The iPlatform » joshuamarch

Conversocial write up in PR Week

joshuamarch — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 23:46:05 +0000

Paul Armstrong, Director of Social Media at Kindred Agency, and blogger at PR Week, has written an interview and review of Conversocial. You can read it here. It’s a great review, although Paul does point out that it would be great to have more automated sentiment and more in-depth analysis of fans. It’s coming!

“to say I’ve been impressed would be an understatement. Coming out for the masses today Conversocial will certainly help to belay any remaining fears that Facebook is not manageable for any organization. The premise is simple: a dashboard/alert system that enables a real-time way of managing content as it comes in (this is important – see later). It’s the best tool currently out there (other options include coTweet, Hootsuite, Tweetdeck, Context Optional, Socialite etc) to stem the tide of a busy fan page.”

Paul Armstrong, PR Week

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Conversocial v1 launching next week at Facebook for Business Event

joshuamarch — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 14:38:55 +0000

We’ve been working hard all of this year on Conversocial, a tool to help companies have effective conversations with their customers online. Right now that means helping companies manage the comments and posts on their fan page – keeping on top of new comments, focusing where it’s needed through search, auto-flagging, easy moderation and team workflow.

You can read more about our motivation for building Conversocial here.

Over the last few months, many of our customers have been using the beta version of Conversocial to help manage their fan pages. We already have several paying customers. Next week, we’re launching version 1 – the culmination of our work over the year, the feedback we’ve received, and what we’ve found is most important for our customers. We’ll be demoing it at Facebook for Business, an event organised by Tempero, one of Conversocial’s early customers. Numbers are limited – you can sign up here. If you don’t manage to come, don’t worry – get in touch and we can arrange a demo of Conversocial and a free trial.

Tempero will be discussing their moderation packages for Facebook, and we’ll also have a raft of speakers from integrated agencies, and Facebook themselves. We’ll be sharing some of our own internal research on what type of posts create the most real engagement, and sharing the results during the event (a blog post will come after!).

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Social is conversation.

joshuamarch — Thu, 27 May 2010 14:00:30 +0000

Over the past two years, we’ve worked with a huge range of companies to help them market themselves effectively inside Facebook. We’ve built dozens and dozens of interactive applications and campaigns, and throughout this we have learned that the most important aspect of a company’s presence in Facebook is the ability to speak directly to their customers. All of the advertising to push people to your fan page, and getting them to press that ‘like’ button, is money well spent – because once they’ve liked you, you can speak to them directly, through their newsfeed, every single day. 80-90% of all engagement with fan pages happens through the newsfeed – which is also where users spend most of their time. The interactive applications and competitions we build are always most effective when they are promoted to highly engaged fans – which only comes when companies have learned how to communicate with their customers properly through the feed.

By engaging properly with your fans in the feed, you build up their trust and interest in what you have to say – so when you have an application, or a video, or a new product you want to promote, they’ll listen; and if it’s good, they’ll share it with their friends. Without this trust, it doesn’t matter how many fans you have – they’re not listening.

Twitter has taken the lead in companies’ minds when it comes to having conversations with followers. It’s a great platform – and because conversation is the only thing you can do there, it’s easy to understand why companies have jumped into it. But, the great mass of your customers are on Facebook. The availability of the Facebook platform and engagement ads has meant that a lot of companies have focused purely on its potential as a broadcast medium – but the newsfeed and status updates were invented in Facebook first, and the amount of comments and engagement can dwarf what you get in other platforms. We believe that it’s time for companies to start really engaging and having conversations with their customers in Facebook. This is especially important for companies who have already invested in large pages with lots of fans (it’s likely that you have customers asking you questions right now, and you’re just ignoring them) but it’s also a powerful medium for all companies, big or small, to interact with their customers.

We want to help companies have these conversations, and manage them in an effective way. It can be difficult for companies to keep track of all the comments they are getting, especially if more than one person has responsibility for responding and engaging back. To help address these problems, we’ve been working on a new software as a service product, Conversocial. Conversocial pulls in every user interaction on your fan page or pages, and makes it easy to manage your responses and actions, individually or as a team, with tools to make your day to day management more efficient – including keyword tracking and email alerts for flagged content.

Conversocial is already being used, by numerous customers, to manage fan pages with almost 10 million fans between them. Over the past couple of months our early customers have been helping us test and scale. We have bold plans for where we want to take Conversocial, but we also believe in following an agile process – we release basic features early, and focus on learning what you actually find useful and use, and then use that knowledge to improve.

If you are managing your company’s fan page, and struggling to keep on top of what comments you’ve already read or responded to, Conversocial can help you right now. And if you’re not managing your page yet – you should be! Get in touch now.

People spend longer on Facebook than any other site

joshuamarch — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 14:26:08 +0000

Facebook users spend on average seven hours using the social networking website, according to a recent survey by Nielsen, with a month on month growth of nearly 10%.

The iPlatform delivers marketing campaigns and competitions in Facebook and other social platforms. If you are interested in reaching and increasingly part of the population who spend time in the social networking website, get in touch now.

