1. Seems appropriate that two totally indistinguishable and uninspired beers, independently ended up with two nearly indistinguishable and uninspired Facebook Timeline layouts.


  2. Nobody Cares About Your Brand’s History

    It’s been a little more than a week now since Facebook released Timeline for brands at their FMC event. This new brand page format was a terribly kept secret leading up to the event, and was more or less a quick gloss-over on the way to a multi-hour romancing of what can be most neatly summed up as “MOAR ADS” once the event itself finally arrived.

    Nevertheless, social media strategists and marketers went (and continue to go) berserk over this page restyling. Even saying things like this:

    It’s as if dozens of little corporate museums just launched on Facebook. (from AdAge)

    Now while that may technically be true, the problem is that these “little corporate museums” are likely to be about as popular as actual corporate museums. Which is to say, not very popular at all.

    As a creative type at heart, I am not immune to being in love with the possibilities of what Timeline presents, and I have no doubt that some brands will find really neat ways to leverage this format. However, as the cynical and jaded northeast pragmatist that I am, I can’t help but feel like…well, like the general public just won’t care about this in the long run.

    The two main issues that I immediately see here are:

    • Social media creation and consumption is still firmly entrenched in the present. Twitter feeds whiz by, Facebook newsfeeds update at a dizzying speed, and while every app on my phone may be recording what I’ve done (past tense), I only care about pushing the buttons and telling the world while I’m doing it (present tense). Rarely do I go back in digital time to re-live my OWN past, let alone the past of a corporation. Certainly Timeline aims to change this (as do apps like Timehop, which I admittedly love), but as shared experiences in the present tense continue to proliferate at a breakneck pace, one has to doubt if users will also have the desire to dig into corporate histories with any regularity.

    • The newsfeed still rules. When users consume content on Facebook, they are overwhelmingly doing so through their newsfeeds. And this is especially true when consuming content from “Liked” brands. Facebook Brand pages are rarely visited by fans more than once or twice on average, and being a user myself (and having watched/studied lots of other user behavior), I question whether or not those couple of visits will be spent scrolling through a deep timeline of corporate past and/or giving a shit about what that past contains.

      “Coke sponsored the 1928 Olympic Games? That’s great and all…but are there any coupons here?”.

    Coca-Cola is actually a nice proxy for the “who cares?” theory. They are the most popular brand page on Facebook with over 40mm fans, and a brand with a storied corporate past. Also one of the launch brands for Timeline, so they’ve got the benefit of a first-mover’s advantage here as well. Scroll down to their two oldest Timeline posts, and there is a sum total of 384 actions on them (comments + likes). That’s a 0.00096% “engagement rate” if you’re scoring at home. And again, this from the biggest brand, with one of the most famous histories of all.


  3. I’m Big In Indonesia

    For some time now, I’ve been getting Facebook friend requests from random Indonesians on a somewhat regular basis. I’d say as often as 2x per week on average.

    For the most part I’d been deleting them, and chalking it up as likely being spam, and potentially being some mistake.

    After some poking around, it would seem like it was in fact the latter, but for a far more interesting reason than some fumbly clicking. As it turns out, my last name “Teman” means “friend” or “friends” in the Indonesian language. 

    So my presumption is that a few times each week, some young Indonesian is introduced to Facebook, and one of the first things that he or she does, is search for “friends”. And since the Indonesian word for “friends” is “Teman”, I am one of the first results that shows up in search.

    Hence my steady flow of new Indonesian…temans.


  4. Even The Graffiti Artist Is Getting PAID On The Facebook IPO

    Amazing. The graffiti artist that painted the early Facebook offices, may be parlaying that job into $200mm.

    In 2005, Mr. Choe was invited to paint murals on the walls of Facebook’s first offices in Palo Alto, Calif., by Sean Parker, then Facebook’s president. As pay, Mr. Parker offered Mr. Choe a choice between cash in the “thousands of dollars,” according to several people who know Mr. Choe, or stock then worth about the same.

    Mr. Choe, who has said that at the time that he thought the idea of Facebook was “ridiculous and pointless,” nevertheless chose the stock.

    Many “advisers” to the company at that time, which is how Mr. Choe would have been classified, would have received about 0.1 to 0.25 percent of the company, according to a former Facebook employee. That may sound like a paltry amount, but a stake that size is worth hundreds of millions of dollars, based on a market value of $100 billion. Mr. Choe’s payment is valued at roughly $200 million, according to a number of people who know Mr. Choe and Facebook executives.


  5. "Brands need to be careful in not only what, but how much they curate. There can’t be articles that make the reader question why a brand is sharing it. Also, brands need to make sure they’re not just regurgitating content, but instead offering readers/followers valuable information, as readers will quickly determine the curated content — and thus the brand — is not worth their time"
    Brands Want To Be Content Creators

  6. "But there’s a cost to these Open Graph applications that is as imperceptible as the effort required to share through them. As the market literally becomes flooded with these passive sharing actions, what happens to their social value?"
    The Hyperinflation Of Social Sharing

  7. Pictures of the ladies, apparently still work. Two out of the three ads I’m seeing on Facebook right now, use photos of cute girls. One is for a beekeeping kit (awful targeting btw) and the other is for content sourcing.

