Its time for Timeline

Facebook’s new timeline for fan pages rolled out on 31st March 2012. You’re already familiar with this from your personal Facebook page so it can be easy to take for granted the implications this will have on your campaign ideas.

The Default Welcome Page

This may be gone – which means no more driving new fans to a splash page with a big arrow to the Like button. But fret not! Many agency partners and clients I’ve spoken to are desperately lost about how to keep getting fans to Like their pages. As we’ll see below, both the Cover Image and the new Timeline Apps are powerful tools to attract and engage with your fan base.

The Cover Image

Now, everyone who accesses your fan page will first arrive on your Timeline page. The general reaction to the new Timeline for Fan Pages has been a positive one so far. And the new Cover Image plays a big part in making it a success. Most brand people love the new wide canvas – and I’ve seen some good ones from the likes of Fanta, Manchester United and check out this fabulous cover image from the Obama team – a simple picture tells you all need to know about the man.

The Rules of the Cover Image

But before you put that thinking hat on – I’d suggest you familiarise yourself with the basic rules of the Cover Image.

Cover Images need to be at least 720 px wide and may not contain any of the following:

• Price or purchase information, such as “40% off” or “Download it at our website”
• Contact information, such as web address, email, mailing address or other information intended for your Page’s About section
• References to user interface elements, such as Like or Share, or any other Facebook site features
• Calls to action, such as “Get it now” or “Tell your friends”

To help you get started we’ve created a Facebook Timeline for Fan Pages photoshop template to try out your ideas. Click on the image below to download it.

But why is Facebook doing this?

Focus on Engagement and Reach – not Fans

Facebook is moving towards a more engagement driven metrics model and is encouraging brands to start looking beyond Fan counts. With the “People Talking about this Page” metric being made public on all Fan Pages, Facebook wants brands to start thinking about their reach (the number of people that see their stories on their feed) and engagement (the number of people interacting with or discussing your brand). Although I applaud this effort, it will take brands some time to adjust their strategy and develop campaigns that have a longer term perspective focused on engaging with fans.

But in the meantime, our clients are still talking about Fans! I can imagine why many brands may be freaking out about these changes. They want to know how get Fans to continue Liking their pages. We’ve been educating our clients on the benefits of the new Timeline for Fan Pages, and we’ve found opportunities to continue to grow your fan base while growing fan engagement.

Companies should realise there’s a lot more they can do on Facebook for their businesses then they currently understand.

Apps to the Rescue

Apps are the new Tabs but they’ll now be at the front and center - right below your Cover Image. This is where all the action is going to happen. Facebook has been working on providing more flexibility to what businesses can do on the site. Starting with the launch of iFrame apps and the Facebook Connect button, today you can build your own unique campaign experience entirely on Facebook and leverage the most pervasive social network to spread your message.

With the Timeline, Facebook apps will get a significant make-over. A new standard 850px wide page will simplify fan page application development and provide users with a more consistent experience across Facebook’s 37 million Fan Pages.

But how do we still get the “Likes” if the default welcome page has disappeared?

Getting the Likes

Brands have to wake up to the idea that a Facebook application’s URL is a powerful tool that they can use to drive their campaign. Although we may have lost the default welcome page on our Fan Pages which now forces all users to first arrive on our Timeline page, Facebook allows brands to use the unique URLs of their Facebook Applications in Facebook Ads and campaign executions. This is your new custom landing page and it can be used very effective to both deliver compelling brand experiences while continuing to grow your Fan base.

Timeline Apps – The Real Killer App

With the introduction of Timeline Apps, brands will now be able to add their app’s activities to Fan’s personal timelines. A great example of this is Pinterest, whose usage shot thru the roof after it launched its Facebook App with Timeline integration in January 2012 making them the fastest internet service to reach 10 million users. Thousands of Timeline Apps have since been launched and Facebook is actively promoting these.

This provides an excellent opportunity to develop campaigns that promote interaction and help spread your brand message amongst your fans’ social network. There’s never been a better time to build great social apps that will sell themselves.

So if you’re planning a social campaign in April – its time for you to stretch your expectations of what your brand should be doing to stay relevant on Facebook.

You would have to be living on another planet if you haven’t heard about the Facebook IPO by now. Deemed as one of the largest public offerings in the world, it has been a roller-coaster ride for what was once a college social network.

But while many amongst us in the Singapore digital fraternity had been looking forward to their IPO with baited breath, and at 100B dollars were expecting it to be larger than the Google IPO in 2004, there are some complications ahead before the deal is done.

In recent days there have been news reports of Yahoo filing a suit against Facebook for infringing numerous patents. And then there’s the SEC crackdown on the secondary marketplace for pre-IPO stock. All of this has cast an ugly shadow on what should have been Facebook’s coming out party and is sure to dampen the price expectations of the IPO.

