Architecture Upgrades
We have upgraded our system architecture to be faster, more streamlined, elegant, and powerful.
Why In The World You Should Care: With these enhancements we should see an up to 20% reduction in the time between a post occurring on Facebook and it being acted upon by our moderation system. That’s serious. That’s like 1/5 yo. Two tenths!

Beta tag removed
We figured it’s time. It’s not like we’re Google or something. This ain’t no disco.

Email Notifications for Moderation
This is a thing for Facebook Moderation. You can now enter a list of email addresses on a Word List, and those email addresses will receive a message every time that Word List is triggered.

The email will tell you whether any automatic actions were taken. Right now moderation can automatically delete comments/posts, so you’ll know via email that that happened so you don’t go rooting around in the Moderation page for something that’s not there any more.

What’s more, if somebody goes and moderates an item that was flagged by a Word List, you’ll get another email letting you know that item got moderated, so you don’t have to bother going and checking for something that’s, again, not there any more and wind up going “what the excelsior is going on here” and scratching your head in confusion as a single tear rolls down your cheek. Here’s a picture of what the box looks like in the Word List dialog, just ’cause I didn’t feel like these release notes were long enough:

Sultry Streamlined Stream Authorization
Once Vitrue has set up a “Custom App Name” for you, the new app name will automatically replace the old app name (”Vitrue Publisher”)– but not until you re-authorize your streams. This will make life a lot easier for everybody. Uh, I don’t have a screenshot for this, but that’s how it works now. Here’s the process:

1. You submit a ticket at help.vitrue.com for a custom app name
2. We set up the custom app name and let you know it’s done.
3. You reauthorize your streams.
4. The custom app name is used for posts that are published from then on.

CSV Links to export Posts and Comments
You can now export all of your Posts as a CSV, and you can export the comments for a post as a CSV too! This option lives under the moderation list, on the right (same place other “export CVS” links are on other pages in Publisher).

The tool will export whatever comments are displayed, so if you have the “All” button pushed that’s what will be exported (all the comments for that post), and if you have the “Flagged” button pushed that’s what will be exported (all the flagged comments for that post).

You cannot, at this time, export all comments. That could be a LOT of data. If you need to have multiple comment exports, it’s best to export the comments for the posts you need, and merge the CSV files either in notepad or by importing them into your spreadsheet one after the other.

IE 7 Sign In issue resolved
We love our friends at Microsoft, but sometimes their browser is a pain in the p’toot. This release mashed a bug that prevented IE 7 users from setting up a stream during the initial setup wizard.

Moved the Vitrue MSA
The Vitrue Master Service Agreement PDF now lives at http://publisher.vitrue.com/pdfs/Vitrue_Platform_MSA_v5_ms.pdf so modify your browser bookmarks accordingly.

Congratulations to the team on another successful release!

I mean, it’s bound to happen. Brands gather large fan bases, so guerilla marketers naturally try to take advantage of a brand’s large audience by posting their messages on brands’ Walls.  We’ve all seen it.  It’s annoying.  And it’s up to page administrators to do something about it.

Spammy post on a non-NASCAR related brand Page.

What’s at stake, you ask?  Fans of your brand. Brands stand to lose valuable fans who became fans to engage with your brand and hear your voice – not somebody else’s.  An unmoderated page also deters new people from being fans.  Users who are genuinely interested in your brand will most likely leave before becoming fans once they find your page littered with unrelated, spammy posts.

How to Moderate
Facebook provides the basic abilities to delete unwanted comments and report or block users who violate Facebook’s Statements of Rights and Responsibilities.  Page administrators tend to use these functions while going through whichever moderation process they use, which brings us to the three moderation methods: manual, automatic and one that combines the previous two.

Manual moderation is a time-intensive process that requires dedicated employees to controlling the fan-generated content on your brand’s Facebook Page.  One or more of the page administrators will need to constantly patrol fans’ posts and comments on the Page’s Wall, photos, and other content, reading and deleting posts that are irrelevant or inappropriate.  Facebook is a 24/7 medium and will need constant attention from these folks.

Automatic moderation uses an automatic moderation tool.  Brands can hook up the automatic moderation tool to scan their Facebook Page at different time intervals to delete predetermined words and phrases.  A big problem with some automated tools is that they can’t use context clues to discriminate between appropriate and inappropriate content. The tool will use a blind eye, deleting posts that the brand should have kept or keeping posts that probably should have deleted.

We recommend a combined approach that’s a compromise between the time consuming manual process and the imperceptive automatic tool.   Brands should configure an automated tool to scan the Facebook Page for a pre-defined list of words and phrases, which the tool sets aside for review by a page administrator.  The page administrator can then go into the system and choose to keep or delete the flagged content.  The combination of the two processes allows for a more control over fan-generated content to keep a brand-appropriate atmosphere and it saves time.

In case you thought this post was all out of the goodness of our hearts, I’d like to point out that Vitrue Publisher is a great solution for your moderating needs.  The Vitrue Publisher goes above and beyond simply eliminating spam by managing multiple lists that serve different purposes.  For example, some brands use our moderation tool to flag product feedback, industry or competitive content, fan sentiment and so on.  Fans post valuable information that your brand can learn from, so it’s worth taking a closer look.

However you look at it, Facebook moderation really is an important part of keeping your Page healthy and vibrant, so that it stays valuable for both your fans and your brand.  It’s up to you to stop guerilla marketers from taking advantage of your fans and stealing their attention away.

New Features in Tabs

1. Pages are now called “Views”.

2. Views now have a disclosure triangle next to them on the Views page. Stuff’s hidden under that that used to not be. It’s nicer. They’re green. The triangles.

