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- American Dreams Combines Social Gaming, Education and International Relations
- Ads API Profile: Brighter Option’s Social Ads Manager for Smaller Budgets
- Compose Facebook Updates to Promote WordPress Blog Posts with Involver’s Audience Management Platform
- Now Available: The Facebook Marketing Bible December 2010 Edition
- Top 20 Growing Facebook Pages: Rihanna, Star Trek, Google, Zynga, Red Bull and More
| American Dreams Combines Social Gaming, Education and International Relations Posted: 30 Nov 2010 08:57 PM PST American Dreams is an educational social game created by developer Nihaoareyou that not only allows users to play in an online university world, but also have access to real life educational lectures from anywhere around the world.
Nihaoareyou, a company that develops educational social games, created the game to foster understanding between the U.S. and China, where American Dreams recently launched in Beta. The Beta version is available in 12 countries total, including Turkey, Indonesia, Brazil and India on Facebook and a Chinese rival to Facebook, Renren. While users play the game, which simulates the American university experience, they can stop and jump into a live video stream of an actual American university class. Nihaoareyou currently partners with Abilene Christian University and offers courses in English, with plans to expand its curriculum. A YouTube video of a game demo also says that lectures from Harvard, Stanford and Yale are to be offered in the game as well. The game promises not only the live lectures, but video lessons, PowerPoints, a white board, online lessons and flash cards to help the user better her education.
The basic premise is that the user is going to study abroad in the U.S., so, players start out receiving their visa in the airport and immediately arriving to a college town. On Level 1 of the game, users pick their avatar and where they live — including how much they'll pay for it from their stock of "money" — and get to decorate their new home. An introduction then explains how the live classes on American Dreams work. Then a user passes to Level 2, finding a job and going to the mall to furnish their new home or buy new clothes are among the activities in which users may participate.
We’ve written previously about how companies like CampusBuddy and Inigral are hoping to take the power of Facebook’s social graph and apply it to the university setting, but no one seems to have gotten the formula just right. Perhaps this combination of social gaming and education will yield new results. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Ads API Profile: Brighter Option’s Social Ads Manager for Smaller Budgets Posted: 30 Nov 2010 05:18 PM PST
For those less familiar, Facebook's performance advertising system offers powerful targeting, but the user interface is not designed for running big campaigns or conducting sophisticated A/B testing. Last fall, Facebook gave a limited number of developers access to an ads API to allow more powerful tools for designing, targeting, and managing ads to be built. Company ProfileBrighter Option is an off-shoot of European social advertising agency Socially Bright, that was looking for a scalable way to run Facebook ads to drive social game installs for its clients. Socially Bright wanted to be able to prove the ROI of running Facebook ads, so Brighter Option designed SAM to focus on conversion tracking and reporting.
“We believe once you start using SAM, your spend will increase,” Goodman explains. “People need to be offered a chance to use it at an early stage to prove that Facebook can deliver good results.” Clients need to understand how to use the tool in order to increase their spend, so Brighter Option offers training to help managers. In the six weeks since SAM launched, Brighter Option has seen a wide spectrum of client spend, though it doesn’t have volume specifics to share yet. The tool provider differentiates itself by “trying to take care of the smaller players as well as the larger ones.” Social Ads ManagerUpon logging into SAM, users see a dashboard showing their most active campaigns and clients which can be sorted by spend or other metrics, as well as recent daily spend history, ad approvals by Facebook, and connected Facebook accounts.
The New Campaign tab allows user to title, schedule, and bid on a campaign, add images from the ad’s destination site or a library of previously used images, and define targeting. By choosing to expand targets, all the included ages in an age range, selected countries, or languages are applied as variables to create every possible permutation of the ad. SAM doesn’t provide a vivid way of seing different variants as they’re created, or the approximate audience of all the variants, making it slightly more difficult for a user to understand what ads they’re running. SAM also lacks suggestions for similar interests, or a typeahead for selecting common Likes to target. The Clients tab presents a performance overview graph which can show metrics including spend, impressions, clicks, Likes, CTR, CPC, CPM, and cost per Like over a variety of time periods. Any of these metrics can be clicked to instantly show that performance graph without the page needing to reload. Users can also see the performance of different campaigns for single products, such as different service plans for a satellite TV package. User can select exactly which columns of data they want to see about these campaigns, such as average bid, total conversions, or how often different conversion levels were reached.
