The Clickable Search Engine Marketing Blog

Clickable and Social Media Society Fêtes the Year’s Most Influential Campaigns

Laura Lim — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 19:03:00 GMT

On what's shaping up to be one of Social Media Week's busiest nights, Clickable partners up with Social Media Society to host the best party in town on Wednesday, February 15th to celebrate and award the best social media campaigns at the Second Annual Social Media Influencer Party at Hotel Yotel in New York City. Clickable will also be at the Breastcancer.org charity event just two blocks away at Lucky Strikes Lane. While some Clickable members will be bowling away just a few doors down, the rest of us will be at the Influencer Awards Party to recognize the best, most influential social media campaigns that were created in the last year. An impressive roster of nominees and their work are all up to view and experience for yourself. Decide and vote for the company you think most innovatively used social media to impact their brand and cause.

Live performances and special surprises are in store for partygoers and our very own, David Kidder (CEO and Co-Founder) will be presenting the top prize to this year's winner. Can't wait!

Super Bowl 2012 Advertising and Social Media Analysis

Max Kalehoff — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 04:16:00 GMT

This year’s Super Bowl advertising extravaganza underscores that marketers are still pushing the envelope in digital to rise above the pack and maximize their investment in this iconic event.

Marketers’ ongoing adoption of YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, along with sophisticated brand websites, underscores that digital and social media have have become a ubiquitous force that can’t be ignored. Marketers must carefully orchestrate these expanding channels within their overall campaigns in order to drive customer acquisition, engagement and overall brand health.

With that, following are key trends Clickable surfaced during Super Bowl XLVI.

Most Super Bowl Television Ads Viewable Online Prior To Big Game

Marketers continue to take advantage of online media to maximize the buzz around their Super Bowl television advertising investments. In fact, three-quarters of Super Bowl ads were viewable on the Internet, predominantly YouTube, on the Friday before Super Bowl Sunday.

Winning Advertisers On YouTube

Biggest Absolute Gainers: Many advertisers are incorporating online ad impressions as part of their total Super Bowl audience reach, and high YouTube volume during Super Bowl weekend explains why. Acura’s “Transactions” spot received 4.9 million views on its official YouTube channel between Friday morning (EDT), February 3, 2012 and Monday morning (EDT), February 6, 2012, amassing a total of 15.5 million over its lifetime. Starting at 300 views, Chevrolet’s controversial “2012” spot for the Silverado amassed 3.6 million views in the same period. Volkswagen’s “The Dog Strikes Back” gained 3.1 million views to accumulate a total of 5.2 million.

Most Popular Ads Overall: Among the most viewed ads overall on the Monday morning after Super Bowl Sunday were Acura’s “Transactions” with 15.5 million views; Honda’s “Matthew’s Day Off” with 12.4 million; Volkswagen’s “The Dog Strikes Back” with 5.2 million; Audi’s “Vampire Party” with 4.8 million; and Chevrolet’s “2012” with 3.6 million. Fiat’s “Seduction”, which Clickable did not track before Super Bowl Sunday, had 3.5 million views.

The Facebook & Twitter Effect

Out of all Super Bowl advertisers with Facebook pages, Coke was among the largest and most noticeable with 38.6 million fans. Between the Friday morning before the Super Bowl and the Monday morning after, Facebook.com/cocacola gained a sizable 308,000 fans, more than most advertiser pages, due in part to aggressive promotion from the television ads, including a redirect from Cokepolarbowl.com. Most other Facebook brand pages that Clickable tracked gained between 1,000 and 100,000 fans over the Super Bowl weekend.

Twitter played an important role in this year’s Super Bowl television commercials. The majority of advertisers had their Twitter follower counts increase by a few hundred to a few thousand over the Super Bowl weekend. Interestingly, several ads heavily promoted hashtag keywords, as opposed to brand handles. Some opportunistic advertisers even purchased hashtag keywords against other Super Bowl advertisers. For example, GM and Chrysler purchased Audi’s #solongvampires in Twitter search in order to serve Promoted Tweets for their brands. GM, Best Buy and Hulu were among the brands to aggressively and defensively purchase Promoted Tweets against their own hashtags.

Ads Direct Traffic To Brand Websites And Social Networks

According to the Clickable analysis, brand websites were the dominant online destination visibly integrated into Super Bowl television ads. Out of 90 ads and promos analyzed around the Super Bowl game, 60% included an owned website URL associated with the brand or campaign. A handful of ads included Facebook URLs, like Budweiser’s Facebook.com/budlight, GE’s Facebook.com/GEAppliances, and Samsung’s Facebook.com/samsungmobileusa.