3. Ace developer Sean B. removed some extraneous logging that may have affected some IE users. He just went and did it, ain’t no big thang.

4. There’s a new beta feature that lets us change the colors on generated charts. Like for poll results and such– we can set the colors appropriately for a brand’s preference. It’s not ready for prime time yet, but it’ll be available for general use in the near future. In the meantime, your friendly neighborhood Vitrue personnel can change the colors upon request.

5. New “raw” chart mode. If this is turned on for your brand (ask us, we’ll do it, no problem really), charts for polls and such will appear as a basic “bar” sort of deal, done via HTML and CSS, which you can then proceed to prettify to your heart’s content via the pre-to-fore re-leas-ed Custom CSS box.

6. If you want to make your own locator page, we can turn on the “Edit locator” function for you. It works very much like the existing “Edit custom css” permission, only with the Locator FBML. So, like, you can make your own Locators and attach them to a tab and build your own stack o’ Tabs Views and just generally go crazy Broadway style. Once this is turned on, you’ll see a new “Edit Locator” link off the Pages page, which has editing/history capability just like Edit Custom CSS.

7. Both Edit Custom CSS and Edit Locator have a “View Revision” link to let you just casually view the contents of a revision rather than reverting to it. Like it’s nothing.

8. Oh, just a little thing we like to call ON FACEBOOK PREVIEW. (!) (OMG!) You can now preview changes that you haven’t published yet. Stuff like repositioned modules, new modules you haven’t published yet, resized stuff, FBML, and Brand CSS changes– and you can do said previewing right on Facebook itself. When you’ve got some unpublished changes, you’ll see a “Preview on Facebook” button at the top of the page (next to the “Publish to Facebook” button, natch). Click it and the magic will commence.

8a. You can preview a locator too by doing likewise from the Edit locator screen. What’s that? Don’t have a locator? Dude, you’re covered. Go ahead and preview your stuff on the “Edit Custom CSS” screen, and we will generate a simple locator to link you to all your pages. (Or at least all your pages that have slugs. Ewww, slugs.)

8b. Custom CSS now uses the “Changes have been made” block at the top, when there are changes made, with the “Publish to Facebook” and “Preview Changes” buttons on it. I know this is a sad day for fans of the “Make Changes Live” link (or whatever it said), but we think that soon you’ll become as fond of the “Changes have been made block” and will somehow find the courage to move into this, the new golden age of change-indication on the Custom CSS page in Vitrue Tabs. *salute*

9. We’re trying out a new code editor for Edit Custom CSS, FBML, etc. It’s fancy. You can do all sorts of stuff, like see line numbers, search, make it full-screen, etc. We’re going to tweak it some more, but it should be a nice tool for editing text in Tabs. Swank.

10. BONUS BETA FEATURE! We’ve added an option to the Video module, which is now called the “Video Library” module. You can choose how to display your videos– in the “popup” format, which is what everybody’s got now, or in the new hotness that is the “inline” format. When videos are displayed inline, that means they show up in a little player box right on the page, and you can play them right there like it’s the most easiest thing in the world. We’ve got a few tweaks to make before the feature is as slick as we want it to be, but it’s there now and ready to be used if anyone should so choose.

Congrats to the team on another successful release!

Last night at a press conference held at their Palo Alto headquarters, Facebook announced Facebook Places. This new service allows users to see where their friends are and share their locations using the new Places tab on Facebook mobile applications, like Facebook for iOS, which was updated last night to support the new features, which will be rolling out to Facebook users in the United States over the next couple of days.

How Do You Use it?

A user will open up their mobile Facebook app and be able to see shops, restaurants, parks, areas, etc. that they are near.  They can then check-in to that location.  If a location doesn’t exist, the user can simply create it.  A story about where that person checked-in will be published to their profile and subsequently their friends’ news feeds.

If your whole gang of friends is with you at that location, you can tag them to let people know that they are with you. The tagged friends have the option to decline, allowing them to maintain control over their location information. 

What’s the Difference?
Facebook isn’t the first company to take an interest in socially sharing a user’s location.  Other location-based services (LBSs) like foursquare and Gowalla had a head start in the location realm.  However, Facebook’s massive user-base is a distinct advantage and is likely to generate location-based activity orders of magnitude greater than other companies already in the space. As the leading social network, Facebook is able to capitalize upon the users existing friends, and use their collected demographic and preference data to show users places that it thinks is relevant to them, instead of just places nearby.

How Will Brands Take Advantage of Facebook Places?

With all of these users checking in to locations, what does that mean for brands?  Well if your brand has brick-and-mortar locations, your brand can claim these digital “Places”, turning the locations into Facebook Place Pages.

Brands can choose to merge a Facebook Place Page with an existing Facebook Page, if one exists, and if prompted– the option may not be widely available yet as Facebook is rolling it out over a period of days. Merging Places with a Page will result in some changes to the Page, but Facebook says that it will not affect your core content or any custom Tabs.

At this time Facebook does not recommend merging your Places with your Page if you are a national or global marketer with more than one location, like a McDonald’s or GAP.  They recommend managing the Places separately and have stated that a solution that will help these types of brands is planned for the future. 

To claim a place, tap the link on the place’s profile that asks “Is this your business?” and check the box to certify that you are an official representative of the company.  You’ll need to verify you own the business by allowing Facebook to call the phone number listed for the location, answering the call and receiving the 4-digit PIN number.  Once you enter the PIN number into the Facebook dialogue box, you’ll be set to go.

A Facebook Place Page that has not been merged with a brand’s existing Facebook Page will allow you to “post updates to people who have liked the Page, update your business information, and more.”  Think of the offers your company could promote on to people who have opted-in to hear from your retail location(s).

