At its very core, Facebook has set out to make it dead-pan simple to integrate Facebook all over the web (see: CNN.com, Yelp.com). So what does that mean for the way we surf the web? A lot. Allow me to explain…

Social Plugins
Facebook has released a suite of social plugins that make it amazingly simple to add contextual and social features to your existing website. Most prominent and perhaps effective example is the new “Like” plugin. Facebook has decided to make the “Like” it’s most central property, after of course, the user. By allowing the ability to Like almost any content on the web, Facebook aims to centralize user preferences and activity by allowing all users to Like content. An interesting aspect to the new web-wide Like is that “liked” content will now be part of your profile info, therefore using user actions to drive preferences, rather then profile forms.

Here’s a quick run-through of some other Social Plugins you will no doubt be encountering in your travels:

Activity Feed – An embeddable mini-feed of recent activity for your website. User’s friends show up first, then the rest of user activity, including shares and likes.

Comments – Not new to the Facebook bag of tricks, but now much easier to implement.  You can now add Facebook comments to your website or blog posts. This resembles posting to a User’s wall – with a nice checkbox to add published posts to the poster’s profile (say that five times fast).

Facepile – 
A really nice way to show potential users which of their friends have signed up for your website by showing a row of profile pictures.

Login with Faces – 
A single sign-on button. This combines a Facebook Connect like sign-in, while showing a version of Facepile to encourage engagement.

Recommendations – 
A nice embeddable widget that offers users recommendations on content. Signed out users see the most popular interactions with your website, while signed-in users get recommendations pulled from the interactions your friends have, allowing it to recommend content more intelligently.

The Open Graph – Get used to this term, Open Graph, because soon enough you will be hearing and seeing it all over. The Open Graph Protocol is Facebook’s attempt to create a seamless and semantic way to connect users and content all over the web. Now to a lot of people that doesn’t mean much – but soon enough you will see the impact such an ambitious protocol will have.

By connecting real-life content like celebrities, brands, products, movies (you know the stuff they have Facebook Pages for) to Facebook’s Open Graph – Facebook is able to make intelligent connections by studying user preferences and interactions. Furthermore, by promoting semantic indexing, using snazzy HTML5 style meta tags, Facebook is able to smoothly index what would normally be scattered all over the web, into clear contextual searches and relationships. The ability to add context to web content is incredibly powerful.  Contextually, it’s something many companies have worked towards (see: http://getglue.com/) but with Facebook’s influence – this will have a massive impact.

What does it all mean?

Facebook has become the party everyone wants an invitation to, and they’re charging at the door.  For one, it means you are going to see A LOT more of Facebook around the internet. The inherent value of Facebook’s social tools and ease of implementation makes it a great opportunity for content generators to create discussion and interaction. Of course, this doesn’t just benefit the content creators – but greatly helps Facebook’s reach around the web.

Facebook has always been able to make associations and hypertarget users through their friends, fans, and interests – but now, by positioning itself all over the web, Facebook can also make connections by the way you surf. Where Google indexes the world by what they are looking for, Facebook may soon be able to index the world once you get there (and know what your favorite band is too).

It’s a classic business model with a new-wave twist. Offer consumers something of such high value that they become evangelists, proliferate and repeat. In this man’s opinion, I can see this working towards a world-wide advertising platform. Imagine a world where ads are not only contextually accurate (see: Open Graph) but hyper-acute. It’s clear Facebook is positioning themselves with their influence and leverage to offer such unique data to the rest of the world. Who is the end user? Who are their friends? What are their interests? Where do they hang out online? These are all questions marketers strive to infer, but soon enough, Facebook will have the answers.

This article is copyright © 2010 

“We’re thrilled to be chosen as a Facebook Preferred Developer Consultant and be part of a program made up of such creative, forward-thinking people and agencies,” said Kyle McDonald, Director of Technology at Carrot Creative.  “With the current and upcoming changes to the Facebook Platform happening, all of us here at Carrot try to keep ahead of the curve, keeping ourselves informed of updates and new technologies that further enhance the Facebook experience.”

Carrot Creative’s work with a number of clients – including Crayola, The Onion and MLB.com – has demonstrated that the Facebook Platform offers a tremendous opportunity for us to execute clever and lively campaigns for our clients and their customers. Our success in building quality user experiences, clean designs and measurable campaigns keeps clients coming back for more.

The Facebook Platform was launched in 2007 to empower developers and entrpreneurs to make the Web more social for users.  Millions of Facebook users return to the site each day, providing unparalleled distribution potential for applications and the opportunity to build business for international brands.