Instead of actively promoting Twitter brand handles, approximately 10 ads promoted a Twitter hashtag, like Bud Light Platinum’s #makeitplatinum, Audi’s #solongvampires and Best Buy’s #betterway. About 20% of ads included no visible online destination.

If not the destination URL, Facebook and Twitter are usually highly integrated into brand websites.

Notable Online Strategies

Interestingly, many brands took advantage of their URLs to redirect traffic to multiple destinations over time. For example, Coke's Cokepolarbowl.com redirected visitors to a Facebook app, then to YouTube after the game. Pepsi also used its own custom URL to visibly direct traffic to Facebook with Pepsimax.com/facebook.

Notably, E-Trade, a veteran dot-com Super Bowl advertiser, complemented its own URL with an analog phone number, 1-877-ETRADE-4. And for all the Internet pundits who’ve declared QR codes dead, GoDaddy included one.

To further drive views of commericals after the game, Super Bowl advertisers -- like Coke, Samsung, Chevrolet, Century 21 and others -- purchased keywords related to the Super Bowl ads to appear in Google search and YouTube results listings.

Winning Teams Gain The Most Fans

The New York Giants Facebook page had1.6 million fans the Friday before the Super Bowl, and it ended with 1.8 million the Monday after, a 9% increase.

Conversely, the New England Patriots had 3.1 million and ended with 3.2 million, a 3% increase.

Power Hour: Learn How To Make Sense of Your Facebook Advertising in 6 Minutes or Less

Jordan Franklin — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 18:01:00 GMT

Tomorrow at 3:30pm, I will be showcasing our powerful "Social Intelligence Dashboard" tool at the 2012 Business Insider Social Commerce Summit. Media professionals from around the country will convene at this one-day event on our home turf in New York City at Pier 60, Chelsea Piers to engage and connect over the hottest, emerging trends and discussions on social commerce.

During this lightning-style presentation round, I will demo Clickable's award-winning tool to show how we can help marketers simplify complex social advertising data into intelligible metrics and make more profitable investments across digital platforms. Witness our brilliant tool and gorgeous reporting come alive, while I facilitate the demo and answer all of your burning questions in 6 minutes or less. If you can't make the event, be sure to check out all of our resources on site to learn more about what Clickable can do for your social marketing.

Clickable Supports 3rd Annual Bowling for Breastcancer.org Event

Laura Lim — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 20:38:00 GMT

On February 15th, Clickable will be joining forces with New York's media powerhouses in support of the 3rd Annual Bowling for Breastcancer.org Event. The event will be held at Lucky Strikes Lanes from 6pm-10pm, and all proceeds go to support Breastcancer.org. We're proud to sponsor and support the event and hope to increase awareness of the disease and raise funds for research into the cause, diagnosis, treatment, and cure. The tireless crusade toward finding the cure is a passionate subject for the entire team here at Clickable. Back in November, the Clickable Men abandoned their razors and grew an interesting array of facial hair in support of the international Movember campaign, raising awareness and funds for men's health issues such as prostate cancer. While we may not be involved in any grooming-related initiatives for February, we will, however, bring on our athletic prowess to the alleys and dominate the scoreboard! No gutter balls here.

Proceeds from the event will help fund expansion of Breastcancer.org's newly launched Spanish translation site and its online content, mobile optimization, and video programming. We believe it is vital for all women to be able to access all the resources the colorful web has to offer, and we fully stand by Breastcancer.org's initiative to make that happen for the women of the Latina Community. Additionally, some proceeds will be allocated to Breatcancer.org's Global Prevention Initiative, "Think Pink, Live Green", an editorial campaign that helps women make healthier decisions every day.

As tech-media professionals, we recognize the value of accessibility to accurate, up-to-date information and helpful resources when dealing with these types of life-changing events. We are truly honored and excited to help support this cause, and we're ready to knock out the disease and knock down some bowling pins!

Search Engine Reporting & Intelligence — Clickable’s Powerful New Online Advertising Dashboard

Andrew Johnson — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 16:00:00 GMT

We are excited to announce the roll-out of our powerful, flexible, widget-based dashboard. The new dashboard allows you to create and customize charts and graphs for monitoring critical campaign activity. With your customized dashboard, it will only take seconds to answer the questions, "How are my accounts performing?" and "What do I need to do to improve?"

