Get ready for the Online Complain Train, folks. It’s official, whether you’re a fan or not: Facebook Timeline is set to become a standard feature on all profiles over the next few weeks.

The latest Facebook profile change has received mixed reviews since it was first introduced last year. Some people love the cover photo feature (Mashable has compiled some truly awesome ones here), but others find the layout difficult to navigate and far too intrusive.

I’d have to agree. Everything below the cover photo feelscluttered and photo albums are difficult to find, making Facebook Stalking much more of a challenge. Plus, it’s easier than ever for users to view posts from any moment in your life; all they have to do is find a particular year and click “All Posts,” unless you’re vigilant about your privacy settings.

Here’s how Facebook is pitching Timeline:

As always, change is never welcome on the Internet, but odds are pretty good that the ruckus over Timeline will boil over in just a few weeks. Or will it?

Google+ is seeing Timeline as an opportune time to unveil their new target demographic: teens. Previously restricted to individuals aged 18 and older, Plus has recently opened up to people between the ages of 13 – 17.

According to GrownUpThinking.com, evidence suggests that the teen demographic is itching for a Facebook alternative. Based on their research, many of the teens who participated in the survey called the changes “confusing, annoying, disappointing and useless.”

With Timeline presenting more change than some users might welcome, can we expect to see more attention coming to Google+?

Let us know what you think in the comments!

So with simple, instant worldwide communication, it’s not really possible for markets to engage in “stand-alone” campaigns anymore. All campaigns live in a world of interconnected media, where TV personalities reference Twitter feeds and where consumers can easily build their personalized news sources. Accordingly, Paid Search doesn’t stand alone. The most popular method of Paid Search, Pay-Per-Click, is a valuable tactic that both feeds off of and drives intricate and interrelated marketing campaigns.

So in what ways can you utilize Pay-Per-Click to actually enhance your other marketing and public relations objectives and campaigns? Here are a few examples:

1. Public Relations

If you have a background in Public Relations, you know that one of the most popular defenses for Crisis Communication is a good offense. If you are a larger corporation and there is a crisis (think last year’s BP Oil leak), if you can get to the media and public first, you have the one-time opportunity to create perception. In marketing, perception is simple to create and very difficult to shift or change once it’s created. So if you have an Oil Leak and you know consumers are going to be searching in Google for news about “Gulf Oil Spill”, what do you do? Well you can let them find other websites with whatever media news is hot that minute, or you can setup a Pay-Per-Click campaign immediately and drive people to “Official BP News Page for The Gulf Oil Leak”. While it seems counterintuitive to bring consumers to a page where you are actually acknowledging the problem and discussing it, you get the opportunity to shift their perception and explain the situation, before other potentially far worse conclusions are drawn. So did BP spend? Yes, yes they did. In July 2010 (just after the height of the Oil Spill) an internal Google document was leaked. It showed that BP increased their PPC spend from nearly nonexistent to a whopping $3.59 Million dollars in June 2010 during the spill.
Perhaps you watched the superbowl and you saw Groupon create a bit of a stir with their socially incorrect commercials. Well, this would have been a great opportunity to run a comprehensive campaign showing consumers that they actually are a massive supporter of social charities, yet most people left February with a bad taste in their mouth about Groupon to the tune of roughly a 10% average increase in negative sentiment.

2. Impression Capture

When you spend millions of dollars to run a superbowl commercial, shouldn’t you make ever good-faith effort to maximize that investment? Of course. A simple, yet underused method is to make sure that anyone who sees your commercial but doesn’t remember your exact URL, is driven to your website. You could setup a large PPC campaign capturing every keyword related to your brand, product and services, for the 24-72 hours following the commercial airing, drive people to a unique place on your website reminding them about the benefits they remember from your commercial. Even better, extend the excitement the consumer feels by offering a continued experience, or build some mystery in your commercial and guide people via PPC search ads to a place where they can explore your brand and answer the mystery offered in the commercial.
The same techniques apply to radio campaigns, of course, since consumers are again trying to remember something, anything, about your brand that will help them find you later. Magazines are a bit more portable, so it’s easier to bring them with you and type in the URL exactly, but how many times are people reading on the go, and only remember something a few days or a week down the road, and then search to find the provider? I’ve done it, you’ve done it. Don’t let that impression go to waste by not following through.

3. Brand Association

Let’s imagine I’m the marketing director for a company that sells aftermarket car seats. And I’m not talking the kind your newborn sits in, I’m talking suede, hand stitched custom luxury seats with an under-seat air conditioning system built in. Do people search for these seats? Maybe a few, but not many. But do people search for Mercedes, Aston Martin, Ferrari, Bugatti and Porsche? Of course they do – by the tens of thousands. How many of these people might be interested in after-market custom seats curing the horrible “thigh-stick-to-seat” condition found in hot climates like my home state of Arizona? Probably more than one, and likely, associating your brand with related luxury brands, offers you a way to cheaply build some brand cache of your own, while hopefully garnering a few new customers along the way.

