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Looking for an expert to give you some great social media pointers?

Look no more - this week WhatTheFuckIsMySocialMediaStrategy.com launched! (PR agencies and social media experts across the web, watch out!).  WhatTheFuckIsMySocialMediaStrategy.com can a tell startups to “identify relevant and compelling hooks”, “humanise the brand by driving the audience conversations”, and combine a bevy of many other pleonastic words to forge taglines that are utterly and completely devoid of meaning. Free of charge!!!

The site works by jumbling a few verbs (facilitate, foster, leverage) and nouns (‘word of mouth’, buzz, ‘branded utilities’) into a sentence that sounds impressive but means absolutely nothing.

The site is inspired by the similarly titled WhatTheFuckShouldIMakeForDinner.

Source:  Techcrunch

Hmm I actually didn’t know that Facebook was initially bank-rolled by one of the co-founders of Pay Pal or that the second most popular Facebook Page is that of Homer Simpson, right behind Michael Jackson? Or that the overall amount of time spent on Facebook each month is 8.3 billion hours?

Here is your chance to get all the Facebook facts you didn’t know that you wanted to know - Enjoy!

Source: Online PhD Programs for Mashable

Looking through a whitepaper on Facebook and reading an article ‘if it makes sense to purchase Friendster’ I found some interesting points that I wanted to share. I also made me thing about the future of the different social media networks and

At the end of 2004, Facebook had over 1 million users; today, the number has increased to over 250 million active users. And, while once the social network was limited to college students, today over two-thirds of Facebook users are not in college. In fact, those 35 and over are the fasting growing age group. Facebook reports that the average user has 120 friends on the site; there are over 5 billion minutes spent on Facebook each day worldwide; over 30 million users update their statuses at least once a day; and over 8 million users become fans of Pages each day.

According to Nielsen NetView, in April 2009 the total minutes spent on Facebook in the US reached almost 13.9 billion, a nearly 700% growth over April 2008, and resulted in Facebook being the number one social networking site for that month, far surpassing MySpace, which held the top spot a year ago.

Looking at Friendster (One of the world’s first social networks with strength in Southeast Asia, that at this time is actually looking for a buyer) - Matt Sutton, Managing director at Aktiv Digital commented on it’s potential:

“… Friendster’s largest penetration is in Asia, the world’s largest digital playing field. It actually has very high penetration in large markets with currently low digital spends — namely, the Philippines and Indonesia. This represents a short-term challenge and a long-term opportunity. Friendster is a big brand with huge reach and in this market advertisers tend to cling on to those offline hooks, attributing advertising with buying profile — the ‘if it’s famous I will be too’ approach. But that’s not a long-term defendable proposition, and things get a little more complicated when you look at it from a micro level. Facebook’s huge number of column inches has made it the kid on the street with the hippest trainers. It will find it easier to attract attention. All the big social network players can swallow huge budgets in one booking, so they need to be able to justify the spend they receive against each other. Friendster can co-exist here but it will need to differentiate its audience. The question is, can it do this?”

It made me think about something I heard at AD:Tech earlier this year;

Ian Stewart, Friendster’s Head of Asia said that there in the future of social networking will be a place for every network - each network for each target group. He described the role for the four biggest social networks this way:

• Friendster is the bedroom (Youth/teen)
• Facebook is the living room (Family/friends)
• Linkedin is the boardroom (Business)
• MySpace is the nightclub (Music)

This was backed up by a Forrester Research analyst that said, “If MySpace is about your entertainment life, Facebook is about your whole life.” Facebook which touts itself as helping you “connect and share with the people in your life,” appeals to broad range of consumers. MySpace on the other hand has a younger audience and tends to be more associated with entertainment and music.

So the future seems to bring segmentation and coexistence… Further down the road it will also bring integration and trends like aggregators will grow. In the end when everyone has a profile on several social media platforms there is a need for social media search engines as well as aggregators to make all of it more accessible:

• SPOKEO (Social media search engine)
• WINK (Social media search engine)
• Google Wave (Aggregator)
• Friendfeed (Aggregator recently bought by Facebook)

What do you think the future will bring?