Here are a couple of highlights from the dashboard:

Clickable Widgets: Fully-customizable interactive charts and graphs that track all aspects of campaign performance.
"Agency" Widgets: Track performance across multiple client accounts, including budget goals and ad spend.
Drag & Drop functionality for creating new widgets and placing them on your Dashboard.

This release is a teaser of sorts. We will be making several important enhancements to this dashboard as well as launching an entirely revamped reporting section based on these same widgets in about six weeks. In addition, we will be incorporating Clickable's market-leading Facebook Ads technology into the new Clickable Pro experience. During this time, we hope you'll take an opportunity to try out the new dashboard and provide us your feedback.

If you are new to Clickable and want a demo of the product or to try the beta version of Clickable Pro, sign up here. As always, if you have any questions you can contact Clickable's customer support or refer to our product guide for detailed information.

Introduction to Patrick Chen, Marketing Operations Manager

Patrick Chen — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 16:21:00 GMT

I'm rounding out my seventh month here at Clickable, and I think it's about time I introduce myself on the Clickable blog. Hello, world! I'm Patrick Chen, and I run Marketing Operations for Clickable. These past few months at Clickable have been, in a word, intense! There are so many great initiatives going on -- from launching our 3.0 product to rapidly developing on new social APIs -- Clickable has been an absolute whirlwind of activity. It's no wonder it took me seven months to finally put up a blog post!

To tell you a bit more about myself, I came to Clickable right after earning my MBA at NYU Stern. Prior to grad school, I lived out in the SF Bay Area (go Niners!), working at tech companies like eBay, VentureBeat, and Quinstreet, mainly focused on Search Engine Marketing. Strangely enough, I was also once a Thermal Engineer at Intel and earned my Mechanical Engineering degree from Stanford. If you ever need to know why your laptop overheated, I can certainly help you out.

What brings me to Clickable is a passion for the technical side of online marketing and building great products that help push businesses forward. Clickable helps businesses not only navigate, but also dominate the increasingly complex world of search and social marketing. There's no better feeling than helping others succeed, and at Clickable, that's what we try to accomplish, day in and day out.

When I'm not burning the midnight oil in our Flatiron offices, I'm at home in Jersey. I'm also a fanatical gamer and run my own game review community site called PopuGamer. When I'm away from the computer, I enjoy drinking espresso, road biking, and travelling back to my hometown in California to see family and friends.

I'm psyched for the new year and for all the amazing product updates and events we've got lined up. I hope to blog again soon, but in the meantime; you can always catch me on Twitter. Thanks for reading!

Facebook Brand Pages - Measuring Success

Max Kalehoff — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 15:13:00 GMT

Note: This post is the seventh installment in a series of excerpts from the Insider's Guide To Facebook Pages, a white paper from Clickable. Download the full guide. For help with your Facebook marketing, contact us.

You can’t succeed with digital marketing unless you’re measuring success. Experienced online advertisers have been doing this for years, particularly with search engine marketing (SEM), where metrics like “Impressions,” “Click-Through Rate” and “Conversion Rate” are the basis for any successful campaign. With Facebook, and particularly Face- book Pages, there is not yet a widely agreed-upon set of success metrics.

David Dunne of Velocidi explains the current situation: “The question of ‘the value of engagement’ has not yet been answered. A lot of people have broached the subject, but nobody has really quantified this. Marketers spend dollars in order to generate sales. There is a relationship between what happens on your Facebook Page and your sales. It’s the marketer’s job to make it as direct a relationship as possible.”

But one thing is clear, as Mark Spangler of Stuzo has pointed out. “Everybody wants their marketing to have a direct impact on sales.” (If you drive traffic from your Face- book Page to an eCommerce site, you can measure your impact on sales directly.)

Two Facebook-specific metrics, however, have emerged as essential: Page Views and “Likes.” (We expect that the recent introduction of “Talking About This” will soon add a third metric to that list.) We discuss both below. In addition, we review five metrics suggested by Buddy Media in their recent report, “The Five Most Important Metrics You Should Be Tracking on Facebook.”

1. Facebook News Feed Impressions

“Impressions” are a familiar metric to marketers with experience in Search Engine Mar- keting (SEM), but they are slightly different on Facebook. A “News Feed Impression” occurs whenever “one of your posts are displayed in your fans’ News Feed.” Using the metrics described above, you can determine what percentage of Facebook users who see your content interact with it. (Buddy Media suggests that you set an initial bench- mark at “anything over .5% feedback.”)

