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Putting your networks to work

January 17, 2011
Posted by Candy Chen Shuhui

We welcome Candy to the iPlatform team, as our new junior project manager! She studied social networks as part of her university dissertation, and here are her thoughts on how we help brands and organisations make use of their networks.

At the last Facebook Developer Garage London event, I learnt from Thomas Neumark of the RSA that many of the problems which we face as a society can best be solved by understanding how networks work - understanding our connections with other people and organisations. Going further than that, the Internet - in the examples of Facebook, and in our own small way, iPlatform - has a really important role to play in this.

Image by Facebook, Visualizing Friendships

Our networks determine our behaviour, norms or even beliefs. With the promise of Facebook “to help people share and make the world more open and connected”, people’s actions can now be coordinated quickly and information can circulate more effectively. This explains iPlatform’s role in the launch of The Big March - an inaugural collaborative campaign hosted entirely online. Virtual marchers handed in a Petition asking the Government for help to protect children from bullying, violence and harassment. Joining forces with other companies and brands including Google, YouTube, Facebook, the National Union of Students, Robinsons Fruit Shoot, and the Metropolitan Police, iPlatform participated to make a united stand against bullying.

“We’d like to say a *big* thank you to our developer friends at iPlatform who have worked on the application in a pro bono capacity - they have made a wonderful contribution to the campaign!”

Beatbullying, minimentors.org.uk

This is not iPlatform’s first, as we were commissioned by Facebook to produce the CEOP application, an online child safety campaign. We think that every brand has an important place in society, and iPlatform continues to help all our clients to effectively engage with their customers and understand their networks. Preventing bullying has an obvious positive impact on society but don’t forget that your brand is a part of all of your fans’ make-up - and how they connect to society.

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Conversocial write up in PR Week

July 29, 2010
Posted by joshuamarch

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

Follow iPlatform on Twitter here.

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Conversocial v1 launching next week at Facebook for Business Event

July 22, 2010
Posted by joshuamarch

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!).

Follow iPlatform on Twitter here.

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Making the web a safer place.

Posted by suzannah

Over the last 4 weeks, iPlatform has been proud to be part of one of Facebook’s most significant developments to date, creating a potentially life-saving application.

TechCrunch hailed it as the first real online child safety campaign, designed to connect and engage with the user. They pointed out that previous ‘panic button’ styled formats, including that of Bebo, were little more than documents about online safety.

http://eu.techcrunch.com/2010/07/12/facebook-has-not-launched-a-panic-button-its-smarter-than-that/

We learnt from previous efforts to keep children safe online, and looked carefully at the format in which the information was presented to children.  Previous formats have been information-heavy, not something that children would find particularly interesting. Rather than trying to engage with the user they tend to speak at them, or moreover, speak to the adults who were far more likely to be reading them.

The CEOP app that we built with Facebook for CEOP intends to educate children on how to be safer online and is designed to encourage children to come forward and address issues that worry them online. Whether that is from negative wall postings from people they do know, or chats from people they don’t. It isn’t designed to appear as an overbearing adult, but rather ‘speak’ with the user and make them feel it is one of them. Its look and feel is simplistic making it easy for the user to navigate, whilst the tone remains friendly and reassuring.

Joshua March, CEO of iPlatform, says:

“It’s been great to have the opportunity to work alongside Facebook and CEOP, in a continuing relationship, not only to build this application but also to more generally help CEOP engage properly with teenagers on the Facebook website; making it a safer place and connecting with CEOP’s schools outreach programmes to really educate users”

CEOP Facebook Application

The application isn’t designed to scare children into believing that the online world is bad, but rather act as a safe haven where children can reach out if they feel threatened.

One of the most important roles the application may play is its ability to ward off sexual predators and cyber bullies.  As TechCrunch discussed, the app acts as a visual warning and deterrent. It shows the user has an understanding of the need to be safe online and serves as a warning to those with less than good intentions.

In terms of users’ interest in the campaign, thus far it is proving a great success. In its first week over 100,000 children engaged with the app, with 20% adding the application’s tab to their profiles – ranking it highly even compared to big brand campaigns. For this campaign however, the true measure will not be the standard user stats, but whether or not it does make the web safer for children.

iPlatform worked alongside Facebook to produce the CEOP application, and Conversocial, iPlatform’s fan page management tool, is being used by Tempero to help moderate and manage the Click CEOP fan page.

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The power of “Like”

July 17, 2010
Posted by suzannah

At the F8 conference in April, Facebook announced the launch of the “Like” button; a widget that enables users to make connections to pages of a website and share content with their friends. The widget allows users to Like specific content such as news stories, articles and photos; and with a bit more work, the webpage can become a ‘social object’, that when liked gets added to the user’s Facebook profile as an interest (e.g. movies), and allows the owner of the social object to message the user through the Facebook news feed, as if it were a fan page.

The button allows users to like the content without being redirected to Facebook, making it ideal for both brand and user. Brands keep the users on the site and the user’s browsing isn’t interrupted. Since Facebook hosts the content of the widget itself, the button can display personalized content (like how many of the user’s friends also liked the article) whether or not the user has logged into the brands site.