Users can also tag pictures, text and other digital content with the location’s Facebook page, creating a multi-media description of the place in a sense.  For example, people are able to leave public comments or recommendations by tagging the location.   Others visiting this location will be able to see this information on the wall, which can enhance their visits to your location.   But what happens if someone tags an inappropriate picture of him- or herself with your location’s name?  It sounds like brands will need to moderate what is tagged with their locations’ names that will appear on the places’ walls to provide the type of feel that’s appropriate for their company.

Currently, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg says they aren’t looking to monetize Facebook Places right now, but that doesn’t mean that they can’t in the future.   With Facebook collecting all of this location-based data, it seems like Facebook could allow brands to place highly targeted Facebook ads on the Places Facebook pages.  For example, if your brand’s products are sold in grocery stores, you could potentially place your ads on certain grocery stores’ pages to be viewed by people who’ve checked in.

We’ll be keeping an eye on Facebook Places as people begin to use the service, and social norms emerge around what is kosher and what’s not, to guide our clients about the best ways to use and manage the new location service.

Vitrue is excited about the announcement of Facebook Places. This new Facebook product makes it more convenient than ever for consumers to stay connected with their social graph.

We anticipate that Places will drive increased value to Facebook pages, allowing marketers to capitalize not only on their brand recognition but now the physical location of their stores. Vitrue Publisher allows brands to seize this opportunity in the most massive, efficient, and responsive way.

We look forward to building enhancements into Publisher as they become possible and are standing by to serve as your source for expertise on issues related to this new product. We anticipate great things in the coming months as new capabilities are built into the Facebook API and as we incorporate those capabilities into Vitrue products.

So how does an Agency float this boat? Do they build out large social media departments and hire experts to track Facebook’s changes and iterations so they can keep up? Or do they continue to concentrate on what they do best and partner with a product and tools company that specializes in social media technology and management?

Can you guess which one I’m going to recommend?

Vitrue believes that an agency and a tools company can, through partnership, become more than the sum of their parts. At the core, agencies are experts at strong brand development and messaging, regardless of the medium. Agencies have always faced changes, from Newspapers to Magazines to Radio to TV, suffrage to prohibition to Reaganism to… whatever the 90’s were. Each time they were faced with a sea change, agencies answered with an evolution (sometimes a revolution) in creative brand management.

Today’s revolution is social media, and Facebook is the 500 million pound gorilla. Our latest release is full of features that give agencies the tools to focus on their expertise and apply it to this new medium. Let the Vitrue SRM Platform put the wind in your sails.

There are ‘growing pains’ with every new emerging technology. Remember agencies spearheading website development? Thus the “digital agency” was born. The “social media agency” may be around the corner.

That’s precisely why we’ve been concentrating on features that meet the needs of an agency. The newly enhanced Agency API lets your existing talent and content start working on Facebook now. And those ever persistent Facebook platform changes? No worries, we’ll keep the platform up to date for you and let you know when there’s something important you need to consider. As our CEO Reggie Bradford says: “Agencies help build brands. Our tools help make those brands social.”

Did I mention the price? I don’t think I did. Oh right, it’s FREE.  Any agency can use the full Vitrue SRM Platform as an acquisition and retention tool. Build out all the clients and tabs that you want. You don’t pay a dime until your pages go live and start building a fan base.

Here are some third parties on the matter:

Key Benefits for Agencies

1. Your Flash, Facebook’s Wall: Vitrue Publisher lets agencies leverage existing games, banners, and widgets (any SWF file) by posting it to their clients Facebook Page as a “wall app”
2. Customizable Look and Feel: Directly design and edit the CSS stylesheets for the tab, to agency specifications
3. Convenient Application Modules: Vitrue’s products include out-of-the-box content applications and modules that make it easy to customize coupons, polls, videos, uizzes and more that reflect a brand’s style and personality.
4. Customizable Tab Content: Agencies can build their own content modules and place them on the tabs of their brands, using Vitrue’s “Custom FBML” app module
5. Workflow Management: With Vitrue Publisher, brand administrators can control who creates and publishes content

Sign up for our free agency API today!

You can also view our official press release here

Facebook has realized that it can be overwhelming to receive so many notifications from subsequent comments because users may not always want to know about them.  For example, milestones, like engagements or birthdays, of a friend are typically the posts that users interact with most.  While a user may want to congratulate their friend on a post about upcoming nuptials, they may not want to receive notifications generated from the other 20 friends congratulating them.

The notification triggers are a little different for brand Pages and interactions.  If you comment or like your favorite retailer’s post, you will not get a notification for fan comments after yours.  You will only receive a notification if the brand comments on the post.  Users who click the ‘unsubscribe’ button on brand posts will turn off any notifications resulting from a brand comment.

This change is welcome news from a user’s perspective.  Less “noise” encourages users to interact within the social network more and keeps them coming back.  This option also puts the power in the hands of the 500+ million Facebook users.  They now have more input on what they are served up on the networking site.

Overall, this change is more geared towards improving user experience - a change that supports Facebook’s long-time focus to keep users and their experience as their top priority.  The end result of a positive user experience is higher user retention and an increase in their already enormous user-base.

Brands should continue to thank Facebook for their attention to their users, as their efforts keep them coming back to engage with your brand on Facebook.

This release adds some really nifty stuff to the app. I won’t drag this out, here’s the list:

Author, Author!
Vitrue Publisher now allows you to create participants in the role of an “author”, who can create posts but cannot publish or schedule them to be published. This is an addition to Publisher’s ever-evolving “workflow” feature set, with more to come.

