Dave Jones

Facebook tweaks News Feed and Timeline: implications for Brand Pages

Dave — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 22:30:32 +0000

The Critical Mass social media team has put together a handy guide for brands trying to make sense of the latest changes that Facebook has made to the way it displays content in the News Feed and Timeline. Even though only user Timelines have started to change, it's a safe bet that these modest adjustments will carry over to Brand Pages in the near future.

Read the whitepaper over on the Critical Mass Experience Matters blog. Just click on the title page below.

Facebook Graph Search - Implications for Brand Pages

Dave — Tue, 15 Jan 2013 21:30:54 +0000

Facebook's much speculated on announcement today was a bit of a letdown to those expecting them to be buying RIM, Netflix or launching their own Facebook phone. But it seems they've finally got around to doing something about their terribly underdeveloped search capability.

While this feature is aimed squarely at users, I've drafted a quick POV on the implications of Graph Search on Brand Pages as it will have some impact on brands in the future. Let me know what you think.

Facebook Graph Search - Implications for Brand Pages by David Jones

A new chapter for me at Blast Radius

Dave — Wed, 08 Aug 2012 15:45:11 +0000

I started an exciting new gig today as VP, Strategy-Social at Blast Radius in Toronto. As the social media experience that connects brands and consumers has moved from wondrous/worrying new phenomenom that many weren't prepared for to business-as-usual in every brand's marketing playbook, I've found myself playing a larger part in strategy writ large rather than finding ways to introduce and integrate social media into the execution of big ideas for brands. The complete fusion of social into brand communications isn't entirely finished, but it's getting pretty close.

And while I enjoyed working with cross-discipline teams across BBDO & Proximity and their sister media & PR agencies, when presented with the opportunity to work at an agency that focuses exclusively on digital experiences with an equal representation of cutting-edge design, technology and engagement it was an offer I couldn't refuse...even though that meant leaving the reigning Strategy Digital Agency of the Year and a great team of colleagues behind.

Equally awesome is the structure of the existing strategy team in Toronto (more on that in the future) and the fact that my colleague Keith Liu who has moved from Blast Vancouver to Toronto as VP, Strategy-Mobile will be bringing complementary expertise to the strategy table in mobile, gaming and e-com. I can't wait to get rolling with such a strong team of digital pros here at home and throughout the world, including the talented Brenda Fiala who oversees Strategy in both New York & Toronto.

Have a look at Blast's current reel and you can see why I'm excited to joining such a classy outfit working with some of the world's top brands:

T-Day: Getting ready for Facebook's Timeline for Brands

Dave — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 18:13:19 +0000

Facebook flips the switch on Timeline for Brands on March 30th, giving Brand Pages a makeover that some may not quite be ready for. With just a month to reimagine Pages since the switch was announced at fMC on Feb. 29, I'm sure many brands haven't fully recognized the urgency. With the countdown on, the SocialWork team at BBDO Proximity created a handy guide to walk brands through the necessary actions to take between now and March 30th and a few more they can get to later.

Feel free to share and pass along to anyone you think this may help.

Facebook Timeline for Brands: getting your page ready for March 30th and beyond

Whitepaper: Facebook's Timeline Era

Dave — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 13:34:52 +0000

Since Facebook announced its evolution at F8 back in September the SocialWork team at Proxmity Canada has been studying the impact of this change on how brands maintain relevance to their fans on the world's leading social platform. With last month's fMC announcement that the Timeline format will be introduced to brand pages by March 30th, Facebook's evolution seemed close to complete.

This fundamental shift in how Facebook will operate prompted our strategy, creative and technical leads on our SocialWork team to provide a joint perspective on how these changes affect brands. The whitepaper below explains what the Timeline Era and its "frictionless sharing" means to brands on both personal profiles and brand pages and how the complete Facebook ecosystem needs to be considered when planning a social strategy.

This document isn't about pixel sizes, canvas specs or technical how-to. There are lots of those on the web already (and we've got one of those coming out, too). "Facebook's Timeline Era" is aimed at brand managers or social media community managers trying to get their head around what the changes to Facebook mean to them and the brands they represent.

Feel free to download, share and use the information. We're issuing this with a Creative Commons license. I and the team would love your feedback.

Facebook's Timeline Era - Managing Your Brand Through Facebook's Evolution

How well do the top brands participate in social media?