This article is copyright © 2010 

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
  •  The Stream (the Facebook Wall)
  • The New Application Dashboard
• Application Invites and requests will be moved (read: buried) to the Inbox, under an Applications section.
• Application News Feed Items will be moved (read: buried) to the new Application Dashboard that shows users 3 sections:
  • Your recent activity among applications
  • Your friends recent application activity
  • Listing of friends and applications they have recently used
  • http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/images/0/03/Games-dashboard-annotated.png
• The Application Dashboard will have a little counter that you can increment as alerts, however it doesn’t seem to be an effective alternative to Notifications.

Profile Integration

• There will no longer be “boxes” on profiles.
• There will no longer be “extended profile info” on profiles.
• There will no longer be Profile Sidebar Items.
• All application branding on Profiles / Pages will live as a “Tab.”
• The new width of Profile “Tabs” will be 520px which is down from the 760 pixels as it currently stands.

Odds & Ends

• A lot of the older posting to newsfeed API calls have been deprecated and replaced with new ones.
• Applications will have the ability to prompt user access to their email addresses to send them info/notifications.
• Most of these changes are coming down the pipeline with no clear timeline, but on the upside:

• They usually give 30-60 days before they get rid of something.
• They usually stage a new feature for ~ 30 days before they push them live.
• They’ve added an “Add Bookmark” button for adding your applications to the bottom bar on Facebook easier.
• They’ve made improvements to the native analytics for applications a.k.a “Insights.”

Gamechangers
The Open Graph API will allow any page on the Web to have all the features of a Facebook Page. Once implemented, developers can include a number of Facebook Widgets, like the Fan Box, or leverage any API, which enable the transformation of any Web page so it functions similar to a Facebook Page. This has enormous implications on the way people consume brands with Facebook. It’s essentially having a brand’s Facebook page be their actual web-page.

In the end what Facebook’s team has done seems to be two fold. On one hand, developers will now have less effective tools than they once had to spread their applications but on the other hand, I believe we will begin to see truly creative and effective applications rise to the top.  Check out the Facebook Developers Roadmap for more information.

This article is copyright © 2010 

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.”

Here are a couple of status updates as good examples

• Just had an amazing 8 mile run with my new Asics“
• “Won free tickets to see Bruno tonight!”

(disclaimer we have no relationship with Asics or Bruno)
By using these brands to vindicate their bragging, these people unknowingly promoted the brand in perfect context… textbook marketing. Technology platforms that monitor this kind of “name-dropping” across the web give brands and marketers a direct link to how consumers incorporate the product with their lifestyle. Understanding a brands “social reputation” is an integral part of a marketers job.

So with that, take a minute to think about what brands YOU want to associate yourself with and do them a favor and find them on Twitter, join their Facebook Fan Page, or hey, tattoo their logo on your forearm. A good one to get started with? The Carrot Twitter page and Facebook Fan Page.

What do you think, do you have any examples of shameful bragging that put brands in a good (or bad) light?

This article is copyright © 2010 

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.

Last night, when the opportunity to speak came about we jumped on it immediately. Sure, we knew everyone would be talking about Facebook Connect, the API…all the stuff developers want to know. But, from a business standpoint, the conversations we are having with brands and the need for custom Fan Pages is a topic that needed to be discussed.

Fan Pages are so important. We’ve blogged about them here. I’ve tweeted about it. Our clients are making kick ass strides in the space. As I said last night (in between telling the crowd to “STFU”) I highlighted the importance of claiming your brand on Facebook. Facebook Fan Pages are becoming the go to sites for brands to send their consumers too. It’s not the main websites anymore, it’s Facebook.

Other topics I discussed:

• Get a vanity URL. Contact Facebook and ask them for it. We did it. Check it out: http://www.facebook.com/CarrotCreative
• Keep the fan page exciting-content is key here. You need to have a calendar of updates ready to be pushed out to your fans. They expect that. Whether or not you’re syncing up Twitter or a blog feed, uploading new videos every week, the content needs to be timely and updated.
• Analytics. Facebook has one of the most unique analytic reporting systems around. Use them to monitor the growth. You’ll be surprised at all you can find out from these stats and how important they are to the client. Knowing that there was a spike in traffic based on a campaign provides ROI reasoning and important lessons to be learned for the next round of outreach.
• Watch how your fans are interacting. Our good friends at The Onion sent over some really cool stats for the presentation about the interaction on their page. Did you know that there are over 260,000 fans, approximately 5,000 interactions per day and a lot more liking than commenting than wall posting? Bonus Cool fact: People love to tag The Onion photos with themselves or made up people/information.