How can it help brands?

The design of the Like button enables brands to harness the viral power of Facebook more effortlessly. The open graph means that brands no longer need to just heap all their content on to fan pages, and can instead allow fans to connect direct to their own websites.  Brands, especially those who don’t feel they have content engaging enough for Facebook users, will often be unsure as to how to connect their product with the user. They often feel it necessary to put all of their corporate information onto a fan page, even though most of the information may be fairly irrelevant for the user.

To be social, brands need to be engaging. Posting a load of corporate information on to Facebook isn’t engaging; but in the same way, leaving that on a corporate website and putting in a Like button won’t help much either! People will engage with interesting content, and this needs to be the focus of social. If you naturally have this, like IMDB below, it makes sense to use the Like buttons to allow users to connect directly to your content. If you’re a more traditional brand with an otherwise staid web presence and corporate website, it may make more sense to leave that where it is, and set up a separate fan page on Facebook to focus just on interesting and engaging content you can produce especially for social platforms.

One key feature of the widget is that it allows users to Like individual content, not just brands or pages. If brands have specific information, for example articles on how they are developing or changing, users can Like and share the specific content. When a user clicks on Like a one-line clickable news story is published to the users newsfeed. This link will then in turn also show on the user’s friends’ homepages.

IMDB utilising the Like button so users can like individual films

A lot of websites have already adopted the button and seen good results. Mashable reported that TypePad users who installed the Facebook Like button on their blog sidebars experienced a 50% increase in referral traffic from Facebook collectively http://mashable.com/2010/06/13/facebook-like-increases-blog-referral-traffic/.

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Believe in England

June 4, 2010
Posted by suzannah

After several months of designing, building, and testing, the FA’s app ‘Believe in England’ launched on the day that Capello announced the England Squad line-up.

An idea devised by Dare Digital and brought to life by iPlatform, the app allows users to get their very own unique England squad shirt and number, which is shown in a giant squad gallery (which includes the real squad, and lots of celebs who’ve signed up for their own unique shirts!), and can be shared back to their Facebook profile.

Join the Squad

Within the first day an overwhelming 30,000 users had joined the squad and had their own unique shirt number.

Stephen Fry tweeted about it, Campaign Magazine rated it 5 stars and due to the vast amounts of money spent on alcohol after many late nights of working on it, iPlatform may now own the rights to our local.

Stephen Fry, loving the app!

Over 77,000 users now have their own individual shirt name and number. As this will be the closest that any of us mere mortals, oh and Walcott, get to wearing the England shirt, long may it continue to grow.

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Social is conversation.

May 27, 2010
Posted by joshuamarch

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.

You can read more on what Conversocial can do here.

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.

A month ago today, at the f8 conference in San Francisco, Facebook announced a brand new suite of APIs and protocols. One of the most exciting of these, the Graph API, aims to bring simplicity and consistency to the way developers interact with resources on Facebook. It is a complete overhaul of the original API, and therefore all the existing client libraries are incompatible. Facebook released an official Python SDK, but usage is not as clean as we’d like it to be.

We’ve been working on a solution and we’re releasing it to the world: pyFaceGraph. It provides an easy and flexible way to access the Graph API, which won’t break as Facebook add new capabilities. At the moment, the client itself contains only 72 lines of code. It’s been released into the Public Domain via the Unlicense, so you’re free to use the code however you like.

The Graph isn’t the only part of Facebook’s new API offering; we plan to release OAuth 2.0 helpers for Django and WSGI applications, to make federated authentication with Facebook as simple as possible.

As the general election draws closer, Facebook looks set to be a key campaigning battleground.  With that, the social networking website has decided to step up to encourage voter registration, debate and participation from its users launching Democracy UK. The page carries the latest campaign information and opinion from different political parties.

We partnered with Facebook to deliver two different applications for this page, aimed at engaging  more than 23 million users in the country.  The “I’m Voting” badge lets people tell their friends they are voting and why.

The VoteMatch, on the other hand, recognises that often it is not obvious which party best represents your views.  So it invites you to answer some straightforward questions and match your views to the political party which best represents them. This was developed in partnership with Unlock Democracy and Telegraph.co.uk.

The UK general election will be held on Thursday 6 May 2010 and it is being dubbed “the first Facebook election” because of its use of  the social networking website during campaign.

With applications like the ones we developed, Facebook becomes the main stage for every aspect of social interaction. If you want to find out how we can help you build and deliver successful campaigns on Facebook, get in touch now.

The average consumer spent more than five and half hours on social networking sites like Facebook in December 2009, an increase of 82% in comparison to the same time a year before, according to a research report by The Nielsen Company. Australia led in average time per person spent (6 hours and 52 mins), with the United States and the United Kingdom in a close second and third, (6 hours 9 minutes and 6 hours  7 minutes respectively).

The overall traffic to social networking sites has also grown continually over the last three years. Social networks and blogs are the most popular online destination, followed by online games and instant messaging.

These numbers show once again how relevant Social Media is for marketing campaigns that wish to reach a growing part of the global population.

If you want to find out how we can help you build and deliver successful campaigns on Facebook, get in touch now.