Preview Button
To assist in the process of approving prospective publicatable posts, users can now select a post from the list of posts, and click the “Preview” button to see a mockup of what that post will look like on Facebook or Twitter. It’s essentially the same thing that appears on the “review” page when creating a post. But still. Cool. And the button is a little magnifying class. Cute.

“Include Link in Facebook Status”
Although Vitrue’s best practices suggest that including a URL in your Facebook status generates more engagement with a post, some of our customers enjoy the cleaner look when there is no link. So we’ve added a neat little check box when you include a link in a post. If you uncheck the box, the link won’t be included in the Facebook status (it’ll still be in the post, in the usual place, just not in the status).

Image Scraping
If you’re adding an image to a post, we’ll now show you all the images on the page the post links to, so you can just pick a picture and kerpow there it is attached to the post. Nifty spifty.

Email on Fail
You can now activate a feature that will send you email when a post fails to publish. When does this happen? Five scenarios: 1. You need to re-authorize your stream. 2. You need to re-authorize your stream. 3. You need to re-authorize your stream. 4. Facebook is down. 5. Other. (We’ll only send these emails if you ask us to turn the feature on. Which you should do. If you use Publisher.)

Faster Navigation of the Moderation Section
Paging through posts and comments in the Moderation section is now faster. “Waaaaay faster” in developerese, which is some variant of Swahili I think.

These enhancements (and there are some bug fixes in there I didn’t mention) offer significant improvements to the functionality and general experience of using Vitrue Publisher. Please let us know what you think in the comments, or by starting a conversation at http://help.vitrue.com

Happy Publishing!

The growth of Facebook, now exceeding 500 million global users, presents a huge opportunity for marketers to build a long-lasting relationship with their consumers. But do you know what the missing ingredient is for building relationships? It’s communication – the two-way communication that simply doesn’t exist today in other forms of media.

I remember a time when I had to remind clients that “people will be talking about your brand whether you are participating in the conversations or not.” Well people are talking about your brand. So what are you doing about it?

Show your fans some love
Are your fans feeling ignored and left out? Are they posting questions and comments to your wall with no responses ever received? Remember, these are your fans – the people who like you. Show them some love and participate in the conversation.

Depending on how active your fans are dictates the timeliness and type of responses given. Some pages receive little or no engagement with your posts – well that is another topic for another day. And there are some pages that are fueled by loyal brand advocates and inquisitive consumers.

Take a page like AT&T that garners upwards of 300+ wall posts per day just from their fans, with each of those spawning additional comments from other fans. Now add in a couple hundred more comments received from each AT&T branded post. AT&T finds it necessary to respond in a timely – almost real-time manner. The sheer volume of support questions they receive via the wall requires action from a dedicated team, typically within a few hours – but often responses are handled within minutes. If feasible, we recommend this vigilance when it comes to responding to fans.

However, if your page does not require such immediate attention we recommend responses be given within 24 hours. A lack of response from the brand could discourage fans and drive them to seek out other sources (possibly less credible sources).

Direct the conversation
In addition to listening and responding to your fans in a timely manner, you have the opportunity to direct the conversation – and continue the conversation on the wall. The more a marketer participates in their fans’ conversations the more “sticky” their wall becomes. Strive for your Facebook page and its wall to become a trusted place for fans to ask and receive credible answers.

Sometimes the social space can feel like the “Wild West” where anything can be said – and often is. In the event your page receives a flurry of negative attention, participating in the conversation enables you to put out fires, dispel rumors and correct any false claims made by individuals.

It is also equally important to respond to your fans right there on the wall. If someone asks a question, don’t direct him or her to your Web site for more information. Don’t provide them with an email address to follow-up offline (unless the question requires insight into personal information, like billing-related issues). Handle questions right there on the wall.

Responding to questions on the wall creates a Facebook notification for that user, along with anyone else who has provided additional comments on that post or ‘liked’ it. This practice keeps the conversation on Facebook where others can benefit from what the brand has to say. It also allows for others to continue commenting and ‘liking’ the post, which creates viral one-line stories in users’ News Feeds.

Devote the resources to manage your relationship-building
When it comes to allocating resources to managing your Facebook wall and responses, is this an after-thought? Is it often left for interns to handle? Sorry, but this is not a good idea. Your brand’s image and credibility are at stake and proper resources must be managing your response plan. Remember, these are your fans you want to build long-term relationships with.

Since the social space is fairly new, many companies have not yet allocated social media departments with people who can physically moderate their Facebook page. In that case, seeking out moderation tools are often necessary.

Need help?
Does this sound like a lot of hard work to manage your relationships on Facebook? Well, building your relationships should be given proper attention, but it doesn’t have to be difficult.

Our best-in-class Vitrue Publisher, which is currently serving about 182 million fans through custom publishing and moderation solutions on both Facebook and Twitter, can help both marketers and agencies maximize their social marketing. A few features that specifically help ease the potential pain of managing responses on the wall, include word flagging and publishing alerts.

With word flagging, you may establish word lists that flag posts and comments in our system and notify admins that action should be taken on them – or automatic removal of the post or comment is an option. With publishing alerts, when scheduling posts in advance you can create a distribution list of key stakeholders that are notified by email every time a post is published. This allows for them to prepare for real-time wall response management.

In the past Vitrue has talked a lot about the importance of the Facebook Wall in terms of maximizing the viral capabilities of social conversations. And yes, placement of custom apps in the wall (like polls and coupons) has shown 110 times greater rate of engagement versus apps housed in a tab.

But, often times it’s the real-time, real conversations you have with your fans that truly build relationships. Let’s get started today!