    Pictures of the ladies, apparently still work. Two out of the three ads I’m seeing on Facebook right now, use photos of cute girls. One is for a beekeeping kit (awful targeting btw) and the other is for content sourcing.


  8. "Recently, I did the unthinkable. I methodically culled my list of Facebook friends, removing high-school classmates, old girlfriends and one-time acquaintances by the dozens. I didn’t hide them from my newsfeed; I didn’t move them into special lists. I deleted them. I deleted 168 of them."
    Check out the rest over on the Hill Holliday blog.

  9. ____ Is The New Hot Thing

    Color is the new hot thing.

    Google Plus…new hot thing.

    Wait, no, PATH. So hot.

    Remember Diaspora? That was going to be the hottest.

    Can I Instagram my yFrog photos and cross-post them to Twitpic and Tumblr?

    Spotify kills Pandora kills iTunes, and then Google Music kills everyone.

    As someone that works professionally in the world of social media strategy, it seems near impossible to stay on top of the newest and the hottest and the XYZ killers of the moment. I can’t even imagine what it must be like for the average user.

    While we nerderati love being early adopters and pronouncing 10 minute old products dead, while we gush over the new hotness, the average user largely ignores these apps and sites as they come and go.

    The stuff that we argue about and use obsessively but temporarily, the regular Joe or Jane likely never even noticed.

    I don’t know that it’s a perfect way to think about it, but I try and look at all new apps and social platforms through the same lens. I try and ask the same question…

    Does this app give me something that I’m not already getting from somewhere else? And if this app DOES give me something that I already get from somewhere else, is it materially better at delivering that experience to me?

    If the answer is no to either of these, it’s highly likely that the rank and file consumers out there, won’t likely give a flying Shazam about your product.

    Of course there have to be SOME winners. SOME stuff has to stick. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, FourSquare and others were all once just a line of code and a dream for some ambitious and wide-eyed entrepreneurs.

    But that said, the aforementioned apps all did something relatively novel (YouTube), or did something in a materially better way than the competition (Facebook).


  10. Engagement Is Flawed

    I had the opportunity to sit on a fun panel the other night with some smart people, including Anne, Eric, George, Janet, and Ted where we discussed lots of different social media related stuff. The final question of the night, was something to the effect of “what will be the big trend or thing to watch for in 2012?”.

    The first part of my answer was that I think most media plans are going to start BEGINNING with mobile, rather than sprinkling mobile on as an additive. The second part of my answer was part soap-boxing and part wishful thinking, and I basically said that in 2012, I think the smart marketers out there are going to begin really asking what all of this social media stuff really means. Metrics and methods are really going to be questioned, as brands and marketers begin to scale WAY back on social, focusing only on the parts of the space where gains can truly be seen and measured with real confidence.

    Along these lines, my most sincere hope for 2012, is that we once and for all abandon the “engagement” number as a measure of success.

    And I say this, because quite simply and literally, “engagement” is at best directionally flawed, and at worst, harmfully misleading.

    For Facebook specifically, engagement is generally defined mathematically as the sum of comments and likes on a given post, over the impressions that the post received (this stat is actually called “Feedback” on Facebook now). So if a post was seen by 100,000 people, and received 200 comments and 300 likes, your engagement formula would be (200+300)/100,000. And your engagement rate would be 0.5% (we’ve multiplied it by 100 to get the final %).

    Simple enough, right? And I think we can all agree, that we’ve seen (and even used) this stat as evidence of a post, page, or campaign “working” or being successful. High engagement equals social media success! Done and done.

    But here’s the problem, those comments that you’re tallying up as part of the numerator, most likely contain some nastiness. Some of those people in that group are probably complaining or hating on your brand. It’s even possible that most of those comments are negative. So if within those 200 comments, 175 of them are telling you that the brand sucks, do we still count those as “engaged” users?

    This is a comment on the page of local cable provider RCN (name has been removed).

    RCN Facebook Comment

    This is a comment on the page of TiVo (name has also been removed).

    TiVo Facebook Comment

    Should these both be counted as carrying equal weight? I personally don’t think so. But they are counted equally under the engagement-as-a-measure-of-success methodology.

    So in 2012, let’s start thinking beyond the top-line numbers and the tweet-able headlines, and really start to understand what is actually going on in social. Because if we don’t, the bell is going to be tolling for this whole industry really soon…


About me

Boston guy, creative thinker, digital doer. I'm an advisor at Custom Made and Vice President, Digital/Social Strategy at Hill Holliday. Thoughts are my own. More on me here.