Facebook’s ubiquitous like button has worked it’s way onto almost every blog and news outlet, and many other sites that encourage their readers to share content via social media. It’s iconic ‘thumbs up’ graphic and the simplicity and ease of use have made the like button a huge success. A study by Bright Edge research shows that 25% of the top 1000 websites include a plugin from Facebook (the most popular being the like button), and that there have been over 65 million likes and shares of the top 1000 websites. This level of activity demonstrates a very tight integration between popular sites and Facebook.

Facebook’s Domination

As we all know, Facebook is an internet giant. The average salary at Facebook is around $100,000/year, they have over 2,000 staff employed at offices in 24 countries, and the company’s net worth is around $84 billion. But very few of us have paid them a single cent in our lives. What’s filling in the gap?

Really, really effective advertising. By allowing advertisers to target the exact audience they are looking for, Facebook creates a much more effective advertising platform. They know who you are, what you like, what your job is, etc. and when they show you an ad, it’s more likely to be successful when they target you. In addition, people spend significantly more time on Facebook than anywhere else on the internet, which means an ad on Facebook is significantly more likely to be seen than an ad anywhere else.

But really, I don’t mind that they use my data to help advertise. Facebook is a great service that I use all the time for free, and if their motive is to show me ads that I am more likely to actually appreciate than some strange robot telling me about lowering my mortgages, I’m all for it. But Facebook is growing, always looking for ways that they can know me better, and they often utilize technology in a very clever way and includes things that most people are not aware of.

Let’s Talk About Cookies

From Parks and Recreation on NBC

So what exactly are they doing? Before we get to that, let’s talk about cookies — and sadly, I don’t mean the kind you can eat. Cookies are a way for a website to know who you are. By default, when you log in to any website, then go to another page (maybe from your home feed to your profile), the website forgets who you are immediately (http is a stateless protocol). Having to log in again every time you go to a different page certainly wouldn’t be convenient, so cookies are the way that websites can remember who you are.

I’ll admit it, the name cookies makes no sense — they are really just small files stored on your computer that contain the name of the website that stored them, and a couple other little bits of information, most often your user name or ID. Any time you load up a new page, a website has the right to ask your computer to give it back cookies that it originally set. The computer happily abides, the website sees your user ID in the cookies, and goes “ohhh right, I remember who you are. I’ll keep you logged in then.” Makes a lot of sense, right? The important part here is that a website can only get back cookies that it set originally. Imagine if they could get any other site’s cookies as well! That would almost certainly be dangerous, and is prohibited in all modern browsers.

Cookies and the Like Button Can Log Your History

Back to the like button. Any time you put a like button or other Facebook plugin on your page, you are essentially embedding a tiny window that loads Facebook.com and just shows the button. This means that if a Facebook like button is on your page, it knows where you are, and it can get the cookie back from facebook.com as well and figure out who you are too. The embedded site (and button) then diligently records the website that you visited, the date and time that you visited it, your browser, computer’s address, and screen size, and quietly files that away, associated with your user name behind the scenes. Clever, huh? Even if you are logged out from Facebook, it still tracks you. It doesn’t use your name, but uses a unique identifier which Facebook could easily associate as soon as you log in. However, Facebook maintains that it does not engage in this behavior.

Facebook keeps a log of the last 90 webpages you visited and they were able to track, and plans on using this data to provide additional targeting information for advertising.

What else does Facebook know about you? A whole lot. And the more popular it becomes, the more they can find out. Although there is a page at which you can apparently download all your information, there is a lot that does not come with this file. Users have reported that after petitioning Facebook extensively, they were able to have Facebook send them a CD containing a PDF of all the information that has been collected about them, as it is required by law. These documents can extend up to thousands of pages and contain a vast range of information logged by Facebook, including chat logs, credit cards, emails, computers used to log in, pokes, locations/checkins, removed friends, and much more. And all of this data is retained even if your account is deleted.

What does all of this mean?

A lot of people learn about these things, panic, and swear off Facebook, claiming that it’s an invasion of privacy and puts all their personal information in public (sometimes throwing their computers in the dumpster). I think this is a bit extreme. As mentioned earlier, Facebook is a fantastic free service, and they are simply trying to keep themselves alive and funded by creating a more effective advertising platform. As with most aspects of internet privacy, it’s important to note that although they are logging loads of information about you (if you use gmail, google has all your emails stored and can read them any time as well), they are not sitting around reading your chat logs and making fun of you. Not only would there be no reason to do this, there’s no way anyone who works at Facebook has the time for it. Your data is processed en masse by computers and used simply for targeting ads.