Facebook’s engagement ads actually makes really good sense to me and is a great way of driving cost-efficient traffic to your profile page or generate fans…

I have always had this viewpoint on social media, that people don’t go there to see/click on ads but to interact with their friends/family etc. That has also affected how I would advise my clients to use the social media platforms in their media mix - for interaction/engagement through applications. I have seen too many advertisers setting up profile pages, leaning back and thinking that now they are on the social media trend train…

Don’t get me wrong, the Facebook profile pages is great for allowing brands to interact with Facebook users, the pages offer the brands the opportunity for publishing great up-to-date content on the page’s wall and allows brands to have a two-way dialog with their fans. However most advertisers just set up a page and don’t really have a strategy for how to get the fans to interact with and the purpose of having the profile page in first place.

Here is where the engagement ads come into play. They typically appear on the right-hand side of the user’s Facebook dashboard, prompting them to take some sort of action: comment on a movie trailer, become a fan or RSVP for the season finale of a TV show etc. If a person takes action (writes a comment, RSVPs, becomes a “fan” of the sponsor), their response — and the accompanying ad message — is broadcast to everyone connected to that user. The ad model revolves around a single premise: that marketing messages are more effective when they come from friends - and that makes sense to me.

So in an ever growing social media world there is indeed a place for social media advertising for many clients – but there is also a need to have a concept and a strategy before you go there (like 1-800-flower).

So if you are a advertiser a good starting point could be to head over to InsideFacebook to get some more info on how to use Facebook in a smart way - first stop could be: 10 Powerful Ways to Target Facebook Ads Every Performance Advertiser Should Know.

After a bunch of great Twitter cases I found this really great case showcasing really clever use of social media integration (Like http://www.cph-ink.dk/?p=346 ):

MoMA and Facebook

MoMA in New York (The Museum Of Modern Art) launched this website to help visitors plan their visits at the museum. That really not that new, just another website right…? WRONG!

What makes this website really great is that it connects to your Facebook profile where you already have entered all your preferences, your lifestyle, your tastes etc. - It then scans your profile, analyses it and matches your preferences in the social network with the experiences currently offered at the museum.

In less than a minute you receive personalized recommendations on the stuff you shouldn’t miss which of course you can share on Facebook itself or on Twitter. You can save your customized visit plan and add or remove parts to refine it.  Summer at MoMA it so simple yet so smart and well done - as the guys at Adverblog says - if there is a place that contains (almost) everything about you, why should you bother typing in information manually?

And why couldn’t and shouldn’t this setup be used by a lot of other clients - Universities could use the same approach to give students indications of what course to choose etc.

Source:  Swiss miss and Adverblog.com

Facebook has been a little quiet as of late. Apparently if you aren’t a search engine moving in on the flagship product of your sworn enemy or you’re not the media darling with apparently little or no security in your fiefdom it’s just not news.

Well, it looks like Facebook has been keeping their heads down and their noses clean and doing something that they have deemed pretty important; finding ways to make money. The Inside Facebook blog tells of three new additions to the ad network offering that make it easier for advertisers to target folks within Facebook. These additions come on the heels of some other improvements that are almost flying under the radar but the numbers are starting to show some progress. Considering that these actions are around actually doing business it’s a breath of fresh air as compared to the speculation and drama that is in the Internet industry news.

The recent spate of enhancements to Facebook Ads is continuing today with several new ways to target Facebook ad campaigns. Last week, Facebook turned on time scheduling, and this weekend, ad editing. Today, it’s enabling three new features: connection targeting, multiple country targeting, and birthday targeting.

Here’s a quick summary of three new enhancements:

Connection Targeting

This allows advertisers to hit specific groups within their network of connections. This targeting allows an advertiser to directly put ads in front of fans of any of their pages, users of any of their applications, members of any of their groups and attendees of any of their events.

Basically, Facebook wants to make it easy for business and brands to increase engagement with any users they’re connected to on Facebook through Facebook Ads, using it as a paid notification or cross-promotion channel. You can also target users who are connected to one of your Pages/Groups/Apps/Events but not to another in order to do more specific cross-promotions.

Multiple Country Targeting

Now rather than having to create individual ads for each country, advertisers can now create one ad for up to 25 countries so the benefits of this offering are obvious.

Birthday Targeting

While I don’t pay much attention to my own birthday, many folks on Facebook really do. Facebook sees that and is allowing advertisers to target these folks at a time that they may be so giddy that they’ll buy something.

The expectation is that Facebook is going to be adding enhancements pretty rapidly in the near future. When you have over 200 million ‘members’ it can be incredibly powerful to slice that group into more and more targeted segments so advertisers will have success without breaking the bank. Should be interesting to watch. Remember that $500 million in revenue number that was floating around recently? There will need to be innovation to get there and maybe Facebook gets it.

Source: Marketing Pilgrim