Moving Stuff Around Is Awesomer
Previously, moving a module around a Tabs View was a dull exercise in clicking the move button and watching the module “pop” into its new position. No more! Now, moving modules around will provide endless hours of entertainment as you watch them gently slide from one slot to another, like a waltz routine on So You Think You Can Dance. This new, javascriptified animation isn’t simply eye candy, but is an important usability enhancement allowing the user to more easily follow changes made to the position of items on the page. And it’s eye candy.

Give ‘Til It Hurts
You can now add a module that lets you send gifts to your friends. Well, virtual gifts. In the form of little pictures. Try it out. Give somebody a Rhiley!

Invitation Explosion!
Get this: you can now invite somebody to all of your Tabs views at once! That’s right, no more selecting each and every view one by one if you want to invite somebody and let them manage all the pages. You just go “click” (you can even make the sound effect if it helps you in some way), and voila, all the views are selected. But wait, there’s more! You can also, if you want to, just check a box and invite somebody as a Brand Administrator for your Tabs account right off the bat! No more making a page and then inviting them to the page and then promoting them to a Brand admin. No. None of that. No more!

Full Width Twitter Module
Right. You can add a Twitter Module to a Tabs View that’s in the single-column format. OOH RAH!

And you may have noticed that I’ve started calling them “views”. We’re going to be switching the interface to some new nomenclature in the near future, so that what are now called “Pages” in Tabs will be called “Views” instead. This should help us alleviate a little bit of confusion that we’ve got going because of, well, Facebook Pages.

Congratulations to the team on another successful launch!

Agencies and Page administrators ought to take notice of the new belt-tightening news.  If the new dimensions are ignored when creating custom tabs, design quality and elements may look underdeveloped or broken.

When these changes are publicly launched, another change users will notice is the removal of boxes on Pages and Profiles.  The Boxes tab on Pages and Profiles will be removed along with the boxes in the left-hand column.  Along with the boxes, iFrames will also become disabled.  Custom tabs will now require FBML code on another Tab.

Because Vitrue has been expecting these changes since last year, we’ve been consciously optimizing our products and client implementations accordingly.

With the removal of boxes and iFrames, it makes us wonder- what is happening to all of that extra real estate on Pages and Profiles? After the boxes go away, will we be left with empty white space on the left side of our Pages and Profiles?  Inside Facebook thinks that the width reduction is to make Pages fit “more neatly” on smaller screens.

What do you think will replace the imminent box-less space?

Since Facebook users currently ask many questions to receive suggestions and advice from their friends, the social network wanted to share the knowledge publicly to benefit the larger audience.

Users can pose their questions to the Facebook community by submitting them to the Questions Dashboard — the link is located in the homepage’s left-hand column.  While asking, users can direct questions towards their existing friends if they’d like.  They can also tag key words that will help Facebook expose it to those who might be interested in the subject and may give more accurate answers.

Users’ questions will show up in their friends’ news feeds and also in the public Questions Dashboard to open up the information for non-friends to see the question and help answer it.

Brand Implications
For brands, the Questions feature brings some new implications.

Facebook will automatically be adding a “Questions” tab to house the questions that users ask that involve your brand.  Brands can adjust the positioning of the Questions tab by moving it among the current tabs to appear above or below the double-arrowed fold. When a user asks a question about a brand, they can tag, or hyperlink a keyword that matches an existing page.  So if a user asks “How can I get in touch with Vitrue?”, the user can link the word ‘Vitrue’ to our Page, and it will appear on our Questions tab for us to answer.

Brands, similar to users, cannot have questions removed from Facebook just because they would not like to answer them or do not want them on their Questions tab, but they can report a question that contains offensive or objectionable material.

Will this new feature cause an influx of questions? Maybe, but it’ll most likely cause a shift from the questions appearing on the brands’ wall tab to the brands’ Questions tab instead as users become more accustomed to the feature.  This could change things for brands who currently answer fans’ questions on their Page’s wall and page moderators.  Instead of having one place to respond to fans’ questions and moderate conversation, now there will be two.  Does this mean more brand moderation will be necessary?

A brand can both ask and answer questions.  When answering a question, Page administrators must decide whether they’d like to answer using their own personal profiles or as the Page.  Answering as an individual person can humanize a brand and help add to its brand personality.  However, affiliating someone’s personal profile with the brand could potentially reflect negatively on the brand if the personal profile has lax privacy settings which can expose users to undesirable material on their profile.  Which method of answering should a brand choose?

Vitrue is interested in how brands will be affected as Facebook Questions is being rolled out to the public.  Rest assured, we’ll continue to analyze the environment in order to help our clients with the introduction and adoption of Facebook Questions.

The Facebook Open Graph protocol was announced back in April and allows marketers to create “Like” buttons for individual objects, and not just Facebook pages. You’ve probably seen the Like Button in use on blogs, like this one or even articles on CNN. And while this is a great way to surface content into Facebook, recent developments in the Graph API create so much more potential in the Open Graph than simply sharing articles!

By creating “Like” Buttons (the technical term is “Open Graph objects”) for your products, market segments, and individual store locations, you create a way for existing and prospective customers to Like those individual elements wherever they may appear in your web content—not just on your Facebook page.

How This Benefits Major Marketers

If this seems a little confusing, let’s take a real-world example. The Ford Motor Company could create “Like” Buttons for its different models (19 is my quick count). They also could create “Like” Buttons for different vehicle segments like Hybrid, Trucks, Crossovers, and SUVs; and even customer segments like Youth, Sports, and Racing.