On that note, the fact that they have so much information about you could potentially be a concern if their policies change. If they were to make your personal information available for purchase, for instance, there would be cause for concern. This does not seem likely, but it’s worth keeping a careful eye on Facebook terms and policy changes.

So while the amount Facebook knows about you may seem scary, it’s important to keep it in perspective: although it’s good to know what’s being tracked and what isn’t, as long as they continue to use your data only for advertising, it is certainly not something to be freak out about. In fact, we should be happy that it allows them to show us advertising that we could benefit from.

This article is copyright © 2012 

Here’s what works about GE’s approach: the campaign…

1. legitimately brands crowd sourced content without alienating the audience
2. rewards participants cyclically for their participation, with multiple stages to the contest
3. engages the Facebook fan base to judge the content produced on Instagram, creating earned reach

This campaign optimally integrates TV, mobile, user generated content, and Facebook. I’m sure it will be a huge success.

Read The Next Web article here or see other brands that are using Instagram here.

This article is copyright © 2012 

Last week a contingent from Carrot Creative flew out to San Francisco and attended Facebook’s f8 conference. We laughed when Andy Samberg impersonated Zuck and we cheered when the app we built for The Daily was featured as the first media app released on the new Graph API.

We went into all the breakout sessions and meetings with Facebook as well as conversations with other developers on the platform with the typical questions and concerns. Nearly each person in attendance all had the same answer:

With this recent update, Facebook has given the entire web the ability to become social. Each object, piece of data and destination can be fully connected with the social graph. On the open web Facebook’s reach started with Connect, moved onto the Like button and Comments, and now with the new Open Graph API, they’re taking objects like songs, movies and articles, and creating social stories for your ticker feed by adding verbs such as listen, watch, and read. In doing this, Facebook has laid the foundation to enter their most substantial phase of growth in becoming a platform.

At each phase, they’ve increased their reach, improved the product they’re delivering users, and empowered the developer community. To take this final step however, they’ve got to turn many basic tenets of advertising on its head, moving an entire industry that’s built on buying nouns to hopefully buying verbs.

Newton’s Third law of motion is: (T)o every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

While this may appear nebulous on the surface of this argument, it’s one of the core principles that plays out everyday in advertising:

I show you an advertisement for X and you recall this ad and hopefully one day purchase X when you need something X was created to fulfill.

Social ads managed to take this a step beyond, helping to drive engagement and audience ownership. We’ve gotten lucky because social ads inherently have more variables and more points for engagement than typical ads, and moreover, they’re based on the subject of the ad, being inherently social.

E.g. Your friend X likes page X, you should like it too!

While we all know the root of actions are verbs, what advertising at large hasn’t embraced is the fact that verbs are fundamental to marketing because they create transactions. Outside of the ‘Cost Per Click’ product, modern agency based advertising–in large part–has abandoned the fundamental aspects of conversion or performance based advertising and in doing so abandoned verbs. Carrot Creative believes this is fundamentally wrong.

Why?

Because actions are generally associated with service based companies and modern advertising was born into an industrialized world, where widgets and not services were a highly sought after metric, easy to measure and objectively defined. Widgets are nouns, and within advertising, these nouns represent objects such as CPM’s or impressions and rating points and subscribers. These are the current industry standard and are all highly scalable in their respective industries. However, these scalable ad products can no longer accurately represent the greatest and most accurate value social platforms hold.

This is why we’re fundamentally abandoning traditional forms of media buying and from here forward building our Social Activation platform off of conversion based metrics exclusively.

This article is copyright © 2012 

Timeline
Facebook’s Timeline re-imagining of the Facebook profile represents a change in thinking that ripples through every part of the Facebook eco-system including Platform. Rather then one’s profile representing an aggregation of actions, typically short-sighted in time – Timeline attempts to encompass one’s entire life-cycle online.  Actions collected by Facebook no longer rely on the now resolution, but incorporate every moment of your life until now. On the outside when interacting with the Platform you’ll first notice a change in nomenclature. The concept of “Add to Timeline” now becomes the prevailing logic around Platform interactions. Facebook users no longer conceptually interact with an “app” namespace, but rather connect with Applications meant to reinforce the idea of collecting one’s actions around the web into a coherent timeline.

