them across initiatives, monitoring skills shortages and addressing training, etc.

Here’s my main problem with this model – it’s structured more for the benefit of the organisation (at least in the short term) than for the individual.  Dedicated project resources creates silos – core project teams see very little change and that means that the people on those teams lose a sense of belonging to the larger company if you aren’t careful.  In the short run these projects are much more efficient – people know how to work with one another, they are functional experts on their projects and they can hit the ground running.  In the long term though there is a significant danger that morale will drop, staff turnover will increase, etc.  In addition, the impact of those changes will be more significant than in a matrix structure where you don’t relay so heavily on individuals to be the experts – the expertise is more widely spread across multiple resources.

In some ways you can mitigate these risks by cycling people through support and maintenance roles on the product that has just been released, but that has its own challenges – staff who have just spent months working on leading edge development for a new piece of software may not be thrilled at going on to a role of dealing with help desk tickets.

From a corporate side the argument against dedicated teams is that functional managers lose control over resources – handing it off to the PMO and the PMs.  I would argue that is more of a theoretical problem rather than a real one if you have a well structured, well skilled PMO, but I understand the concept.

Matrix Resource Model

This is obviously the most common model these days, with resources being assigned to projects as needs arise.  These resources may have operational roles or may be seconded from other project areas, but the key is that they aren’t a dedicated team.

This can be a double edged sword – you trade the ability to have SMEs on your project team which should serve to increase the functional knowledge on the relevant areas within the project team, however the trade off is that people aren’t necessarily used to working together as a team.

Consider a sports analogy – we can all think of examples in our favourite sports where teams have brought in high priced stars who have proved to be incapable of working as a single cohesive unit – the whole is considerably less than the sum of the parts.

Of course this isn’t always the case, but as project managers we need to be very careful when managing matric teams.  We have to be careful to ensure that the individuals are working together and that the needs of the project are paramount at all times.  The PM needs to undertake formal and informal team building exercises – it may not be anything more than rotating the chairing of the weekly status meeting, but make sure that people feel part of the project team, if only for a fixed period.

The matrix structure has a number of distinct advantages for team members if managed well.  Team members have a chance to work with different people than would otherwise be possible, and they will have an opportunity to develop different skills.  Additionally they will be exposed to other areas of the organisation and that will inevitably help build a more rounded employee.

As more Facebook applications have been developed, Facebook now sees a need to establish stronger guidelines for brands, agencies and companies to follow moving forward.

Late last year Facebook updated the Promotion Guidelines which govern the publicizing and administering of any sweepstakes, contests, competitions or other promotions on Facebook.

According to the guidelines, below are examples of what you can or cannot do:

“You cannot: Condition entry in the promotion upon a user providing content on Facebook, such as making a post on a profile or Page, status comment or photo upload.

You can: Use a third party application to condition entry to the promotion upon a user providing content. For example, you may administer a photo contest whereby a user uploads a photo through a third-party application to enter the contest.

You cannot: Administer a promotion that users automatically enter by becoming a fan of your Page.

You can: Only allow fans of your Page to access the tab that contains the third-party application for the promotion.

You cannot: Notify winners through Facebook, such as through Facebook messages, chat, or posts on profiles or Pages.

You can: Collect an address or email through the third-party application for the promotion in order to contact the winner by email or standard mail.

You cannot: Instruct people (in the rules or elsewhere) to sign up for a Facebook account before they enter the promotion.

You can: Instruct users to visit the third-party application to enter the promotion (as described in Section 3.4(i)). Since users must have a Facebook account in order to access an application on the Facebook Platform, if you give this instruction, they will be prompted to sign up for a Facebook account if they do not already have one.”

Note that Facebook can disable the page or account of anyone who violates its terms of service and guidelines.

Make sure this doesn’t happen to you. Inside Facebook have put together some tips for running your promotions within Facebook’s Guidelines:

1. Read All the Promotions Guidelines

2. Clear the Promotion With Facebook First (to get an account representative in the first place, you need to spend around $10,000 on Facebook advertising).

3. Don’t Call Facebook Your ‘Partner’

4. Understand Local Rules, and How They Affect Your Facebook Promotion

5. Heed Facebook’s Formatting Requirements

6. Don’t Require Facebook Actions

For more information click here.

“If your audience has responded favorably to social media elements on your website, it makes sense to offer additional ways to interact. Determining which features to launch, and when to add them, is another matter.

Find out how the marketing team for a Latin music and entertainment website tested and expanded the site’s social media features to increase visitor engagement. Time spent is up 33% on some portions of the site — and registrations and impressions are up, too.”

Click here to view case study.

“The western world’s most feared government is shaking with insurrection in the streets after a contested election and the leading name in news, CNN, is shockingly absent from the story. Twitter, meanwhile, is how Iranians are communicating with the outside world. It’s the best place to follow events going on in that country and CNN’s failure to engage with the story is one of the hottest topics of conversation there.”

Click here to read more.