As customers interact with the content and click the “Like” Buttons associated with their particular preferences, a powerful, segmented, “graph” emerges. But for that graph to be useful, Ford in this example would need to have:

1. A clear definition of the graph objects it wishes to create;
2. A system to manage the deployment and use of the various graph objects
3. A way to manage and publish content to Facebook users who have Liked the different graph objects

Vitrue’s Publisher, enhanced to support the Open Graph, accomplishes all three of those things!

Marketers can log in to Vitrue’s easy-to-use Publisher to create and manage Open Graph objects, and publish content to people who Like those objects which will appear in the news feeds of the fans. They can do this with the same ease and power they have come to expect when using the Vitrue Publisher to manage their Facebook pages.

Marketers can create a message and target it to the people who “Like” a specific Object, or can broadcast it to those who”Like” many different Objects, all with a simple click.

In the example below, the Vitrue Publisher is managing 3 graph objects and a Facebook page.

Click Image to Enlarge

Extending to Local

Another incredible application of the Open Graph functionality is localization of content for major Quick-Serve Restaurants, Franchisers, and Retailers. As the industry leader in Facebook Tab localization (and the first to introduce Global) we are now helping brands extend/build local strategies around the Open Graph.

Creating Open Graph objects for retail locations, agents, branches, DMA, zip codes or regions creates a powerful network of “Likes”. Using Vitrue’s Publisher to manage these Objects takes the daunting task of managing hundreds or even thousands of items and makes it manageable for the marketer. Marketers can also surface “Likes” on existing Facebook pages using the Vitrue Tabs product and integrate their existing Facebook localization strategies.

Other Features

The enhancements we launched to our product platform go far beyond just Open Graph publishing and we’ll cover those additional features in a separate blog post.

One final thing I’d like to update you about, are changes to our product names. Our former Vitrue SRM and FMS products have now been renamed to Vitrue Publisher and Vitrue Tabs, respectively. The Publisher and Tab products join our Apps and Mobile products to make a holistic social media marketing toolkit known as Vitrue’s Social Relationship Management Platform (SRM).

Do you have plans to leverage the Open Graph for your market? How would you segment your fans to create conversation? Leave a comment below and join the conversation.

This summer we had the opportunity to work as interns at Vitrue. We had a great experience. It was our first time to work for a company and get the feel of an office setting. Coming in the first day, we were somewhat awkward, nervous, and had no idea what to expect, but comfort set in with the guidance of our bosses and Vitrue’s staff. We felt at ease to ask a plethora of questions, learned quickly, and became a part of the Vitrue team. We participated in a variety of projects, and were able to sit in on meetings and learn the dynamics of the company and the problem solving strategies needed to achieve results.

One of the projects we particularly enjoyed was researching and choosing appropriate social media events for Vitrue to showcase products or send a speaker to. We were able to learn the varying importance of international conventions and conferences and became knowledgeable of the importance of our competitors and their presence in media. Another project we enjoyed was creating and revising an enterprise client portfolio and PowerPoint. We learned in-depth details of specific apps and tabs that Vitrue customized and fitted to their clients’ needs. This gave us a deeper understanding of Vitrue’s ability to specifically cater to the needs of their clients.

It might sound cheesy, but the past two months have truly flown by. Being college students, countless hours of our day and the hours of those around us are spent on Facebook and the Internet. Leaving Vitrue, we take away the realization of Facebook and social media’s extreme influence on how we perceive products and brands. Vitrue’s products are giving brands the tools and guidance to have an active social presence, and we are glad to have been a part of a company with insights into upcoming advances in the social media world.

- Katie and Christina

URL shortener services, such as bit.ly and tinyURL, are free but do not offer the authenticity of a custom, branded URL shortener (not to mention making your click data public to your competitors). We encourage brands to use branded URL shorteners to gain credibility and authenticate their links.

CAPTCHA window

One of the biggest downsides to using a free service to shorten a URL is that spammers often use these services to hide links that could be dangerous to your computer or try to steal your information.

Facebook is making strides to create a safe environment online. Last week they broke bit.ly links and marked them as abusive. Facebook posted a blog entry addressing the issue in June 2010. While they have since been restored, to post something with a bit.ly link, users will now see a window with a CAPTCHA authenticator to ensure the link is being posted by a person and not a spammer or robot.

These new safety precautions makes me wonder if it is a sign of things to come for bit.ly and other consumer-based shorteners on Facebook and other social media platforms.

The best way to let your fans, followers and friends know your link is trusted and will not lead them astray is to use a branded URL. The Vitrue Platform offers solutions to create unique, trusted, branded URLs.

Our relationship with Facebook as one of their Preferred Developers is one of mutual responsibility.  The round-table last week is one way they are keeping up their end, by giving us the chance to tell the story of our value proposition directly to the people who enable us to realize that value by creating such killer social apps. We jumped at the opportunity.

The Facebook “campus” is a fascinating place. Right off the bat my eye was caught by seemingly dozens of Internet memes used as the taxonomy of Facebook conference rooms. They have one called “I’m On A Horse”, and another called “Leeroy Jenkins”. I love that kind of thing. Vitrue’s main conference room is just called “Executive Conference Room”– Classy, but somewhat staid.

Other impressions of the Facebook physical plant were the wonderfully open spaces everyone works in, the interesting materials used for walls and other structures, and the massive amount of snacks and refrigerators stuffed with sodas and water lining every other wall.

Facebook’s human component is a corps of young, incredibly bright people all of whom seemed to adore Vitrue sales guy, Jim Tramel. He worked there for a year or so before moving to Vitrue and was kind enough to show me around the Facebook offices, where everybody we saw had a huge grin and a hug for him. I don’t blame them; he’s hard not to like.