These are just a few concepts, but there are dozens of other creative ways to utilize Pay-Per-Click marketing to assist, rather than degrade your more traditional marketing and public relations tactics.

Remember, in a world where you can text your sister from central park in NYC, to find out how she is liking that amazing (and scary) live Sushi experience she’s having while on vacation in Japan, and in mid-conversation she asks you why your friend Tony would check-in to Starbucks on Bryant street (in downtown San Francisco), when The Coffee Bar is right next door on Mariposa St. and it’s clearly “way better”…well, communication and media are fast. As a marketer, you’ll truly only get one good chance to control an entire stream of exploration, research and consumption by your target consumer. If you mess it up, yeah you can try again, but it’ll be harder, less effective and more expensive next time.

Feeling talkative? Great! Let us know what other creative uses you’ve employed over the years.

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Note: I originally wrote this article for our good friends over at Agencyside @agencyside.

What is it?

From a technology standpoint, the Facebook “Like” button is part of a larger technology initiative called the Open Graph Protocol or Open Graph API.  The platform is an upgrade to last year’s Open Graph announcements. It also replaces the “Fan” button with the “Like” button.

The new protocols will not only allow organizations to have all the features currently found on their Facebook pages page such as being able to “Fan” or now “Like” the organization, allowing that action to show up on people’s profiles, publish that action across their friend’s newsfeeds, but will allow Facebook to start building massive amounts of data on how Facebook users interact with sites within and beyond the Facebook walls.

Simply put the “Like” button and Open Graph Protocol will allow Facebook and organizations to understand web users’ habits across the larger web. They want to build not only a social, but personalized web whose hub is Facebook.

Organizations will be able to find out what users like, what they do not like, what their friends and connections like and then tailor a user’s site experience to that data. They can leverage this platform to make their websites more personalized based on site visitor’s Facebook profiles and actions within Facebook and outside the walls of the social network by utilizing data from sites that also adopt the Open Graph Protocol.

One of the earliest integrations of the new protocols is Levi’s ecommerce site http://store.levi.com/. You can now see the products that Facebook users like and what your friends’ like. Based on your interactions on the site, Levi’s can also provide targeted and personalized recommendations for different products.

Why it matters:

1. Facebook is the most used social network by monthly active users. With just under half a billion users, Facebook boasts the largest active user base of any US-based social network. Need some perspective on that number? If Facebook was a country, it would be the third-largest behind only India and China. Needless to say, it has the largest potential reach of any social network for your brand to connect with consumers.
2. Facebook could be the key to building the true semantic web. Due to the number of users and the ability for Facebook to collect data from its and any site that implements the Open Graph protocols, Facebook is potentially becoming the hub of the semantic web. By semantic web, we are referring to the idea of building a web ecosystem where a user’s needs can be anticipated, understood and personalized for them. Think of demographic or geographic targeting on other sites such as Google, but take it to the next level, where a website understands what you and your network likes, does not like, buys, reads etc, and then personalizes your experience around that data.
3. The growth and data provided by the Open Graph is already massive. The new Open Graph Protocols were announced less than a week ago and already some 50,000 sites have implemented it and Facebook is seeing over 1 billion “Likes” per day.

Privacy Concerns:

The greatest concern is privacy. Facebook has not effectively promoted exactly what these changes mean for users, at least not in terms that the average Facebook user understands. The Open Graph Protocol allows third-parties to access most, if not all, of any Facebook user’s data as long as they are opted into the program through their security settings. It’s important to note that all users were automatically opted into the Open Graph Protocol.

How your organization can use it:

1. Site registration using Facebook. Similar to how Facebook Connect allowed websites to register and sign-on utilizing their Facebook account, sites can even more easily integrate Facebook’s authentication features to allow users to register for your site. Websites can access a Facebook users real name, email address, profile picture and list of friends. This sign up functionality can either replace or supplement your current system and can help increase user signups and improve the quality of user data.
2. Interaction and Engagement. With new features such as the “Like” button and additional sharing features, websites can now engage with visitors in deep ways such as what the larger Facebook community likes on your site or what friends of specific users like. This will help create engaging and meaningful experiences for Facebook users.
3. Syndication beyond the walls of Facebook. Websites that incorporate the “Like” features across different pieces of content—such as articles, images, products, etc.—will allow site visitors to easily spread that content across Facebook and web.

All of these opportunities can ultimately help increase the viral potential of your content. To further illustrate the process, click on the image below which will bring up a larger image to illustrate the “like” process.