2. Facebook Likes

The “Like” button has become one of the most important and widely-used features on Facebook. Patrick Stokes of Buddy Media points out that marketers should not think of “Likes” as an abstract metric, but as a concrete statement by Facebook users about your company. “Liking a brand used to have a stigma, but that’s changed. Apple in some ways has led this movement. People now think of brands as part of their everyday life. Facebook has helped make that happen.” If a user “Likes” your page, that will be their first interaction with it. Future interactions, and deeper engagements, are tracked with other metrics.

3. Page Views

The simplest indication of your success is Page Views: have you driven Facebook users to your page, or not? While this metric alone doesn’t give you nearly enough informa- tion, it is crucial to maximize your total Page Views. As T. J. Kelly of Edelman points out, “only a small percentage of content generated on Facebook is actually seen.”

4. Facebook Pages Tab Views

Tab Views, one of the five metrics suggested by Buddy Media in their report, provide a more granular perspective on your performance than Page Views. This is especially important if you create custom iFrames applications for tabs on your Page, because “you likely will present first time visitors with the most interactive and engaging experience” on your Page. (This quote, and others in this section, are drawn from Buddy Media’s white paper on Facebook metrics, cited above.) Taken together with Page Views and Likes, Tab Views tell you whether users are reaching the right pages on your site, or being diverted to less important content.

5. Engagements

Unlike “Page Views” or “Tab Views,” “Engagements” are a not concrete metric that would be measured the same way by all advertisers. “Engagements can be defined as the primary action that you want users to take within the custom content on your Page.” For some advertisers, or certain apps on Facebook Pages, an “Engagement” will range from filling out a survey to submitting a form to watching a video. For each of your tabs, or each of your specialized apps and posts, you will define “Engagement” differently. In this way, “Engagements” are similar to “conversions” in SEM.

6. Clicks

In the future, Facebook Pages may become a significant source of direct sales and eCommerce. But today, advertisers who want to drive sales using Facebook will most likely be driving traffic from their Facebook page to an external site. As Buddy Media puts it, “Your Facebook Page should not be a dead end street.”

If you have conversion tracking and analytics installed on your site, this metric will be easy to track. In your traffic reports, simply include a section that aggregates traffic from your Facebook URL. This will give you a clear sense of how well your Facebook Page is performing as a source of sales and traffic, especially relative to other sources.

7. Submits

Describing the unique value of marketing on Facebook, the company’s COO Sheryl Sandberg told the Wall Street Journal in 2010, “We enable effective word-of-mouth advertising at scale for the first time.” In concrete terms, this occurs when users recommend your content to their friends, by submitting it to their News Feed. “Each published message equates to one fan willing to vouch and evangelize for your brand.”

Download the full guide.

Facebook Brand Pages - 5 Critical Areas To Resource

Max Kalehoff — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 15:01:00 GMT

Note: This post is the sixth installment in a series of excerpts from the Insider's Guide To Facebook Pages, a white paper from Clickable. Download the full guide. For help with your Facebook marketing, contact us.

Once you’ve developed your editorial policy and built your 24-month editorial calen- dar, you will need to allocate resources and execute. Given how new Facebook Pages are, this is often difficult for businesses to do. As Patrick Stokes of Buddy Media has explained, “One of the most challenging parts for businesses is figuring out how to fit a Facebook Page into their workflow. Your page can’t be a ghost town: you need to be listening and engaged.”

Actual costs are going to vary widely depending on your business and the functionality you plan to offer on your page. However, the line items of a typical Facebook Pages campaign will be relatively consistent. T.J. Kelly of Edelman provides a helpful break- down of the major cost components, and the questions you need to consider:

1. Facebook Page Setup & Development

The cost of building your page will depend on one question in particular: will you be using Facebook native tools, or will you be creating custom content in iFrames? If you will be using native tools, the only costs will be time, either internally or with an agency or third-party provider. If you will be creating a custom page, costs will vary as widely as they do on your URL.

2. Facebook Page Content Creation & Community Management

As noted above, you need to have a significant amount of content created before launching your Facebook Page, as well as a plan for the next 24 months. If you will be creating your own content, it is crucial to have dedi- cated resources allocated to the task. If you reallocate resources months after launching a page, your content creation will fall off, and your fan base will disengage accordingly.