• Introduction to Timeline
• Add to Timeline (Social Plugin)
• Define Timeline Aggregations
• Permissions (Add to Timeline)

The Open Graph
The idea of the Open Graph is not a new concept in Facebook. Released previously, the Open Graph is an attempt to define objects around the web in a structured and semantic way, but admittedly was never really open and was never really a graph. In the past, objects in the “graph” were generic things like ‘products’ and ‘websites’, but there were still many categoric blind spots. It was difficult to represent real-life objects in Facebook’s Open Graph if they didn’t fall into one of the predefined Categories – hence not truly an “open” solution.

Facebook’s newest revision aims to solve these shortcomings and does so by taking on the semantic web. Platform developers are now able to specify generic and specific objects all throughout the web. Where once a user “liked” a “website”, Facebook now allows all-encompassing abstractions. More transient objects, like a “feeling” can even now be represented in the graph. The mapping of /abstracts/ like this truly offers a new level of expression, and further connects real-life thinking with online activity. Only a property as ubiquitous as Facebook even has the opportunity of such an undertaking. Without it’s level of omnipresence and overall consensus this could never successfully be achieved.

• Introduction to the new Open Graph (beta)
• Open Graph Sample Applications
• Custom Open Graph Overview
• Custom Open Graph Actions

Forces Combined
When the two concepts of the Open Graph and Timeline combine they create an extremely compelling proposition, and it’s my belief they are only truly successful in tandem. The strongest case for this that I find is among actions and user behaviors in the past. In it’s earliest instance, Facebook’s value proposition was in summary. Around it’s inception, user’s lined up in an attempt to create an online representation of themselves through background info (name, school history, interests). Then Facebook introduced the Like button, a way for a user to behaviorally drive their representation, rather than introspectively. Liking an item created a lasting attachment between you and that object and therefore became part of your online make-up. Both of these iterations became wildly successful. User’s rushed to express themselves in this way, therefore creating wildly beneficial connections, but both of these instantiations only took into account the actions created from the moment you signed up. Timeline takes a much more radical and inclusive approach – the forever. By sharing the ability to back-date actions and behaviors, Facebook has opened up entirely new and seemingly enormous opportunities to generate unique connections – whether those connections are life events, interactions with friends and family, and even associations to brands and products. By exposing the frontier-land that is a person’s past, Facebook has altered the landscape of human storytelling.

Empower the people
It appears that Facebook has made a concerted effort to entrusting the future success of their platform to outside developers. The potential that Timeline and the Open Graph exposes is only effective when activated by it’s Platform developers. It’s on us to progress this concept of storytelling to it’s limits.

This article is copyright © 2012 

Facebook announced a plethora of impressive updates during F8 last month. However, did you know that Facebook also silently rolled out a massive update to their Insights dashboard? This updated dashboard now allows brands to improve their measurement of not just their Facebook Page, but of the social plug-ins on their websites as well.

With the new update, a Page admin that has claimed Insights for a particular domain will be able to collect granular data for that domain’s subsequent sub-domains. Essentially, domain users will now be able to see Facebook demographic information that encapsulates gender, age, country, city, and language breakdowns.

Facebook is now putting a much greater emphasis on actions and objects than ever before. Page admins are able to see impressions in much greater depth — what types of stories triggered those impressions (Like, share, and comment stories) and where those impressions were seen (the Newsfeed, Timeline, or the Ticker).

What’s remarkable about the addition of web page metrics to Facebook Insights is that for the first time, Page admins will be able to gain insights into the life cycle of an object right from the Facebook Dashboard.

In the example above, filters are used to boil down application data into a specific set of actions and objects. Page admins are able to see metrics tied to their complete life cycle, from insights on the particular published action to the way to traffic referrals are caused by those actions.This updated Facebook Insights dashboard will give marketers specific understanding into exactly how their promotion initiatives on Facebook are performing.

(shows breakdown by channel)

Let’s take a sample scenario for example. Client A wants to allocate a budget towards a Facebook campaign; however, they are unsure if that budget should be allocated towards building out an application concept whose goal is to have users generate share stories, or put it towards building a robust and interactive application to be featured in a user’s Timeline. If referral traffic to their website from the Timeline happens to be lower in this case, budget spent on features for other users to interact with on the user’s Timeline probably produce the referral traffic Client A is looking for. This is a simple example of how Facebook’s updated insights will bring brands closer to determining a campaign’s ROI — eliminating the guessing game played by many marketers and brands utilizing applications for campaigns. Rather then saying “our app will drive traffic to your site”, Page owners will actually be able to see how this happens and whether it is from users liking, commenting, or sharing their content. This allows brands to initiate strategy-driven campaigns around a particular user action, an insight that is clear through understanding what type of execution will help them reach their goals.

