Facebook tapping into Search - by letting you Ask Questions!

It's now official: you'll be soon able to post your questions on any topic to an audience of over 500 million people, as promissed by Facebook. Facebook has introduced a new 'ask a question' option, which will allow you:

- to post questions;
- upload photos;
- create polls and get:
- personalized answers,

and all that in an attempt to leverage "collective wisdom",to which I'd add: worldwide wisdom! Wondering about the benefits? To name just a few:

- all questions will become visible to all Facebook users (although you'll still have the option to restrict the option and make it visible only among your followers/friends;

- all questions will become browsable and thus...- searcheable!!

- they can also be tagged with specific themes so that people with interests in those areas are more likely to see them!

- also, to ask a question to the community, you'll just click the "Ask Question" button at the top of the homepage. You can also ask questions about your friends from their profiles, similarly to how you would post on their Walls:



- Moreover, you'll be able to browse answers from people with deeper knowledge on a topic or click "Follow" under any question to receive a notification each time someone submits a new answer.

So, basically you'll now have a blend of some Twitter options (in terms of broadcasting) and a bit of LinkedIn and Yahoo!Answers with their Q&A tools and polls..Nice having it all under one umbrella, right?

Anyway, the service is only available at the moment to a small number of beta testers (50 000 selected users), who will provide a feedback, based on which we'll see the final product on our "update profile" tables:)

As for the opportunities to make your voices heard - either as a merchant, an advertiser or just any random user - remember to craft your questions neat and nicely, so that you'll get your audience and why not - follow it!

Have fun and see you on Facebook Q&A!!

Cheers,
@Digilunch

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Facebook - now as a Hollywood Movie..about Facebook!

Facebook will soon have its own story told.. Will it be a success? At this point the buzz figures are already speaking out loud, potentially powered at least by one in 12 human beings on this planet who now "happen" to be Facebook users, numbering already 500 millions chaps! If it will prove more popular than the social website itself - not sure, yet - “The Social Network” is quite an ambitious production: take a look at the trailer released just a few days ago:



The movie is based on a book written by Ben Mezrich, “The Accidental Billionaire”. Although it speaks about Facebook's foundation history, it's using primarily co-founder's side of the story - Eduardo Saverin. Mezrich stated that he tried to get in touch with Mark Zuckerberg for his own views, but was unable to reach him.


The movie begins with Zuckerberg entering Harvard College, showcasing him wanting to become a part of the popular circle in high school and inventing the idea of a website where people can post their college experiences, photos, and innermost thoughts. This is how Facebook was born..

The movie literally follows Zuckerberg through the ups and downs that fame and money can sometimes bring.




A few curiosities to take away:

- Facebook was launched in 2004, firstly within Harvard Colleage walls (for internal access only);
- within 2 hours of the site being made available to the public, Zuckerberg recieved 22,000 facebook hits;
- Mark Zuckerberg's character will be played by Jessie Eisenberg (starred in “Zombieland”);
- The movie is set to be available in theatres on October 1, 2010;
- It was directed by David Fincher, known for previous productions “Fight Club”, “Zodiac,” and “Seven.”

Enjoy!! Barely wait to exhange some reviews as soon as it comes to UK..and yes, don't rush into falling in love with this incredible success story as yet, it might be a bit biased (remember there's only one side of the story in place, plus it's all about the new emerging form of marketing - the social media one!)

Cheers,

@Digilunch

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Google Search will Differentiate Retailers by – Consumer Reviews!

Beware: Google announced its debut as Online Consumer Reviews Aggregator.
Retailers and merchants should now be aware that consumers’ reviews will from now on be integrated into Google Product Search, which makes it both attractive and tricky.

It’s already a fact that two of the most utilized tools for consumers on the Web are search and consumer-generated product reviews. It proves that we no longer care for the actual search results only, but also consumers’ reviews related to the products we’re enquiring about. We tend to “listen” to what other online users say about the products we’re searching for. Why? Obviously, because that’s a convenient, free-of-charge and usually unbiased “back-up”.