In addition to the foreseeable task of creating content for your page, you need to have a policy in place for responding to feedback and criticism. By definition, these items are unforeseeable. But while you can’t predict the specific content of negative (or positive) feedback, it should come as no surprise that you will receive some feedback.

3. Syncing Facebook With Other Social Channels

Is your Facebook Page going to be a standalone unit? Or is it going to interact with other properties. What will the relationship be between your Facebook Page and your Twitter feed? Your LinkedIn company page? Your YouTube channel? Every time you add a new channel, you need to allocate resources to monitor it.

4. Facebook Page Analytics

Recently, Facebook overhauled their “Insights” dashboard for Pages devel- opers. In addition to being able to track total “Likes,” you can now track: Friends of Fans: the total number of friends your fans have; Total Reach: the consolidated total of people who have posted about your page, news organization who have mentioned it within Facebook, and viral distribution of your page elements; “Talking About This”: a new metric that, according to a Facebook spokesperson, provides “the current barometer of how much conversation is being generated by someone’s Page on Facebook.”

While Facebook’s native performance tracking tools provide a wealth of detail, many advertisers will want to take a deeper dive and track more analytics. Costs vary, but you should budget for setting up and monitoring performance.

5. Supporting Facebook Page Engagement With Paid Media

The most effective way to drive traffic to your Facebook Page is to let your fans do it for you. (As we explain in the section on Measuring Success, “Submits” are the top of your conversion funnel.) However, you can’t de- pend on fan referrals for all of your traffic, and paid media can provide a significant boost to your traffic. You should have a dedicated paid media budget that includes both SEM and Facebook Ads.

Download the full guide.

Facebook Brand Pages - Creating An Editorial Calendar

Max Kalehoff — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 15:20:00 GMT

Note: This post is the fifth installment in a series of excerpts from the Insider's Guide To Facebook Pages, a white paper from Clickable. Download the full guide. For help with your Facebook marketing, contact us.

Acquiring fans is only the first step of creating a successful presence on Facebook. According to Mark Spangler at Stuzo, “Liking a page is just starting a conversation. Then, you have to determine through your consumer engagement strategy how you will continue the interaction and the dialogue with your users.” Brian Simpson at Vikram Chatwal Hotels agrees, “Just because you have a page doesn’t mean that people will flock to you.” First, you need to determine the frequency with which you add content to your page.

Official blogs might be updated as infrequently as every week or two, depending on how often you need to communicate news or views to your audience. Twitter feeds need to be updated far more frequently, but content producers are only on the hook for 140 characters at a time. A Facebook page falls somewhere in between.

Facebook Pages don’t need to be maintained as aggressively as Twitter feeds. On the other hand, posts to your Page should be somewhat detailed, but nowhere near as ex- tensive as a complete blog post. The specific frequency will depend on your business. According to T. J. Kelly, at Edelman, “When determining your posting schedule, you need to figure out what works best for your brand and your products.” Some brands update their pages every day; others update them less frequently. At most, you can wait two to three days between posts. In either case, you need content. Kelly again: “You can’t post every day unless you have enough truly relevant content.”

Before you launch your page, you need more than a policy for posting and moderating content: you need content. As Kelly explains, “You need to have a content strategy in place before you launch your page. Brands often get themselves into trouble in this way.”

To manage a successful Facebook Page, you will need a buffer of time that will allow you to create relevant content. To protect your brand, be sure to create the first two months of content before you launch your page.

To manage your Facebook Page effectively – that is, to acquire fans and maintain their interest – you need a progressive plan. Your posts and apps must build on one another and constantly create new reasons for fans to engage your brand. You can’t simply make disconnected updates. You have to tell a story, and that story needs to be at least two years long.

While multimedia offers like contests, surveys and polls can drive a significant number of Likes to your page, it is easy for Facebook users to dismiss them as one-offs. “The challenge,” according to T. J. Kelly at Edelman, “is to keep those fans engaged.” Doing so requires consistent and rich content. “People often don’t realize that this is a long- term strategy,” says Simpson at Vikram Chatwal Hotels. “Patience is going to pay off.”

Download the full guide.

Facebook Brand Pages - Developing An Editorial Policy

Max Kalehoff — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 15:20:00 GMT

Note: This post is the fourth installment in a series of excerpts from the Insider's Guide To Facebook Pages, a white paper from Clickable. Download the full guide. For help with your Facebook marketing, contact us.