You can read the rest of the analysis on the Singapore Business Review here.

Framework – BootStrap from Twitter

There are a number of frameworks to choose from when getting started, but we really liked Bootstrap from Twitter. It has everything you’ll need to get going, including a responsive grid system, Jquery and all the useful plugins you’ll need to deliver cross platform goodness.

Tutorial – Responsive Web Design Demystified

This in-depth tutorial builds a responsive template and discusses the key design considerations when moving from a non-responsive layout to a cross-platform friendly layout.

Video –  Responsive Web Design: A Visual Guide

If you’re more of a visual person and would rather check out a video tutorial then NetTuts has got just the thing for you. This 30 min video tutorial covers Media Queries and some great examples.

Testing - Screenfly & ResponsivePX

ScreenFly and ResponsivePX are simple but effective tools to easily test your responsive web designs in different viewports. I particularly like the wide range of preset screen sizes available in Screenfly.

Once you’ve worked thru the above resources, you should be able to quickly reuse your current code base to get your web site working charmingly well on mobiles and the iPad.

I came across a new Javascript MVC framework via a tweet from Aslam who’s quite the front-end whiz. Checked out the project description and it dawned on me that I had no real idea what a Javascript MVC framework is.

It seemed almost counter-intuitive to me that anyone would create a MVC framework for a programming language that was essentially built for the Presentation layer of web applications. I come from a strong background in server side programming and have been a strong proponent of MVC and many of the other design patterns ingrained in me from my years of indulging in the works of Martin Fowler, Booch, et al.

So I did a little digging around and thought I could put together my findings as an introductory guide to Javascript MVC frameworks for developers like me who may not always be on the cutting edge of web app frameworks.

MVC – Model-View-Controller Architecture

I won’t delve too much into this as I’m assuming the reader already has an appreciation for separating the ‘what it looks like’ and the ‘how it works’ parts of a web app from each other. Besides a cleaner codebase, this approach allows designers and developers to work separately on the front-end and the back-end respectively, as they mostly do in a typical digital team. Here’s the simplest explanation of the MVC concept I could find on the web.

Good ‘ole Javascript

Everyone knows what Javascript is right? Its the stuff that makes magic happens on web pages and has brought us a whole generation of dynamic web applications that we call web2.0. Javascript has helped web developers break away from the depressing page refreshes that happened everytime we clicked something on a web page. Now we’ve become accustomed to pages dynamically refreshing, Facebook comments auto-updating and our Gmail account always showing us the latest mail. God bless the creator of Javascript.

Javascript MVC?

So I knew what MVC was all about and I knew what Javascript did – but how could something like Javascript that worked purely in the web browser contain all the business and application logic that would normally be written on the ‘back-end’ server. Stuff we used to write with Java, PHP, and the like? Then it dawned on me. Sure you need back-end services but with so much logic happening in the browser and the heavy use of restful web APIs, there’s a lot of good stuff a web app can do without a line of server code. Sure this means a whole lot of Javascript code, and if you want it to be readable and reusable code – then an architecture like MVC can definitely help.

Javascript MVC Frameworks

I won’t be getting into any specific MVC frameworks, but there are decent comparisons here and here. If you feel like giving any of these Javascript MVC frameworks a run – Addy Osmani has got a great project where he’s implemented a simple TODO app with many of the popular frameworks so you can easily compare the code and pick your favorite framework.

So it quickly became clear to me what a pattern like MVC was doing in Javascript. Javascript today (aided by its vast many frameworks like JQuery) is enabling web developers to build rich user interfaces that are beginning to deliver a similar user experience to traditional desktop applications. To build such complex applications, you’ll need a lot of code. So if you can organise that into a structured architecture like MVC, then you will end up with a more robust and flexible application.

In fact, with Single Page Applications all the rave today, I would expect the Javascript language and its frameworks to mature quickly and provide ever higher levels of abstraction for developers to build amazing web software.

Some Useful References

1. A List Apart’s intro to Javascript MVC
2. Addy Osmani’s blog – Great resources on architecting Javascript applications

Find Followers through your Email Address Book

The first thing to do is to import your contacts from your email address book. Twitter will dig into your Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail or AOL Mail accounts to find friends and business associates who are already on Twitter… This makes it dead simple to connect with the people that already matter most to your business. Head over to the Find Friends tab in your Twitter profile and you can easily import email contacts and start following them.

Search by your business area of interest

Whether you sell widgets or services, you’ll be in an industry that has thought leaders, networkers and business people who are already active on Twitter. The best way to find these people is to identify Twitter users who are discussing your industry by searching for keywords (or perhaps buzzwords) that are relevant for your business. Head on over to the Browse Interest tab in Twitter and you’ll be presented with a list of categories. You’ll most likely want to use the Search box on the top to type in relevant terms for your business.