Dave — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 20:05:59 +0000

UK-based social media consultancy Sociagility (founded by my former H&K colleagues Niall Cook and Tony Burgess-Webb) have issued an interesting scorecard called the Sociagility Top 50 that shows how the world's top 50 brands rank in relation to how well the participate in social media.

Using their proprietary PRINT (popularity, receptiveness, interaction, network reach, trust) methodology, Sociagility has mapped the relative social media effectiveness of the globe's biggest brands (based on Millward Brown's BrandZ and Interbrand's Brand Value studies).

It's an interesting measuring stick to see how your favourite brands stack up and also to see how your brand or client stacks up against these category leaders.

Twitter: the new complaints hotline

Dave — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 16:23:06 +0000

I've never been a big proponent of the many organizations who rushed into Twitter to deal with all the negative tweets about their brands or services. Often times this was a directive of the PR department who looked at Twitter as a channel to manage online reputation.

While reputation management is a part of a good social strategy, I've always felt in my gut that it's impossible for the communications department to serve as de facto customer service/tech support/consumer complaints personnel solely based on a familiarity with the channel. Planning a Twitter presence should be part of a broader communications and/or social strategy. It should based on customers' journeys with your brand over time and ladder up to how you want your brand to be perceived in the long term.

Figuring out how to deploy Twitter isn't as straightforward as setting up an account. Every brand has different needs and requirements in the space. Sometimes you need to have multiple Twitter accounts to talk to multiple constituencies i.e. consumers vs enterprise vs developers and sometimes you've got geographic or language considerations to think about. In my view many brands have been too literal with their customer-oriented Twitter handle. Using "Cares", "Helps", or "Support" are very restricting, though commonly used. Your handle is less important than the speed of response and the quality of the interaction with your customers. That's what really matters in customer service.

Thinking about a longer term relationship over a short term customer transaction will get you thinking of handles like "Ask", "Connect", "Talk", "Voices" or simply your brand. I have three concerns with the path many brands have charted and others have quickly followed that are great for customer service and not-so-great for building a long-term relationship:

Creating a fast-track customer service hotline
Sharing the knowledge
Putting their brand on the back foot

Customer service hotline

My biggest worry is that by being reflexively defensive in Twitter, brands would be providing a customer service hotline to those who either gave up on other channels (60 minutes on hold, anyone?) or figured a public social media space provides the right level of public shaming to get a reaction from a big company.

I know brands have ventured into this space with the best of intentions with “Cares”, “Helps” and “Support” suffixes on their Twitter handles have struggled with how to scale for the volume of interactions and simply keep up. Many have integrated customer service staff right into their Twitter teams, which is a move in the right direction. But what if you outsource support to call centers with a transient staff that follows a script and refers to a manual?

Even the celebrated Comcast example had some problems with scale. Tara Hunt, blogger and author of The Whuffie Factor noted in a presentation a few years back that only one-third of tweets to @comcastcares were being answered. This was at the height of Comcast’s celebrated use of social media for customer service. A recent study from Maritz/evolve24 shows that consumer expectation of receiving responses to Twitter-delivered complaints is growing.

Have the early adopting brands modeled a new consumer behavior based on how they approach the channel or are they simply reacting to where the consumer is most comfortable “complaining”? Either way, if each complaint takes 10 minutes to deal with and you get 60 complaints in a day, you’ll need 10 hours to deal with them all. If the trend continues companies will either need to train customer service staff to be proficient in Twitter or train their Twitter staff to be proficient in customer service.

Sharing the Twitter knowledge

Companies have invested in creating extensive knowledge bases, FAQs, and user forums on their main domains. They aren’t all perfect. They aren’t all well organized. But there is a wealth of information there. If you take the opportunity to add to the knowledge base away from the main domain and deal with issues on Twitter you’re giving up a huge opportunity to capture that knowledge for your broader consumer base as Twitter doesn’t keep all of its tweets searchable forever.

If I’m spending 10 hours helping consumers, I want to make sure the interaction is captured, indexed and easily found by someone with the same or similar problem in the future. Luckily, there are solutions like Lithium that allow for community managers to connect Twitter and Facebook with brand communities on main domains so that there is a seamless ecosystem and the ability to capture knowledge centrally while sharing it through various social channels.