Like all new marketing initiatives, a Facebook Page requires an investment in education and training. You need to be clear with every member of your organization about who can make updates to your page, and what those updates should say. There is, however, one important difference: everybody on your team already knows how to use the tool.

As Brian Simpson of Vikram Chatwal Hotels explains, “Nearly every one of your employees most likely has a Facebook account already. You’re not teaching them a new tool; you’re teaching them how to use a familiar tool as a business application.” Given that scenario, it’s tempting to simply give the relevant members of your team access to your corporate page, along with some very general guidelines. However, to effectively manage your page, you need to implement a clear and rigorous editorial policy that covers permissioning, your Fan-response strategy, and privacy concerns.

Facebook Page - Activation and Permissions

While nearly everyone in your organization already knows how to use Facebook, this does not mean that everyone in your organization should be granted access to your official Facebook Page on day one. Marketing leads should begin carefully, controlling the page yourself, or allowing a small number of your people in your marketing team to have access. This will allow you to determine what kinds of postings work, and what kinds don’t. More importantly, it will give you a sense of the feedback you can expect from your fans, and allow you to develop a plan for responding to it. (See below for more on “response strategies.”)

Over time, however, you will want to grant access to as many people in your organization as possible. The reason is simple: with “many-to-many” marketing, your fans should be able to hear from and interact with exactly the right person on your team. If somebody has a question about a specific feature, that question should be answered by the lead developer of that feature—the person who knows it best. If you’re ready to launch a new campaign or app, it should be launched in the voice of the person most closely associated with it. If you have a geographically-dispersed business, questions from customers in one region should be answered by managers in that region. And so on.

Facebook Page - Response Strategy & Etiquette

While response strategies will vary from organization to organization, there is one rule that every owner of a Facebook Page needs to have. T. J. Kelly at Edelman sums it up: “You have to respond to every conversation on your page, positive or negative.”

One of the most valuable features that Facebook offers is a way to learn what your customers think about you in a controlled environment. (If they can’t comment on your page, they’ll still be commenting elsewhere.) However, opening up the conversation introduces risk, and you have to be prepared to deal with it. For positive feedback, you simply need to personally acknowledge the fan who has something good to say about your brand, or one of your offers. Always avoid generic responses: speak directly to the point they were making. There are few things worse than squandering good will by giving a canned response, or by not giving any response at all.

The more difficult challenge is how you should respond to negative feedback. No matter what industry you are in, no matter how robust your products, no matter how carefully you manage your image, you will occasionally receive negative feedback. In egregious cases of slander or defamation, you have the option to remove comments from your page. However, you should exercise that option very sparingly. If you simply remove all negative feedback, other fans will notice, and they’ll speak up. (If they do so on a page other than your own, you won’t have the recourse of removing their statements.)

The proper approach to negative feedback, as every customer service manager knows, is to answer the complaint honestly, and to make amends when possible. If the issue is user error, provide more detailed instructions. If there’s a bug in your product, explain when a fix will be available, and compensate them where appropriate. Finally, if they are asking about features or products that you don’t yet offer, provide some insight into your roadmap. Or, if you don’t plan on offering the particular service a fan is looking for, refer them somewhere else. One of the greatest way to drive traffic to your pages is to drive it to others. More often than not, they’ll reciprocate.

Facebook Page - Privacy

Facebook has dominated the tech news in recent months, particularly when privacy concerns arise. Businesses need to be very careful in this respect, especially if they are in regulated industries such as healthcare and finance. However, according to David Dunne at Velocidi, it is not only businesses in regulated industries that need to address legal concerns: “The FCC is beginning to look into privacy concerns with much greater scrutiny, and there is a mounting risk of class action lawsuits. (There have been over 30 since the beginning of 2011, and only a small handful of them are in regulated industries.) The legal dimension can’t be ignored anymore. For many companies, it’s the deciding factor.”

One best practice applies to all businesses: you need to have a clear privacy policy that is accessible from your Facebook Page. The content of that policy will depend on your industry, and the way you plan on using your page. If you would like to discuss your privacy policy in more detail, please contact your Clickable Solutions Social Media Expert. They are ready to answer any questions, or refer you to a reliable third-party source.

Download the full guide.

Customizing Facebook Brand Pages

Max Kalehoff — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 19:18:00 GMT

Note: This post is the third installment in a series of excerpts from the Insider's Guide To Facebook Pages, a white paper from Clickable. Download the full guide. For help with your Facebook marketing, contact us.