- Michael

While we have a lot to learn, we’ve learned quite a bit from the numerous social campaigns we’ve managed for our clients. One of the major findings is that social campaigns are unique. And I mean really unique. You can’t force a customer dialog if the customer doesn’t want to have one. The campaign must be both transparent and interesting enough to make a customer want to interact with your brand. The product, however, doesn’t have to be overly interesting, because most likely there are some people out there who are already fans of this product or brand, and the job of the social campaign is to unite these people and allow them to communicate directly with the brand.

And all of this has taught us a few things about measuring social. It’s tricky for sure. Each campaign is going to have a variety of stakeholders that will all care about different things. Some will care about fans and followers. Some will care about impressions. Some will care about clicks and interaction levels. Some will just care about direct purchase and lead acquisition. So…what is a marketer to do? We’re starting to work through this conversation with clients and help define a “path” of metrics to track. We are working a funnel process, or a customer purchase cycle, to identify clear and measurable points of interaction for the consumer during this campaign. This sounds easier than it is, because each business has a different understanding of their customer, and the purchase cycle, not to mention a different business need for running a social campaign in the first place.

For example, say a client is doing a social campaign to introduce a new tech product into the marketplace. Perhaps we’re holding a live world release and product demo on Ustream, and have held an event registration in Facebook. To promote this, we’ve built a twitter following based on a sneak peak photo opportunity campaign, and an event live-tweet road show. We’ve posted these pictures in a tagged Flickr and Photobucket account. We’ve ran connect based ads that are customized to users profiles in Facebook. We’ve ran ads based on job categories in LinkedIn. We’ve initiated a good forum discussion board and have seeded tech blogs with hot information releases. New product demo’s have been sent to leading bloggers and industry journalists. The campaign kicks off and it’s time to report the initial results. Ideally we’ve worked with the client ahead of time to identify a path to report along that makes decision making easy. Perhaps we’ve created a funnel reporting to identify:

1. Customer Awareness – Facebook Fans, Twitter Followers, Ad Impressions, Blog Posts and Articles Written
2. Customer Engagement – Facebook Fan Interactions & Posts, Twitter Mentions & Retweets, Blog Comments, Article Comments and Reads, Photo Views
3. Customer Activity – Event Registrations, Demo Launch Views

The metric that we’re measuring changes as the campaign progresses, so naturally the reporting and focus should change as well.

So, bottom line, it’s a lot of work. But, when this is done correctly, we’re starting to see some unique findings. For one, clients are starting to enjoy their social campaigns. These campaigns are allowing them some artistic freedom, and a natural extension of what they do anyway. The clients are sometimes even becoming a bit more invigorated with their brand, almost as if learning more about it for the first time. And customers are responding. They are participating and asking questions. They are submitting information and scheduling events. They are event buying products and helping companies streamline R&D processes, through direct conversation and feedback.

Here’s an interesting article about how social media engagement levels are varied and should be looked at uniquely.

This past December, I was visiting my family for Christmas and my mother asks me “how do I get on facebook?” I quickly replied back “Mom, you don’t.” Perhaps for selfish reasons. I really didn’t know what to say. Here I am, approaching 30, and have been on myspace and facebook for quite a few years. What were once safe harbors for your college party pics and funny comments between friends, has now become a hub for your entire online life, viewable by every friend and family member alike. And the baby-boomers like my parents, they want in on the action too.

The reality of this adoption didn’t hit me personally until this week when I had different friends say their parents where on facebook. I quickly replied back, “so is my mom”. Being in the online marketing business I started to think more about it. I thought about the people that have “added me” as a friend in the last 6 months:

• My Mom
• Two of my Aunts
• My great Aunt
• My second & third cousins
• My older brother
• My older sister

I think it’s safe to say Social Media is not a “fad” and is probably here to spoil the online photo posting for high school and college students everywhere for generations to come. But also, giving us an unprecedented “in” with the boomer-generation that has been historically tougher to reach online.

How about you? Has your parents added you on facebook yet? If not, beware because it will happen sooner than you might think.

Here is an interesting article I came across today by Jennifer Martinez; an industry author on Online Marketing.

http://gigaom.com/2009/08/25/the-social-web-isnt-just-for-the-young-anymore/

When you look at Twitter, keep in mind that only 10% of the users on Twitter make 90% of the “tweets”. This means that there are die hard twitter users that have a ton of followers and probably get something from their tweets because they are reaching a massive critical audience. The rest of the users, just get a little fun or find it interesting to see what other people are up to in real time.

Derek Harding, one of the writers over at Clickz [a marketing news website] poses some questions about the long term validity of Twitter and whether it will “implode under the weight of it’s hype”. Keep in mind Twitter still hasn’t found a long term revenue model. Derek Harding’s article can be seen here: http://www.clickz.com/3634038

Let me know what you think!

Ken