Thanks again to Andrew Cherwenka from Trapeze for getting us on the panel and to Facebook for the support of the Garage. This event is something we look forward to every year where we can hear the exciting stuff being worked on by some of the smartest folks in the industry. (Side note: AppSavvy was a bit self promoting for this crowd. This event is the time to learn, not promote as mentioned in the initial outline of the event. This is not the place to hype up what you’re doing and I think the crowd picked up on it.)

If we didn’t get a chance to meet, become a fan of Carrot Creative on Facebook and let’s hang out there. Or, send me a shout on Twitter.

This article is copyright © 2010 

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.

Adam hits the point with something we’ve been saying for awhile: get your fans in one place. While corporate websites are great for branding and having a secure presence for all the information about your company, many are static and not interactive. Plus, you’re not offering any incentive to come back to the site and collect information about all of the interested people clicking.

By driving people to Facebook and having them simply click that they’re a FAN of the brand, you’ve got them. You may not have really exciting stuff to give them now, but that doesn’t mean you won’t later on. For your already loyal set of fans, they’ll gladly join the page. And for the “fans on the fence” or new fans, you’ll be able to entice them on a place they’re already familiar with.

Here are a few doing a great job in driving folks to their social sites:

• Universal Pictures: While they have set up basic websites for some of their summer movies, Universal is also sending fans to designated Facebook Fan Pages. (The official Bruno website is actually a MySpace page)  Land of the Lost. Drag Me to Hell. Public Enemies. Bruno. Funny People.  (I have to wonder what the marketing team at Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian is thinking about this. There site isn’t interactive at all besides a simple game, which is comparable to most movie sites. Think about all of the interaction they could have had on social media with the characters and content!)
• Southwest Airlines: The crafty crew at Southwest Airlines set up a photo contest using their official Twitter account where users submitted a  photo of a very specific travel or tourism-related picture. The company offered a travel package to the winners. If you check out the Twitter account, you can already see the overwhelming response. Why? Well, it’s easy. A simple upload of a photo and a tweet takes 2 minutes. Plus, people are on Twitter and thus familiar with the platform. Sending people to the official Southwest Airlines website for a contest would be a bit odd wouldn’ it?
  
• Skittles: And then of course there is Skittles.com, which is completely shifted into a social site. (Right now it’s YouTube. In the past, Twitter and Wikipedia were the backdrop of the site.) We all remember the backlash, but there website still has everything on it to get more information about their company from a social media perspective.

What do you think? What other corporate sites are driving people to social media sites?

This article is copyright © 2010 

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.

When interesting content is created and posted on a page, fans have the opportunity to comment, like it, and write on the page’s wall. When fans interact with a certain status update, event add or note, they are simultaneously giving feedback and spreading the word. The post they interact with has a chance to gain buzz by being published on the fan’s News Feed, where their friends will see it.

Post Quality a great measuring stick for success because it takes into account the engagement levels of fans within a strict time period (7 days) and compares activity to similar pages with a similar number of fans.

For Carrot, this new metric comes in very handy. It will quickly show us how our clients are doing when interacting with their community, and the historical data will give us insight when stepping in on a new account. In the instance that a client has a low PQS, we can help guide them to more seamless, welcomed interactions with their fanbase. If a client has a high PQS, we can rest assured that they “get it” and that we’re doing our job well and meeting our client’s digital strategy needs. The goal, of course, is to always facilitate an opportunity for the most positive interactions, thus raising the PQS.

With Post Quality Score, Facebook gives administrators a chance to gauge perfomance and plan in a timely manner. When it comes to monitoring social media and proving ROI, this new metric is another step in the right direction. Hopefully more useful insights like this will become available from Facebook and other social networking platforms down the road.

This article is copyright © 2010 

There are more ways to bringing out your personality within your online profile. Facebook Fan Pages are a GREAT start to this. We love Facebook Fan Pages here at >carrot creative and I can promise you there will be more posts about this topic.

If you check out my Facebook page, you can tell that I like sushi, baseball, chardonnay and Dave Matthews Band. Sure, there are many OTHER things I like, but you already know  a little more about me than “she has a blog and a Twitter.”

Looking at this from a marketers perspective, brands need to have a strong presence on these Facebook Fan Pages. If I have a favorite type of perfume that I use every day, what’s stopping me from showing that off and adding that to my Facebook page? In fact, from writing this post I found that Burberry London is ON Facebook and I can become a fan of the brand. Now people know that I like this type of perfume.(And yes, that’s why I smell so good.)