Here’s an example of the types of people you’ll find for the search term “digital agency“. Run thru the list to explore the most interesting people on Twitter that are discussing the topics and issues that matter in your industry. Follow the people who you find thoughtful, insightful, or in some way useful to your business. Then drop them a little tweet and start the conversation.

Next Steps

These 2 simple steps should have you started with at least 100 relevant people and organisations to follow. Now the next step is to listen and engage with those who matter in your industry. This is the best way to build relationships and grow your own followers.

There are a few things that it does which impressed me.

• Being able to search for a wide range of people even if they are not in your network. The advance search breaks down to location, industry, position and many other options so you can specifically search for exactly the type of person you’re targeting.
• Send direct mails to people. I have found that messages on LinkedIn get better responses than even email. People respond to LinkedIn messages and using the pro version you can send messages to people who are not in your network. Perfect for pitching an idea and getting a response from a prospective client.
• You can save searches. Once you have searched for something you can save it, and have the system update you when there are changes to the search. This is very useful for helping to build a list of clients you want to pitch to.

Since then I have developed various content-led traffic generation strategies for clients, but have left the gory implementation details to external service providers. This allowed us to focus on our core strengths in digital strategy while leveraging our global partner network to deliver a more cost effective campaign to our clients.

Well enuff of that. This week we started thinking about applying some of the key concepts we espouse to our clients to help us reach out to our customers – creative agencies out there looking for a trusted digital agency to partner with.

While Alf and the team work on the new website, I decided to put in place a Search Engine Optimisation and traffic generation strategy. So I find myself now dusting off my Market Samurai license, logging back into Adwords, scouring for good content writers and beginning to have a really great time.

In the series of posts to follow, I will try to share some of my experiences and learnings. And to kick off this series on SEO, heres a list of the tools I will be using during my SEO adventure.

Getting the basics right

• Define your Objectives
  Draw up a simple list of what you’d like to achieve in your SEO campaign. Use these as guides:
  • Increase Search Traffic by 45%
  • Appear on first page for 3 keywords
• Google Analytics
  You should have this ready to go on your site. If you dont know what Google Analytics is – the best place to start is the Google site.
• Google Adwords
  Getting an account on Google Adwords gives you access to some pretty handy data even if you don’t plan to run Google Ads on your website.

Keyword Research and Generation

• Google Adwords External Keyword Tool
  This is the holy grail in free keyword research. Google Keyword Tool provides local and global search volumes, adword CPC costs along with suggested keywords to help you build your targeted keyword list.
  
• SEOMoz
  SEOMoz is a great service if you don’t want to get inundated with too much info from the start. With its host of research tools, they provide an easy to use and powerful all-in-one SEO platform at a monthly subscription price. I have used SEOMoz and although there are many far more powerful tools out there, SEOMoz is built to be as easy to use for a beginner and a Pro! You’ll get on-page SEO analysis, back-link tracking, historical ranking information and keyword tracking all in one place along with email reports that look great. And they do a great Free Trial ;-)
• Open Site Explorer
  This is a great free tool from the guys at SEOMoz. Open Site Explorer is a large web index with 36 billion URLs and 9.2 trillion links. This is a great tools for digging into your competitors backlinks and learning where their getting their backlinks from. More on this in a later post.
• SEOMoz Term Extractor
  Another free tool from SEOMoz – the Term Extractor is great for digging into the keywords your competitors are targeting.

Ethan Marcotte: A Dao of Flexibility – An Event Apart from Jeffrey Zeldman on Vimeo.

Our approach thus is to ensure we develop web interfaces that will automatically adapt according to the available screen size. This differs from the old “fluid width” implementation where the canvas is stretched according to the available width. Just try viewing Wikipedia on a maximized 1920×1200 display! Does not make for good reading.

The idea is not to just scale the contents down, but to adapt the interface to “flow” nicely based on the available screen canvas. This could include a stacked navigation replacing a horizontal row of links, loading smaller graphics for smaller screens, breaking up text into columns for wide screens – just to name a few.

You can see how this works by resizing your web browser on any of the following demos:

http://www.columnal.com/demo/
http://cssgrid.net/
http://webdesignerwall.com/demo/adaptive-design/final.html

In short, web builders should start to implement meaningful interfaces that will work well – be it on a 320 by 480 smartphone screen, or 2560 by 1440 monitor.

As with everything, pros and cons. Ensure your site won’t break in older browsers. You will also need more time to roll this out, though there are many good frameworks to help you. Also consider the possible issue of “dynamic” viewports which is what happens when an iPad/iPhone/etc. is rotated to change from landscape to portrait view and vice versa.

Further reading:

• An article which Ethan wrote back in 2010
• Some arguments against responsive web design
• A nice list of frameworks to get you started

PS: Our upcoming NEW website and blog will be “responsive”. Look out for it!