Whereas it often seems like Facebook is some monolithic entity making unilateral decisions about its feature set and policies, the truth is that Facebook is 1500 or so people (and growing every day) who are all trying to keep up with not only the space they’re competing in but the pace of change driven by their peers at Facebook itself. It’s a daunting task that they meet head on, but one of such proportions that companies like Vitrue are needed to provide real-world product experience for the folks on the inside. When you’re peering out the porthole of a submarine it’s not always easy to see how the fish are swimming.

The developers, designers, and product managers in charge of the various sections of Facebook are, rightly, primarily concerned with how changes will affect their user base– the ordinary people (like you and me) who spend an hour a day on average “Facebooking”.

Their focus on the everyday user makes it important for us to demonstrate the value that brands can bring to Facebook– how brands can help fulfill the human need to attach ourselves to ideas in order to define our place in our culture and increase our connection to other like-minded people.

At Vitrue we see it as our job to make sure that Facebook personnel are exposed to how brands and marketing via Pages and Tabs actually serve the wants and needs of Facebook users in general.

To that end we promise to continue our conversation with Facebook and live up to our responsibility as a Preferred Developer on behalf of everyday users, marketers, and brands.

There are a lot of changes coming to Facebook, and soon. Enhancements to Insights, to Pages, to Tabs, to Social Plugins. Nearly every section of Facebook is targeted for substantial improvement both in the User Interface and under hood.

What you see now is really just a baby. A really big baby, but still an application that only really started to come into its own a couple of years ago– compare that with a service like Google, which has been a serious concern for over a decade. I look forward to watching Facebook’s progress and contributing to its success in my own small way, as part of the product team here at Vitrue and as a participant in the conversation at future events involving the Preferred Developer Consultants group.

My thanks to Facebook for the opportunity to meet so many great people and talk shop to my heart’s content over the fantastic food in the cafeteria at Facebook HQ.

There are 340+ Social Media Day meetups scheduled to take place from Sheboygan, WI to Kaunas, Lithuania.  Using Meetups Everywhere, communities around the globe have come together to help host this first-ever event  Look for Mashable staff to provide more insight into the world of social media in New York, San Francisco, Atlanta and Austin.

Look for photos tagged with #smday on Flickr and comments with #smday on Facebook or Twitter to track this global conversation.  Also, Mashable has set up a website for the event at smday.com and attendees are asked to upload pictures and event information to the Social Media Day Facebook event.

The Vitrue team is looking forward to joining the conversational global celebration in person.  Look for us in San Francisco, Atlanta and Cincinnati where Vitrue is also an official sponsor of #smday.  Our team will also be en masse in New York City.

San Francisco, CA
Porter Novelli Office
550 Third Street
6:00 PM

Atlanta, GA
Hub Atlanta
1375 Spring St NW
8:00 PM

Cincinnati, OH
Lavomatic Cafe (upstairs patio)
1211 Vine St

New York City, NY
The Mean Fiddler
266 W 47th St

We hope to see you out tonight!  Where will you be celebrating?

The question on everybody’s mind: how frequently should your brand post to Facebook? Unfortunately, the answer is not cut and dry - it just depends.

Our analysis based on data gathered from the Vitrue Social Page Evaluator supports that the more active a brand is, the more engaged their fans are. What we mean by that is the more often a brand publishes updates and content on Facebook, the higher the levels of “liking”, commenting and posting a brand receives from their fans. Best practices show that posting two to three times a day is most effective. However, many factors play into finding the right posting velocity for your brand. These include the type of brand, the time of the year, and even the day of the week.

Type of Brand

Different brands certainly warrant different Facebook publishing strategies. With more people relying on their Facebook and Twitter news feeds for news and interesting material these days, your brand should be prepared to update your fans as newsworthy content arises from your company. For example, fans of a news or sports organization are probably expecting frequent updates from the brand. Let’s face it – as a fan of those types of brands, those users are looking for scores and breaking news. If they’re not receiving the content they want, they will probably go to a different source to get it, so don’t lose their attention. Even brands who seem like they don’t have much to talk about can generate posts to spark conversation every day. Ask for your fans’ opinions about a topic. Talk about events your company may be sponsoring. It’s all about figuring out what type of information resonates well with your fans and keeping the conversation going every day.

Time of Year

Some brands tie to seasonality much more than others. Most retailers will want to increase posting frequency during the holiday season – and their fans are expecting that. Facebook users expect and appreciate relevant information that fits the time of the year. This means Facebook users may not be receptive to updates in their news feeds about ski clothing in the middle of their summer. Keep it appropriate.

Day of the Week/Time of Day

How many times have you pondered the best day of the week or time of day to post? If you said “a lot”, you’re not alone. Unfortunately, there is no secret sauce, but there are some key indicators about more effective days than others. A study conducted last October by IT staffing company, Robert Half Technology found that 54% of US companies block access to Facebook (and other social media sites) at work. For your brand, traffic may be higher in the evenings when people are checking their social media accounts from mobile devices on their way home or settling down at the home computer before dinner’s ready. According to Vitrue data, Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays seem to draw the heaviest levels of traffic on Facebook, so your brand should aim to publish its most important updates on these days. Weekends are a different story. If you are planning to post on the weekends, users typically have more down time on Sundays and check Facebook more frequently than on a Saturday.