Insights like this are also extremely valuable for community management. By seeing which type of action draws the largest amount of referral traffic, community managers can better tailor their updates in order to garner more Likes, shares, or comments. With Facebook’s newly added exporting feature, community managers will also be able to figure out what times and days are best to post.

This seems to be just the beginning of what will hopefully be many updates that will improve the robustness of Facebook Insights. Just this week we saw yet another new feature — the “People Talking About” metric — designed to give Page admins an idea of how compelling the content they are posting on their page is based on how much people are talking about it (see the article in Mashable.) With these updates it seems obvious that Facebook has vested a much greater interest in helping brands and companies who market through Facebook to prove the results of their campaigns while understanding the true impact and returns that social media marketing on Facebook can have.

This article is copyright © 2012 

To demonstrate, we are using an example with Stephen Colbert running for Presidency of the United States. While we lament that this scenario is completely fictional, we are going to use this as a means of understanding what capabilities are available to users with the Timeline.

Here we can see Stephen taking advantage
of his cover to advertise his campaign.

Events are now grouped together by month and display in
a concise fashion making it easier for friends to join.
The advent of the Timeline also makes it very easy to go back
and look at previous events that others have attended.

Photos take center stage on the Timeline, offering a gallery view
and the ability to activate a lightbox with one click.

Facebook users will have the ability to feature any story they wish.
Above, you can see how a post looks before and after it has been featured.
The Featured view expands the content to a full column width view.

Another addition to Facebook is the ability to post Milestones and Experiences.
A Milestone comes with the ability of uploading a photo to commemorate
the event. These milestones also have the ability to be featured and will
display very similarly to the featured photo we looked at earlier.

Work and Educational information received a major revamp as well,
being implemented right into your stream of stories. Now there is
no need to toggle a user’s information tab to view this data.

The experience of using a Timeline is very unique to other social networks. Having the ability to go back to a specific period in time is refreshing and yields new ways of consuming information. This change makes information seem more historical and we thought this would be a great way to showcase that. Also, for those of you wondering, you can sign up for the Facebook Timeline right here.

To view Stephen’s full timeline, click here.

This article is copyright © 2012 

Introducing: Platlas from Carrot Creative on Vimeo.

Here’s a quick look at the people and thinking behind Platlas, the first ever social media platform atlas. Meet the engineers, managers and research analysts that made Platlas for Facebook come to life. And see for yourself exactly what all the fuss about, and how you can use Platlas to better understand the countless interactions and connections that are possible on Facebook.

This article is copyright © 2012 

This article is copyright © 2012 

We’re here in force at F8 and jazzed about the platform changes in store at Facebook, some of which we’ve been honored to build with via our work on the The Daily Facebook app.

We will be following up to this post soon, with our additional thoughts on what this means for users, brands and what will surely be a leap in the evolution of how we share, experience and archive our daily lives.

Announced today:

Timeline: The story of your life in 3 pieces… All stories, all apps, a new way to express who you are.

Essentially, Timeline organizes your life – as you’ve shared it on Facebook over the years- for exploration. More importantly, it will allow users to better chronicle their lives moving forward (as well a brand new level of experiences), with ease. Apps will facilitate this new level of content on the Timeline, at the user’s request. Facebook will present history to the user in a “best of ” format, but will allow users to hide content as they choose, or highlight items that Facebook may have missed. Timeline will also launch with a full-fledged mobile-side experience. Privacy settings will be available for Timeline, and individual pieces of content on it.

At first glance, it’s beautiful.

A New Class of Apps: Define an action and publish it.

We’ve experienced Communication and Gaming apps to date. Now, Facebook is revolutionizing experiences for Media (Music, Movies, TV, News, Books) and Lifestyle (Exercise, Food, Travel, Fashion). Users will be able to connect to anything in any way they want, which will allow them to create an enormous amount of new connections and shared discover shared experiences. Users will experience a new permissions screen, detailing exactly what will be published to their Timeline.

Driving this, is the New Open Graph.

