Carrot Creative Blog

After reviewing work samples, checking with professional references and analyzing company history, Facebook® has seen Carrot Creative’s strong track record of success and has selected us to be a part of the Facebook Preferred Developer Consultant Program.  The program has been set up to help companies, brands, celebrities and organizations connect with leading consultants and developers who are familiar with building applications, Facebook Pages and Facebook Connect integrations.

What will the current and upcoming changes to the Facebook platform mean for clients and their existing Fanpages?  As Director of Technology (and Director of  the “keeping it real committee”), I wanted to give everyone a heads up on the changes, but keep my ‘geek-speak’ to a low.  ‘Keep It Simple Stupid’, that’s my motto.

Application Interaction

• There will be no more application-to-user notifications. Meaning the small notification box in the bottom right of the bar on Facebook will no longer go-off when you are notified by an application.
• All correspondence between applications and users will be moved to either:
  • Email

In a recent article from Silicon Alley Insider Mark Zuckerberg was euphemistically quoted saying Facebook allows people “to stay updated on what’s happening around them and share with the people in their lives.” Translation? People like to brag about the awesome crap they do via status updates and Tweets.

As a prolific status-updater I am in no way claiming innocence on this (my last status update was VIP at DMB with Carrot Creative, jealous yet?) But seriously, the reason I bring this to our attention is because as a creative agency, working with brands that consumers want to associate themselves with makes our jobs at Carrot a whole lot easier. We encourage “cool” brands to offer viral content users can share, blog, post, whatever you want to call it, giving the consumer more opportunity to “tag their brag.”

Last night I had the pleasure of speaking at the Facebook Developer Garage hosted at The Sullivan Room. This meant a lot to me as I had spoken at the very first Garage here in New York two years ago hyping up the newly developed The Lotto application that we had built and wanted to meet with the up and comers. In fact, it’s where I met a former Carrot employee and one of my closest friends today.

Adam Ostrow at Mashable has a great post about whether or not social media is hurting or helping corporate websites. Current brands, Vitamin Water is the example in the post, are sending fans and users to social sites like Facebook or MySpace to engage with a campaign versus the traditional corporate website.

The benefits of sending to social sites are obvious including more interaction and an easier way to gather a group of users interested in your brand versus sending them to a corporate website.

Yesterday, AllFacebook.com’s Nick O’Neil introduced Facebook’s new Post Quality Score metric for pages. According to Facebook, this is a “score measuring how engaging your content is to Facebook users.” So, the higher the Post Quality, the better your fan page is performing in terms of engagement.

For those unaware, Facebook gives the owner or administrator of a fan page access to key analytical data such as Pages Views, Total Interactions, New/Removed Fans and now, Post Quality Score. With Post Quality Score, Facebook is giving the page administrator a tool to quickly gauge their brand’s involvement and their fanbase’s corresponding reactions.

Everyone has their online identity. You have a website. You have your blog. Your LinkedIn. Twitter. Facebook. You build these networks and pages out to form “Who you are.” But, having one of these “things” does not classify who you are as a person. If you’re on Twitter, it doesn’t mean you necessarily have “quick thoughts”, if you’re on LinkedIn it doesn’t necessarily mean you are all about networking for your career. Or, at least I hope it doesn’t.

“Party with the King for the GrooGrux Grand Prize!”
Dave Matthews Band’s Album Listening Party Contest

Sure, it’s great to build cool things. But, when there’s a great strategy to reaching an audience behind the cool thing—you need to take a bigger look at it. That’s what happened with the latest project we did for Dave Matthews Band.