Determine What’s Right For Your Brand

Facebook Insights tracks the numbers of impressions based on the date, but does not allow you to draw conclusions to determine which day of the week is best for your brand to post. Since a Facebook publishing strategy should be tailored to an individual brand, it may be a good idea for your brand conduct an exercise to determine when you’re getting the most exposure. Try this exercise:

- In a spreadsheet, figure out the total number of impressions for all of the posts your brand made for each day of the week over the past four weeks. For example, if you made two posts every Monday that each received 100,000 impressions, then write down 800,000 for that day (2 posts per day * 100,000 impressions per post * 4 Mondays = 800,000 impressions received on Mondays
- Repeat for the other days of the week
- Then, divide those totals by the number of posts that were published on each day of the week (800,000 impressions received on Mondays / 8 posts made on Mondays = 100,000 average impressions per post made on Mondays). This will give you the average number of impressions per post based on the day of the week so you can see which days are best for your brand.

So there you have it. Make it a point to experiment with your posts and track your progress. It won’t take long to figure out what works for your brand and start incorporating that into your brand’s overall posting strategy.

While we dive into the details of our data, I’d like to address the question of post frequency. According to the Vitrue Evaluator, we recommend brands strive to make two posts per day. We’ve received feedback from some brands questioning the frequency implying that it’s too much, while other brands are successfully posting 5 or more times per day. Ultimately the optimal post frequency will vary for each brand, but high frequencies are proving to produce engaged fans. Let’s take a look at some stats:

Out of the 30,000+ Pages evaluated, we narrowed our sample down to those Pages who are actively posting to their fans, at least 1 wall post per week. For now, let’s call these page owners Active Posters. Looking at the Active Posters, focused our sample to around 21,000 pages.

Active Posters produce an average of 1.37 wall posts per day. Honestly, that’s not far from Vitrue’s recommended 2 posts per day strategy. We typically recommend reaching fans in the late morning hours and then again in the early evening.

Digging deeper into the data we can see even greater evidence for a two-post-a-day strategy:

Fan Posts, Likes and Comments
The following charts depicts the three most important Fan engagements against the Page engagement (wall posts). We see that brands who post more then twice a day have significantly higher Fan Posts and Likes. While brands posting at least 1 per day see the highest amount of comments. That’s logical based on the simplicity of Liking a post vs. writing a comment.

Fan Post Rate is the number of fan posts, divided by the number of fans
Like Index is a score based on the number of Likes per Page Post per Fans
Comment Index is a score based on the number of Comments per Page Post per Fans

So in summary, our data shows the more active a brand, the more engaged the fans - pure and simple. When a brand posts about two times a day, it leads to higher Likes, comments and fan posts. Let’s not forget Likes and comments increase the likelihood of your page’s post appearing in the newsfeed. Similarly, Fan Posts appear in the Fans’ streams, creating more viral awareness for your page.

All three of these fan engagements - Likes, comments and fan posts are used to determine Facebook Page value in the Vitrue Evaluator. If you haven’t seen what your Facebook Page is worth, you can do so for free at http://evaluator.vitrue.com

What’s your post frequency? Are you successfully posting 2+ times per day? Share your experience by leaving a comment and join the conversation.

So you may be wondering what exactly is an iAd?

“iAd offers advertisers the emotion of TV with the interactivity of the web, and offers users a new way to explore ads without being hijacked out of their favorite apps,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO.

iAd, which is built into iOS 4, allows users to stay within their app while engaging with the ad, even while watching a video, playing a game or using in-ad purchase to download an app or buy iTunes® content.

In a nutshell, iAds are very similar to the apps we see and build everyday on Facebook. Engaging apps like coupons, polls, and contests will find their way into iAds. You can leverage video, images, maps, social networking and many of the unique iPhone features.

While not as extensive as Facebook’s reach and targeting capabilities, the iAd network is certainly poised to deliver major results for brands.

“iAds will reach millions of iPhone and iPod touch users—a highly desirable demographic for advertisers—and provide developers a new way to earn money so they can continue developing free and low cost applications,” said Steve Jobs.

Vitrue is a member of the iPhone Developer Program and we are expanding our platform to include support for iAd JS (the API for iAd development). Vitrue customers today can execute cohesive social initiatives across Facebook and Twitter; and very shortly add mobile social initiatives with iAds. Marketers and Agencies using the Vitrue platform realize time and expense savings, have access to cutting edge social technology and can leverage the industry’s most powerful management tools.

Are you as excited about iAds as we are? Drop us a note in the comments below, and join the conversation.

I am thrilled to welcome a true innovator and internet-marketing pioneer to the growing Vitrue team. Well, I should say “Welcome Back,” as many know J.B. Kropp was a key contributor in the very early days of Vitrue.  From 2006-2008, he served as our Vice President of Strategic Development.  J.B. has rejoined us and will serve as Vice President of Channel Partnerships where he’ll be responsible for expanding our product suite across our partner channels, giving Vitrue a much larger footprint nationwide.  A primary focus for J.B. will be developing new partnerships and expanding current ones with publishers, agencies and technology companies as those relationships will be pivotal for our future.

J.B. is certainly qualified and up-to-the-challenge, bringing almost 15 years of product, operations and strategic-leadership experience to Vitrue. He has both started and participated in numerous early-stage advertising and marketing companies such as Sharkle.com, Flycast Network, Web Visible and Cucina.com. He most recently served as an executive with ShareThis, the company known for the social-sharing tool that now reaches more than 400 million users across 130,000 sites on the web. During his more than two years at ShareThis, J.B. led the product strategy and distribution efforts helping pave the wave for the company’s outstanding success.

J.B. is joining Vitrue at a very exciting time as we are experiencing tremendous growth with our client base, technologies and research advancements. He is extremely creative and knowledgeable and will immediately make his mark here at Vitrue.  With J.B. joining our talented staff, we are uniquely positioned to continue our growth and further solidify our status as the leading social media management company. Welcome back, J.B.!