When Facebook Pages were first introduced, advertisers were constrained by the re- quirement to use Facebook’s native capabilities to develop their presence on the site. Increasingly, this led to a homogenization of branded Facebook Pages, with one page looking very much like any other. As Ovi Roatis, Director of Technology at Velocidi explains, “if all Facebook Page and applications look the same, the value proposition goes down.”

The situation today is very different. “With the change of in-page development, you can do nearly everything on a Facebook Page,” says Kelly. The major change to in-page development was the replacement of Facebook Markup Language (FBML) by iFrames in March, 2011.

To most web-savvy readers, iFrames won’t sound like a revolutionary development, but a blast from the past. In the early days of the Web, iFrames were ubiquitous. The most familiar configuration divided pages in three: a sidebar at the left, the main content in the upper right, and a thin footer below. More often than not, they were all scrolling in different directions. It was an unattractive usability nightmare for web browsers, and a maintenance nightmare for webmasters.

After years of being relegated to amateur pages, Facebook has introduced an important new use for iFrames. In the past, marketers needed to either use native Facebook apps or wait for the social network to develop the tools they needed. Worst of all, impatient marketers and developers did whatever they could to get the functionality they needed out of a limited toolset. Roatis at Velocidi explains: “Even without iFrames, developers were hacking the system to make things happen. iFrames allows them to do it with less risk.” In other words, forcing Facebook’s native tools to perform tasks they weren’t built for was much more likely to cause pages to fail than traditional web development.

Essentially, iFrames allow marketers to develop fully customized, interactive content and display it within tabs on their Facebook Page. You have to develop and host the page yourself, as you would with a standard website. You can then use the Facebook Developer Application to integrate the page into Facebook.

Download the full guide.

Facebook Pages As Part Of Your Digital Marketing Strategy

Max Kalehoff — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 18:21:00 GMT

Note: This post is the second installment in a series of excerpts from the Insider's Guide To Facebook Pages, a white paper from Clickable. Download the full guide. For help with your Facebook marketing, contact us.

To tap the full value of Facebook Pages, you should think of it as an addition to your broader marketing strategy. Not a replacement for any existing components. As Kelly from Edelman explained, “Facebook can be the lead in your broader strategy, but it needs to fit into your other owned properties as well as other social media channels.”

And while there has been a considerable amount of speculation about the role of Google in a world where Facebook has nearly a billion users, Dunne from Velocidi is not convinced that the search giant will feel a major impact: “We are seeing first hand that Google continues to be just as relevant in a world where Facebook is thriving. They serve different needs. Each can grow vertically and horizontally without making a dent in the others’ business.” More importantly, according to Dunne, Facebook has at least one significant limitation. “As large as it is, Facebook is still a walled garden. What you need to have is an ecosystem that touches into other places.”

There are many different ways that you might want to engage your customers, and different tools exist for them. Brian Simpson is the Director of Digital Media at Vikram Chatwal Hotels. He has invested considerable time and energy into developing a major Facebook presence for the chain, but he recognizes the need for other properties. “You’ve got your dot com; a highly-edited, tight blog; a looser, more conversational Facebook Page; and a real time Twitter feed.” Each element is critical.

Permanent Content and eCommerce

A corporate website is a repository for permanent content, and information about your products and services. This is a site that users can and will depend on for deep-dive information, such as product manuals and detailed terms of service. Today, your website will also be your primary CRM and e-commerce vehicle, though there is a significant movement of commerce to Facebook Pages. Kelly, at Edelman, suggests that with the growth of “F-Commerce” apps (Facebook-based retail), more and more sales will be driven directly from Facebook Pages. But, these apps are still in early in development, and most Facebook users are not yet acclimated to Facebook as a commerce venue. Until that changes, traffic will still be primarily directed from Facebook Pages to brand homepages in order to conduct monetary transitions.

Daily Engagement

The greatest value of Facebook Pages is as a venue for high-impact, daily engagements with your audience. Of course, your page will only be an effective venue for daily inter- action if you give users a reason to come back regularly. “Facebook should have some level of daily interaction, or at least every two or three days,” says Dunne. “If it’s high value, users will come back often.”

To ensure that users have a reason to come back to your page every day, you will need to develop a long-term editorial calendar that tells a continuous story over the course of months, and even years. (Most of the experts we’ve spoken to suggest that advertisers build a 24-month editorial calendar, at the very least.) In stages, you will introduce new content, new tools, and new incentives for your audience to return. We’ll describe this process in greater detail below.

