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 

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 

“Brands want to communicate with customers, and there’s an equation there that can be easily replicated with sports in that players want to interact with their fans to create a more loyal fan base. [In terms of the NBA] social media allows players to very easily transcend just being a basketball player. It allows any athlete to take that next step in communication with fans and make it personal.”

Check out SLAM Magazine Online and read the rest of the article HERE.

This article is copyright © 2012 

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 © 2012 

I was lucky enough to be invited to keynote yesterday’s IDI Marketers Forum International Conference at the Marriott Marquis in Times Square. The conference is intended to provide valuable, up-to-date information from top internationally recognized experts to the direct marketing community. With an experience working mostly in online marketing, one might think that a direct marketing approach needed an entirely new perspective on social media.

But, when you think about it, there’s a basic theme every industry needs to think about when entering this space— just get in it. Get in it now and learn quickly, you’re already behind.

Speaking to an audience, as I said “full of suits and ties and not really social media savvy” I approached it with the “Don’t be afraid tactic—get on it. Everyone else is.” (I also approached it with the–let’s have a conversation, I may (and did) add some curse words Gary Vaynerchuck style. I just hope my mother never comes!)  This seemed to resonate well before the storm of questions that always come at the end of these panels. What about privacy issues? Why would people want to keep putting their information out there?

It’s a very good question, but people are continuing to put information about themselves. Minor information about their favorite food or sports team turns into data that marketers have been dreaming of for years. Accept the fact that people are comfortable exposing themselves online and we can capitalize on this for our own purposes. Yes, we can be a bit selfish as marketers now and do this.

As always at these events you have some great conversations and I did with our good friend Simon Burrell from Newsweek, and Doug Sacks from Focus Worldwide. Keith Messer at Data Services is also doing some pretty amazing stuff that I look forward to hearing about more. Plus, I made some new friends from National Geographic and the Harvard Business Publishing.

This article is copyright © 2012 

Check it out and stay tuned for an upcoming prediction and resolution list about the future of web marketing in 2009 from the entire Carrot Crew.

This article is copyright © 2012