The most curious is that we’re more likely to trust positive sentiment in order to make purchase decisions.

Thus, Google has now decided to deliver both the actual search results with a “bonus” on top of it: online consumer reviews, related to your product search queries. Firstly: it’s a premier initiative and will soon be fully implemented.

Now - what is it & how it works?

Firstly - that’s how it looks like:



As you can see, beneath the actual ad listings for a randomly picked “appliances” term (within the Sponsored Links field) Google suggests a few merchants who acquire now “star ratings”. You may also see the number of reviews next to each merchant domain: (426 ratings for AppliancesOnline and 223 for John Lewis).

As mentioned on Google’s Official Blog, this advertising feature is called “the Seller Rating Extension” and it aims at “making it easier for online users to identify highly-rated merchants when they are searching on Google.com”. Basically, it does it by attaching the merchant star rating to Google Product Search.

To be able to attach the star ratings, Google has partnered with Bazaarvoice - a technology provider in hosted social commerce applications, which in turn connects online users with ratings from third-party seller rating websites (such as : Kelkoo, ReviewCentre.com, Dooyoo.co.uk,etc)

It’s really important to note that the Seller Ratings will always provide review ratings for the advertiser, not the product!.

So while searching for the term “notebooks” for example, you won’t get ratings related to the quality of the notebooks themselves, but more an appreciation of the merchant or the retailer, who should be eligible to be automatically “assigned” the seller reviews:



The feature is now running for online merchants only , triggering only English/google.com. This means that any advertiser running on this domain may have a review showing against their ad.
Also, the names used in these ratings are the same as the advertiser’s Display URL.

Requirements:

• Google Products will only show a review if there are more than 30 unique reviews and if the advertiser has 4 or more stars!
• AdWords links these Seller Ratings using the domain of the Visible URL on the advertiser’s ad;
• Important: existing plusboxes or sitelinks on the ad should be removed, so that it becomes “attractive” for seller rating extensions.
• Ad quality doesn’t trigger the ratings - the number of unique reviews and the number of stars – does!

It’s an opt-in feature, updated automatically as soon as the merchant qualifies, but what happens if the company wants to opt-out?

• The retailer can add their domain to Google blacklist using this form:
this form: https://services.google.com/fb/forms/ratingsoptout

• Blacklisting turnaround is usually within 48 hours.
Improving the Reviews:

In order to improve the online consumer reviews, a focus on providing excellent customer service within the online space is essential.

This can be done by ensuring that you:

• Read reviews entered by your customers – identify previously flagged up problems/complaints and post any solutions provided (to show receptivity and action: this increases consumers’ trust)
• Make sure that review sites display the correct name and home page URL. If you have a Merchant Center account, you should additionally ensure that the name and URL are consistent here too.

Finally, even though the feature sounds exciting and curious, also as an advantage to highly ranked merchants, in order to be able to build more trust among their consumers, it still leaves 2 major questions behind:
- How accurate enough will the selection process be for the rating sources that Google will rely on? (Bazaarvoice confirms to have partnered with over 800 consumer rating and review sites)
- Also, since the ratings refer to the brand itself and not the product you’ve searched for (brands might have a plethora of products/services) how relevant will the ratings be to the individual product searches? Do we want to know how reputable the merchant is or how reliable his certain products are?
So far so good, you’re now able to dig into social e-commerce and build on your brand’s quality ratings (except for your product quality ratings..).

Good luck,
Yours,
@Digilunch

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How about..Search by Voice? Google is ready to deliver...

"Whisper to me your search query and I'll be ready to fire up the results for you", - supposedly 'said' Google this week to its multi-million clients' base.

We've all experienced the meaning of speed...I'll clarify: speed accompanies now the search market leader : the quicker you can get the user to the desired "land"-ing page, the higher will be his recognition: in terms of traffic, sales and .. ultimately long-term retention.

Since Google has worked from its infancy on its key market USP: relevancy (qualitative results), it has now decided to stretch its speedy locomotive, by "gently" pressing on quantity. Will the two features work well together? Time will show.