Real-time Engagement

While Facebook is taking over many of the functions of a traditional web-based homep- age, it is still not an effective venue for real-time interaction. “People spend most of their waking hours with a PDA, but not on Facebook,” says Dunne. “You can’t rely on it to be your 24/7 touchpoint.” If you need to interact with your audience in real-time, you will need a real-time platform. To date, the most successful real-time platform is Twitter, which is beginning to unlock the full potential of mobile devices as an advertising platform. (We will not be discussing Twitter and real-time engagement here, but we will address it in a future white paper.)

Clickable Men Will Grow A Mo

Max Kalehoff — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 15:47:00 GMT

If you walk around the Clickable New York office, you'll notice a lot of men sporting a moustache.

While we are stylish and manly, the real reason is we're participating in Movember. It's a global campaign to raise awareness and funds for male health, especially diseases like prostate cancer.

Please donate to our campaign.

You see, cancer will strike one in two men. That means it has (or will) impact every single one of us, directly or indirectly, in our lifetimes.

For example, when my uncle was officially diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2006, he made a point of not only informing me, but pleading with me to make sure I got checked out. Because he was a guy who put off health issues, doctors discovered his prostate cancer later-stage. That resulted in later, more severe treatments, and lower probability of survival. He died two years later -- barely sixty years old.

And we all have stories like this.

Which is why it's so important to raise awareness and funding for male cancer research.

Please donate to Clickable's Movember campaign.

Preview The Next Generation of Clickable 3

Max Kalehoff — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 16:25:00 GMT

The next generation of Clickable technology is transformational.

We're introducing more sophistication, better workflow, advanced reporting and real-time intelligence.

If you're an agency or serious online advertiser, you should check out the Clickable Pro 3 beta -- right now.

We just launched the Clickable Pro 3 beta dashboard with a big focus on the search networks, including Google and Bing.

Our rapidly developing Facebook and social tools, now available in the main dashboard, will soon surface in Clickable Pro 3 as well.

Since Clickable 3 is in beta, we're seeking customer feedback. Not a customer? Then talk to us now.

Read full details about Clickable 3 in the product forums.

Facebook Pages and “Many-to-Many” Marketing

Max Kalehoff — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 19:17:00 GMT

Note: This post is the first in a series of excerpts from the Insider's Guide To Facebook Pages, an expert white paper from Clickable. Download the full guide. For help with your Facebook marketing, contact us.

Facebook is more than just another channel where businesses can reach their audience. It represents a fundamental shift in the way marketing is conducted. David Dunne, a longtime executive at Edelman Digital and founder of Velocidi, a next-generation digital marketing agency, explains how brands have moved from ‘pyramid-style’ marketing – a few people distributing messages to the many – to a model with thousands of partici- pants:

“The increasingly digital world we live in has forced B2B and B2C brands to think beyond their traditional marketing – where a few people decide the brand messages their audiences receive - to programs and campaigns that originate with and revolve around the audience’s digital life. Facebook is one of the important aggregators of these audiences. For many brands, there is nowhere else on the Web where you can collect as large of an audience.”

The numbers bear him out: to date, Facebook has more than 800 million active users. (It won’t be long before they reach a billion.) Half of them log on every day. In aggregate, they spend 700 billion minutes per month on the site. Whether you’re a startup or a major brand, a Facebook Page is no longer optional.

Even if you don’t have an official presence on Facebook, thousands of people will still use the network as a forum to discuss your offerings. As Mark Spangler, Director of Client Services at Stuzo explained, “People are on Facebook, and they’re going to talk about you. By owning and claiming your presence, you have the ability to start participating in the conversation.” Or, as Dunne put it, “The question is not whether you should have a Facebook page, but what your Facebook presence should be.”

Of course, maintaining a Facebook Page isn’t simply a defensive strategy. Facebook Pages are a tool that allow you to interact with users at greater scale than ever before. “With a Facebook Page, you can activate a large audience that’s already pulled together,” explained T. J. Kelly, VP/Group Director of Digital at Edelman. “In most cases, it’s easier to get Facebook users to interact with your page than it is to get them to interact with your website.” Some analysts are even suggesting that corporate Facebook pages may begin to replace traditional web-based homepages in coming years.

Facebook Pages are still relatively new, but a number of offerings have surfaced to help businesses manage them effectively. Among the most important of these include Buddy Media, Vitrue, Wildfire, and Involver. In this series, we’ll review their solutions, and others, after discussing some best practices for Facebook Pages.