Brands on the back foot

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not against customer care or using social to connect with and solve problems for your customers. I’ve been helped many times by blurting something out on Twitter…and other times I’ve been directed to content that was completely irrelevant. It’s not easy dealing with a one-to-one problem in a public space. The margin for error is zero and the upside is a consumer who feels listened to and looked after stays loyal. With the rush to be present in the social conversation many brands have jumped in to the social spaces to help.

The best known and most followed tend to be the customer service accounts (@ComcastCares >54,000 vs @ComcastVoices >2,400). While this approach served an immediate need, it hasn't translated into a real relationship with the brand beyond the need for assistance. I’d caution brands not to join social spaces with a vision solely to helping in the now. It puts your band on the back foot. Think about the future. Once you’ve helped someone on your “Cares” account, they won’t be sticking around to connect with the brand in other more meaningful ways. They’ll be back when they’ve got another problem, but the only relationship you’ll ever have is based on being a troubleshooter.

I've got no axe to grind with Comcast. In fact, their leap into the social space has been the inspiration for many other companies to start talking with their customers through social media channels. But as much early-adopter cred they've gained, I bet they wish they entered Twitter with @ComcastVoices or @Comcast and built followers for a handle that gave them the ability to add value to the relationship after the initial issue was fixed. I can understand that some brands want to keep the customer issues away from the master brand, but in social we need to look at all interactions as marketing touchpoints and not be shy about showing how we solve problems for angry customers.

BBDO Proximity at Ad Week 2011

Dave — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 17:59:42 +0000

It's Advertising Week in New York City and BBDO Proximity has been been actively involved. First, BBDO's worldwide CEO appeared on Creatives Talk Live, Facebook's live streaming program aimed at showcasing creativity within the social media space.

I'm biased, but Andrew Robertson acquitted himself well. Hopefully, the social media pundits will let go of the tired "big agencies don't get it" stereotype and start to see that an integrated approach to social media can be delivered by one integrated firm, or a collection of agencies just as well (or better) than by a social media rock star. Andrew even bristled at the mention of "traditional" at the 22:52 mark: "If you start calling things traditional that's what they'll become." Great line.

Watch live streaming video from fbmarketingtalks at livestream.com

Later in the week, Andrew Bailey, Proximity's North American Chairman, wrote a column for the Huffington Post that provides some insight into how Proximity's network has been built on four key pillars during the last several years:

Make brands more valuable to people and make people more valuable to brands
Help our clients understand what they should do, not what they could do
Build our own centers of excellence within the North American network
Hire our unfair share of the best talent in the world

You can read the full article at the HuffingtonPost.com.

Facebook growth around the world [infographic]

Dave — Thu, 12 May 2011 20:11:05 +0000

Facebook's "rolling thunder revue" continues as the 600-million strong social network is fast becoming the globe's dominant social network as the graph below from ComScore demonstrates. Countries that have leaned towards other social networks such as Orkut, Hi-5, Bebo, RenRen, etc. have obviously fallen for Facebook's siren song as they have support for 70+ languages...including Pirate. Seriously.

There will always probably be some regional, cultural and geo-political reasons for multiple social networks to exist, but I'd be foolish to bet against the Facebook juggernaut losing any steam as the social software of choice for planet earth. Hey, they rolled over Friendster and MySpace in North America long before your grandmother started her profile. How can your great-aunt in Hungary resist?

Chart: comScore_Facebook Global Growth

Photos: iStockphoto

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"Civilination: taking a stand for civil digital discourse." Is this necessary?

Dave — Sun, 01 May 2011 01:56:15 +0000

I don't really like rules and I'm not much for people telling me that there's a certain way I need to behave. I'm fairly capable of making my own decisions...or at least living with the consequences.

So, organizations like Civilination leave me feeling ambivalent. Their mission:

"to foster an online culture where every person can freely participate in a democratic, open, rational and truth-based exchange of ideas and information, without fear or threat of being the target of unwarranted abuse, harassment, or lies."

They seem a bit like government programs where the aim is to legislate common sense or kindness or respect. I applaud the effort, but I get a flash of Orwell even though the intentions are admirable.

Maybe you think I'm a misanthrope. Maybe you think I'm a heartless jerk. Maybe you think I'm an asshole and want to tell me that with an anonymous comment. I'm prepared for all of those reactions and feel quite ready to handle them all, which is why I feel that Civilination is a bit overwrought.