Yet, Google has launched now its new service - Google Search by Voice, which enables mobile users to search the web faster than ever before—"getting you answers with fewer keystrokes" (as promised by Google):

The service was originally launched in English, and was offered in the U.S., U.K., India, Australia and New Zealand. Later - Japanese and Mandarin were introduce to expand the number of possible users. Just a week ago, Google launched the service also in French, Italian, German and Spanish.

You may be well wondering how accurate will Google results be based on our voices only, taken into account the tone, the accent, clarity of sounds etc.

Also, will the service speed up the "results' journey" or hinder them instead? Let's see what the company version is:

According to the company's official blog, even the local dialects were considered as a performance factor for speech recognition, so that this week Google continues its expansion by including Korean, Taiwanese of Traditional Mandarin versions.

Any thoughts? Has anybody already tried the service on your mobiles and wants to share the experience? Would be glad to hear.

P.S. You can find the application for your mobile by accessing the page below:

http://www.google.com/mobile/google-mobile-app/

Cheers,

@Digilunch

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Case Study: How PPC teams up with PR to re-build BP's image

Today it was announced that BP has agreed to set aside £13.5billion to compensate victims of the devastating Gulf of Mexico oil spill. So far BP has lost almost half of its market value already. Needless to say what a significant impact this has had on the overall brand image, where PR strategies come in place almost instanteneously.
So what exactly did the company do to improve its image or at least to maintain what's left of it?
It's interesting to note that BP did not seek their traditional advertising agency for advice, Ogilvy & Mather, but instead took on Purple Strategies, a political consultancy, run by Steve McMahon (Democrat) and Alex Castellanos (Republican) for an online marketing campaign.

Measures taken:

- BP launched a dedicated section on their website called the Gulf of Mexico Response homepage (giving the a wide array of options: latest news, recent updates, recent videos and a "keep up to date" feature listing feeds to Twitter, FB, YT & Flickr)
- Also, the company created a YouTube channel, launched a Flickr poll and started live broadcasting on Twitter.

As for its major budget slice - it went t o PPC rather than press or social media:

It is estimated that they are spending up to $1M a month on an integrated search marketing campaign using Google AdWords and YouTube (Searchenginewatch.com):

$995K spent on Google AdWords ads in the U.S.
5M total search ad impressions
750K clicks
$1.33 average cost per click

Anyway, this is a small part of the total reputation management budget when compared to the $50Million BP estimated to have spent on TV ads.

Thus, since end of May, BP has had top visibility (position 1-2) for over 1,000 search terms related to "oil spill" on the search engine and their videos are promoted to the top of search results for videos on YouTube:




What did the company gained by bidding on over 1000 crisis-related keywords? Firstly, the advantage to have the opportunity to state their view first, before giving the visitors the freedom to choose randomly, as we all know random may include both positive and negative views.

Although, there's an issue of overexposure and positional manipulation, still - the move stirred a huge wave among international media. My point - well-done anyway (even the negative PR can become positive, right?), although was it cost-effective or not, we don't know yet.

Cheers,

@Digilunch
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Facebook Can Now Tell Who "Likes" What!

If you're tapping into the online business world - having good analytics is always key. As announced recently at the f8 conference, the new tool brought by Facebook - Insights Dashboard is a revamped set of analytics on (anonymized) user data. Hereby, Facebook promissed that its new tool may provide you with better metrics for your Facebook applications, websites, and also Pages:



What is it useful for?

Well, the new Insights dashboard claims to be your single source for all your Facebook analytics:

• Websites: Fully-integrated sites and those that use social plugins or add a non-integrated domain in one easy step
• Applications: Including canvas, mobile, device, and desktop applications
• Facebook Pages: Including Pages created on Facebook.com and (which created quite a lot of stir recently, being thought as a next big "social innovation") those that are part of the Open Graph protocol

Following Google Analytics model (although in a less extended manner), Facebook's new tool offers analytics around specific stories liked on your website, or how many users commented on posts made on your Page .