The Engagement section of a product allows users to set up conversion tracking pixels for different post-click actions or conversions, copy the code, and insert it into the web page denoting the action or conversion. Up to eight conversion pixels can be configured for each ad.
The Campaigns tab provides data on exactly who is clicking the ads. Pie charts and bar graphs show a campaign’s clickers broken down by gender, age, location, creative clicked, and more.
Bid management is Brighter Option’s biggest weakness at this time. Users must manually adjust bids to reflect insights from the analytics, but this is impossible for large scale campaigns. Constantly changing bids by tiny increments to optimize for how different demographics monetize at different times requires an automatic, algorithm-based system that the early-stage company has yet to develop.
The Details view allows users to see bar graphs of the performance of different ads stacked on top of each other for multiple campaigns. This makes it easy to visually compare the campaigns while retaining perpective on how each ad influenced each campaign’s performance.
To help small agencies and advertisers who don’t always have a manager in the office to pause campaigns in the event of a problem, Brighter Option has developed a special WAP site. It allows managers to pause or active campaigns from their mobile device. ConclusionGoodman says the fast-growing ads API industry is exciting, and that Brighter Option has focused on getting feedback from clients to define their roadmap. He says Facebook has helped the company pick up the steep learning curve by providing ample warning about API changes. Next, Brighter Option is working on developing bid optimization algorithms. Overall, SAM is a huge improvement over running Facebook ads through the native user interface. Offering training, conversion tracking, and native analytics without a minimum spend means any business can get data on the ROI of Facebook ads. However, if advertisers or agencies can afford an ads API tool with auto-optimization of bids, they’ll achieve a lower cost per acquisition than is possible with Brighter Option’s Social Ads Manager. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Posted: 30 Nov 2010 10:37 AM PST Involver is announcing a new WordPress and Facebook integration for its Audience Management Platform today. Users can draft WordPress blog posts, compose updates for Facebook and Twitter which promote the blog post, then publish the post and updates from within AMP. Updates for the social channels can be automatically populated with a headline and shortened URL, saved as drafts for publishing later, and feedback can be tracked across posts through a tagging system. The addition shifts promotion on social media from an ad hoc, untracked secondary action to a central, measurable part of content production.
Involver, a social marketing platform listed as a Facebook Preferred Developer Consultant, launched its moderation and engagement tracking software Audience Management Platform in July. AMP provides frequently updated growth and engagement analytics, and clients are charged by the number of Pages or accounts managed or by audience size. Since, the 60+ employee company has raised $8 million in a round led by Bessemer Venture Partners to encompass additional channels and content platforms such as those integrated in this build. Involver has powered promotions and designed custom applications for the FIFA World Cup, top musicians such as Alicia Keys, and even Facebook itself. The latest build of Audience Management Platform allows users to add WordPress blogs as outlets in the Publish tab. Users can compose, save drafts, and publish to WordPress within AMP. After publishing a blog entry, most content producers would either let an application automatically post updates to Twitter and Facebook linking to the blog, or manually compose these updates. Automated systems can produce robotic-sounding posts which don’t attract readers, while manual composition for each channel is inefficient. Involver has developed a solution by bringing promotion of a blog post on Facebook and Twitter within the same window as composition on WordPress. Facebook Pages and Twitter accounts can be selected as outlets to publish to, and by clicking “Promote to all”, drafts of updates to these outlets are populated with the blog post’s headline and a http://inv.lv shortened link to the post. Content producers can then add additional channel-specific context such as photos or text descriptions. Like the blog post, these social updates can be saved as drafts, published simultaneously with the post, or scheduled for future publishing.