• “A Frictionless Experience”: Users need not be interrupted by Share prompts because activity will be fed to their Timelines. Lightweight material will be fed to their Stream, with popular or pattern-content highlighted in the News Feed to help other friends discover it.
• “Real-time Serendipity“: This is where the Ticker comes into play most. As users interact with media and content in real-time, their actions are shared live in the Ticker. The power of this is demonstrated effectively by our own client, The Daily: as users read news (through Facebook-connected or native services), their friends will have the ability to read those specific articles as well. Effectively, this offers “Serendipitous” experiences facilitated by Facebook and a user’s favorite apps.
• “Finding Patterns“: As items hit the newsfeed, Facebook will recognize patterns and showcase overlapping behaviors of friends, for effective recommendation and discovery. Users also receive Notification when their friends discover through them and interact with media through their ticker feed.

Fascilitated by the Canvas apps, Facebook can now bridge the connection between their users and the experiences of their users across software and websites. Ticker items that indicate a friend is listening to a song or watching a film will not only link to the content, but launch the experiences immediately, inline, for the user’s friends.

The “Like” stories are expanding to other verbs: “Chris Petescia watched to Star Wars” for instance. The stories generated by a user’s App interactions hit the Newsfeed, Ticker and Timeline. Wherever users interact with applications and media (for which they have opted into for publishing), it will feed back to their Timeline.

Timing: Facebook will provide access to Developers (like us!), immediately. For everyone else, it will be rolling out over the next few months and likely, the Timeline itself will be relatively sparse for users initially.

Synopsis: The new features rolling out to Facebook are all about having access to and sharing the history of your life: what users have shared in the past, and the wealth of new experiences that Apps will help facilitate for you in the future.  On the flip-side, it’s also about discovery and shared experiences as users see and interact with the ongoing history of their friends’ own experiences.  Everything Facebook users already share, and everything they will now be able to share, will be logged to the user’s personal preferences on their Timelines. Everything is personalized, and real-time feedback and interaction on content will determine it’s value.

Note: some of this post contains paraphrasing and partial quotes from various Keynote presenters. Thanks to Adam for helping out with detailed notes!

This article is copyright © 2012 

Platlas.com: A love letter to our favorite social networks.

Earlier this summer, we took on the somewhat daunting task of exhaustively mapping out the ecosystem of Facebook. Even though Carrot is a Preferred Development Consultant and we consider ourselves severely versed in the Platform, we still learned A LOT by delving into Facebook so expansively. However, our ultimate goal was to narrow down a story within this vast array of features, into something compelling and widely relevant to us: our clients and our industry. Platform education is an integral part of our relationships with our brand clients, so we decided to focus on what is most relevant to them: content creation and interactions.

We began with a flat infographic (PDF) to share with our current and prospective clients, mapping the features available to both a Facebook User and to a Facebook Page. For each feature, there are a number of response actions available to Facebook users; we are calling these “edges.” Essentially, Facebook features – anything from Profile fields to Status/Wall updates – allow users to create and share content. From that content, users have actions such as “Like” and “Comment,” a variety of tagging options, and so on. These edge actions are what make Facebook truly a powerful experience for users and a valuable tool for brands. They are what populate newsfeeds and enable the spread of content from Page to Profile, Application to inbox. Taking a step back to get a bird’s-eye perspective of the spread and availability of these edges, across all features, has helped us garner a better understanding of content-share relationships. We also realized that experiencing a flat version of this map is limiting. So, a new Carrot Labs project was launched, to bring this infographic to life as an interactive experience.

Just as the visual experience we have built has been an exciting experiment, so has been the development on the backend. Jeff, who handled the bulk of development, will be detailing this in the near future… but it’s worth noting that this experience does not use any flash. It is a mix of SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics), Javascript, and whole-lotta math.

As with any ecosystem, the Facebook platform is constantly evolving and growing. This is exciting for us as we’ve built this “Social Platform Atlas,” because it means we will be continually releasing new versions (while archiving previous ones for reference). The beta launched Platlas (accurate to Sept 1, 2011) is already slightly out of date with Facebook rolling out changes in the last 2 weeks as they lead up to F8. Not to fear – we are already tracking these updates on the Platlas News page, and will implement new releases of the infographic as often as we can. Additionally, we are excited to have a Pages interactive view in the works (for now, you can view the flat version). If all goes well and we see the social community enjoying our Facebook-centric Platlas, we will be taking a look at other social platforms to help tell their stories of content and sharing as well.

You can follow Platlas updates on Twitter and of course, on Facebook. Be sure to visit Platas News to keep on top of the latest in Facebook updates and our continued development of the project!

This article is copyright © 2012