Thus, the tools show mostly sharing data, in terms of broad demographics- (eg. certain stories emailed or "Liked" by males/females of a certain age) . The demographics include gender, age, country, city and also language, being accompanied by some nice-looking charts and graphs.

It's a nice tool especially for content owners and developers, who can now tell who referred their app to customers, how long customers use their software, and get some hints on how to market it.

As for the deriving privacy issues, Facebook assures "this is anonymized aggregate data and does not include personally identifiable information," so try not to worry too much and focus on your audience instead.

Best of luck!

Always yours,

@Digilunch

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Local Search on Mobile drives New Loyalty Solutions

There’s been a lot of buzz recently about Foursquare among advertisers trying out new mobile tools to reach their audience.You must have heard about it by now (for those who haven't, here’s a short overview of Forsquare). I’ve heard many people predicting a great deal of advantages that Foursquare and other location-based services (Gowalla,Loopt in,etc) will bring along for Social Media marketing and local businesses. While the predictions seem to have solid grounds, I'm more inclined to think that main beneficiaries are going to be small, unique businesses with a niche market or very targeted offering.

The truth is that we've already witnessed examples of successful integration of geo-location tools into big brands' marketing/promotional strategies:

Loopt, for example, which has established a suite of tools tailored for social media and mobile phones, is currently rolling out an app, Loopt Star, which basically acts as a "virtual loyalty card":

• Starbucks – The person who checks in to any individual Starbucks the most becomes the “Honorary Barista” of that Starbucks (similar to Forsquare model for "the city/location mayor")
  
• Universal Music Group – By checking in to any qualifying bar in the United States with two other Facebook friends, you'd get access to five free MP3s from popular Universal Music artists, such as Rihanna, Lady Gaga, and Mos Def.
• The Gap – By checking in twice to any Gap adult store you would instantly receive 25% off your purchase (within a set timeframe).

• Stanford University – By checking in to qualifying 2010 Commencement events you get a chance to win a special graduation gift, etc.

In terms of the results, you'd be amazed to find out that Gap alone made its application available to an audience of 3.4 million members. Additional benefit was the fact that mobile phone owners could sign up to Loopt Star via Facebook Connect, meaning they could share information on the social network. Ineterstingly enough, Loopt geo-location app is linked directly to Facebook, so that the user doesn't have to leave the platform for additional connections:




"Local is different from search in that you're not looking for new things. It's more about turning existing customers into better customers, rather than gaining new customers as in search ," said Sam Altman, chief executive of Loopt.

"It's more about going to the local place you've been to before, like Starbucks or Burger King. It's more about turning existing customers into better customers, rather than gaining new customers as in search" ,said Sam Altman, chief executive of Loopt (as reported by WARC):


In conclusion, here're my 5 take-aways for the benefits of using geo-location tools in the overall marketing strategy:

• turning potential customers into more loyal ones (aiming to stir both check-ins (similar to clicks in PPC) and purchases );
• personalized offers to the tastes of clientele (entitling customers to receive exclussive deals and rewards (e.g."Mayor" at Forsquare, "Honorary Batista" at Loopt, etc)
• strong "gaming" element - entertainment is key (when mixed up with "social" element - becomes even more effective);
• relevant offers based on previous purchase history data (when your mobile purchases are being tracked);
• exclussive opportunity to analyze consumers' buying behavior.

Anyway, using social media is a no-brainer. All you need to consider is your audience and where they're "hanging out" be that online,offline or mobile. Than - joining the conversation is more than recommended (a dynamic brand doesn't need a "special invitation" to jump out when an opportunity shows up). Remember, you need the skill to create awareness of your products without even mentioning that you have something to sell in the first place.

It's all about talking to your consumers & engaging with them (using tools that are both relevant and entertaining) and not broadcasting to them.

So, what would you say? Would local services integrated into mobile devices deliver new loyalty solutions?

Eager to hear. Don't forget we're always welcoming your ideas on the menus for future digital lunches!

Yours,

Nadya @Digilunch

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