When Facebook rolled out the new Fan Page redesign, PR people everywhere did a happy dance. An integrated place to push out a brand and everything that goes into it? Here we go! Mashable wrote up a great outline on these pages and how marketers will need to get involved when designing these out. We’ve had the opportunity to work with this for a bunch of brands already and the opportunity to really engage with your brands fans on these are amazing. The easy ways to share the content (there is a SUGGEST PAGE button—easy!) and have the content show up immediately in your news feed provides for a quick jumpstart to your viral campaign. There’s no reason to not be doing this.

So, brands—make sure you’re out there on these Fan Pages. Users are looking to add a bit more personality to their online identity. People are proud to say they eat Carl’s Jr. hamburgers any chance they get. They enjoy saying they watch Lost or wear Nike sneakers. Make it available for them and start bringing these fans to a place where you can interact with them directly.

What do you think? Do you build out your online presence on Facebook? Are you a fan of brands and objects?

This article is copyright © 2010 

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.

As many know, the DMB fan base was collected and solidified through grass roots- the 90s viral, trading music from tape recorder to tape recorder. Just shy of 20 years later, the band’s fan base has grown, evolved and adapted as technology has done the same thing. Snail Mail gave way to early email lists, to forums (which are still booming), to social media platforms like Facebook. The means have changed, but the  fans’ passion is the same.

In recognition of this shift to viral digital platforms, Dave Matthews Band’s management Redlight Communications is promoting the Band’s upcoming album Big Whiskey & The GrooGrux King with some viral contests and interactive projects, the first of which we just finished up work on.

We’re pleased to announce the Facebook-based Advanced Listening Party contest, where users create a Facebook Event and invite friends in hopes of receiving an advanced copy of the album. The 100 Facebook Events with the highest members in attendance win a chance to dance to DMB before anyone else. They’re also encouraged to document their party with video, in order for a chance at a grand prize to win Front Row tickets, accommodations and a special meet & greet with Dave Matthews himself.

The contest launched Tuesday and already 395 events have been created. 395! In 4 days! Obviously, this group is largely influenced by promotions for Dave himself. but this is pure proof of creating a campaign for your audience, knowing your audience and reaching them on that level.

Some tips we’ve learned:

• If you’re using Facebook as a platform for the campaign, use the Newsfeed to your advantage. Your friends see your Newsfeed and are interested in what is going on. By placing a catchy title, image, etc…you’re already increasing the chance of people finding your item.
• Let your users and fan base spread the news for you. If you’ve built the proper amount of content for them to share, they’ll spread it on their own. Let them do it and watch with a smile on your face.
• Monitor it. The pick up and amount of links shared is important. Make sure you have a plan in place to track everything early on. Results are not only important for ROI, but it provides that OH COOL! factor as well.

Are you a fan of DMB? We definitely encourage you to take part! (And tell them >carrot sent you!)

This article is copyright © 2010 

Everyone likes friends. Friends are there for you when you need them. Friends are there to talk to you, hang out with you, have good times with. Friends in the Web 2.0 world (ugh buzz word) can mean something completely different though. Friends on Facebook may mean something to one person and something completely different to another. Friends on Twitter? You have followers. You follow them back possibly. Are they your friend? Sure. Some of them are. Others? No way.

So what’s the big deal about having a bunch of friends online? From what we’ve seen,Web 2.0 friends are there to share your ideas with, retweet your tweets, post links to your blog and help create an online presence for you or your brand. When I saw this blog today about Burger King encouraging users on Facebook to ditch friends on Facebook to get a free Whopper, my first reaction was: WHAT?. Then I thought: BRILLIANT. Getting rid of friends is actually a positive thing these days.

There is too much noise out there on social networks. There is no reason to follow 5,000 people on Twitter or friend thousands on Facebook because honestly…you’re probably not going to listen to all that they’re saying so what’s the point? You need to listen to targeted people that supply content that you’re interested in. Then, you need to respond and interact. This builds your brand and adds value to the community.  Brands should do the same and interact with their audience—not just the mass community. While this may not be the overall goal of the campaign, I’m interested to see the results. How easy is it for people to just clean up some people they’re not interested in hearing about anymore for a free burger? Then, when they realize how great it is to clear out some of the clutter, will they continue to do so for their personal benefit?

What do you think?

Photo courtesy of Paul Watson.

This article is copyright © 2010