Turkey, UK, France and Germany show impressive active user growth

joshuamarch — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 14:59:14 +0000

As the number of Facebook users in Europe reached 123 million at the beginning of February, UK, France and Germany showed the biggest growth among the regions countries, according to Inside Facebook.

With its 24.3m users, the UK is still leading – with an impressive 40% of the population on Facebook. In comparison, Turkey, France and Germany have rates of 26.3%, 24.3%, 8.1%.

These numbers show once again how relevant the Facebook platform can be for marketing campaigns that wish to reach a growing part of these countries’ population. If you want to find out how we can help you deliver successful marketing campaigns on Facebook, get in touch now.

500% increase in sharing in Facebook – in just 6 months

joshuamarch — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 14:26:34 +0000

At the end of 2009, Facebook announced its most recent statistics revealing that sharing on the site increased 500% in just six months, with the average user sharing 12 pieces of content each week.

With 400 million users - 50% of which log in the network website every day – increasingly using the site as a tool for sharing stories with their friends, this may not be a surprise. However, we can say this also reflects the continuous implementation of Facebook Connect over the Web – more websites are sharing content into Facebook now than ever before.

These stats show how important Facebook has become for your business. If you want people to be telling their friends about your products or your content, you need to be either in Facebook, or using Facebook Connect!

Get in touch to find out how we can help.

The future of Facebook

joshuamarch — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 16:04:39 +0000

The Facebook Developer Garage will start 2010 bringing the Future to agencies, developers and social media types attending its first event of the year! The gathering will happen on February 24th and promises a close look at the year ahead and possible developments in areas such as brands, monetization, mobile, game developers, etc.

A few weeks later, a team from the Garage will be at the Social Media World Forum to present workshops on successful Facebook campaigns and to handle delegate queries related to the Facebook platform.

2010 is a promising year for Social Media and the Facebook Developer Garage London is on top of that to bring you the most recent platform updates and relevant information for developing for the Facebook platform.

Joshua March, CEO of iPlatform, is Chairman and host of the Facebook Developer Garage London

The Flavourhood: McDonalds reaching their fans through Facebook

joshuamarch — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 14:58:26 +0000

Towards the end of the year, we worked with Razorfish to develop McDonalds first major Facebook campaign, The Flavourhood. This campaign included several game-like applications aimed at building a fanbase around McDonalds products.

As Alistair Macrow, McDonald’s UK marketing director, said on an interview to NMA, “the campaign was designed to engage customers with its top-selling products… Using Facebook lets us engage, entertain and reward our fans,” he said.

The campaign includes a central application connected to multiple games and fan pages related to each product, and has reached over 200,000 users so far. Unit 9 created the introduction flash.

iPlatform worked with us on ‘The Flavourhood’ activity we developed for McDonald’s, and they have been a real pleasure to work with. They were very flexible, accommodating our many requirements, and have shown real dedication and commitment to deliver. The Facebook platform is constantly evolving, and having a collaborative partner who understands it well is invaluable.

Deborah D’souza – Razorfish UK

If you want to find out how we can help you deliver similar campaigns, get in touch now.

You must be a fan to enter!

joshuamarch — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 13:53:53 +0000

After Facebook updated their competition and promotion guidelines towards the end of last year, there was a lot of confusion surrounding the ability to require users to be fans of a fan page before they could enter a competition. The guidelines weren’t clear, and seemed to suggest that you could restrict users from entering the competition if they weren’t fans, as long as you didn’t require them to be fans as an entry condition (so you could limit the entry page to fans, but couldn’t actually say ‘you must be a fan to enter’). This was inconsistent and confusing for clients, and the Facebook team themselves.
Luckily, this has now been amended – on the 22nd December they updated the guidelines to read (emphasis ours):

4.2 In the rules of the promotion, or otherwise, you will not condition entry to the promotion upon taking any action on Facebook, for example, updating a status, posting on a profile or Page, or uploading a photo. You may, however, condition entry to the promotion upon becoming a fan of a Page.

This will make things much simpler and avoid the verbal wrangling that was going on before Christmas!

The iPlatform Competition Platform allows us to quickly launch fully branded text, photo and video competitions with voting, leaderboards and full fan page integration. Get in touch to find out more.

Josh discusses apps with PR Week

joshuamarch — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 09:06:37 +0000

I was recently interview for a PR Week blog on all things social media and Facebook apps. A small excerpt:

PR WEEK: Applications are the new crack. What are the top 3 things to remember when thinking about making an app?

Me:

1. If you can build it on a normal web app, you can build it in a social app – plus all the additional social graph data and actions you can pull in.

2. If the app isn’t inherently social, then using FB Connect / Twitter OAuth as an identity provider is a good idea; but building it as a Facebook app isn’t.

3. Usability is more important than making it look like Facebook; just because it sits on the Facebook platform, doesn’t mean it needs to look like Facebook, and our research does not show any particular benefit for doing this.

Read the full interview here.