Combining a tagging system with human-assisted social media publishing represents a significant improvement over existing automatic cross-channel publishing systems. Involver’s VP of Marketing Jascha Kaykas-Wolff explains that the improvement to AMP “accurately represents the way we publish content – to the richest channels first, then to Facebook and Twitter as promotional channels.” The interface for the improvements runs smoothly and intuitively, making social promotion a natural extension of the blogging process. Content producers who find themselves constantly juggling these different publishing outlets have much to gain from the analytics and efficiency offered by Audience Management Platform’s WordPress integration. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Now Available: The Facebook Marketing Bible December 2010 Edition Posted: 30 Nov 2010 09:00 AM PST
The December 2010 edition of the Facebook Marketing Bible: The Comprehensive Guide to Market Your Brand, Company, Product, or Service Inside Facebook is now available! The Facebook Marketing Bible has enabled thousands of marketers, social application developers, publishers, and entrepreneurs to navigate and get the most out of the increasingly sophisticated marketing opportunities on Facebook. The web edition of the Facebook Marketing Bible is comprised of detailed resource pages, comprehensive how-to guides, and case studies analyzing today’s most successful marketing and advertising campaigns on Facebook.
Now that Facebook has crossed the 500 million active user mark, there’s never been a better time to reach your target audience through marketing on Facebook. The December 2010 edition includes updates on the following topics:
Learn more about the December 2010 edition of the Facebook Marketing Bible at FacebookMarketingBible.com. Table of Contents excerpted from the full December 2010 EditionBuilding Your Brand through Facebook Pages
Growing your Facebook Page Audience
Designing Your Facebook Page
Advanced Strategies for Facebook Pages
Tools and Analytics for Pages
Facebook Groups
Facebook Events
Facebook Questions and Places
Performance Advertising Fundamentals
Ads Targeting on Facebook
The Facebook Open Graph, and APIs for Web Publishers
Policies, Privacy, and Guidelines to Watch
The Facebook Marketing Bible is available at FacebookMarketingBible.com | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Top 20 Growing Facebook Pages: Rihanna, Star Trek, Google, Zynga, Red Bull and More Posted: 30 Nov 2010 08:00 AM PST
Top Gainers This Week
The first Page on the list this week was the Harry Potter Page, which given the smash success of the most recent film, makes sense. The movie reached worldwide release in the past week, adding 930,300 Likes in the process to grow to 10.6 million total. Another film, "Tangled," from Disney pushed that Page to number 10 on the list with 530,900 new Likes and more than 13.9 million all told.
Then there were two beverages on the list, Red Bull and Coca-Cola. Red Bull took third place after adding 730,300 new Likes to reach 13.3 million; the Page has been mostly promoting Red Bull and related events and merchandise. At number 15 was Coca-Cola with 475,600 new Likes and a total of 19.7 million. Tech companies on the list included Google (Chrome and YouTube), Facebook and Zynga. In second place was the Google Chrome Facebook Page which showed some huge spikes after adding 807,100 Likes to pass 4 million. Facebook's own Page added 597,800 Likes to come in just under 29 million. YouTube's Page added 597,400 Likes to jump to 23.5 million. Finally, Zynga's Texas Hold'em Poker Page added 586,300 Likes to get to 28.8 million with all types of promotions on the Page. There were a bunch of TV-related Pages on the list, too.
At number 11 was "The Simpsons" with 527,100 new Likes and 15.5 million total; the Page has been promoting the show. "SpongeBob SquarePants" was number 13 with 493,800 new Likes and 13.7 million total; the SpongeBob float in the Thanksgiving Macy's Day Parade seems to have garnered some attention on the Page. "Star Trek" was next at 14 with 481,000 new Likes, the bulk of the 591,800 Likes to the Page — it seems like perhaps a Page consolidation took place. Finally, MTV's Page added 460,400 new Likes to reach 11.3 million although it mostly promoted old content. The remaining eight Pages on the list belonged to musicians. Rihanna came in fourth with 646,300 new Likes and a total of 17.6 million; she recently appeared on an awards show and is running a promotional sweepstakes for fans. At number 8 was Shakira, who added 578,700 new Likes to her 15.4 million; she recently won a music award. Eminem was next at 9 with 565,600 new Likes to pass 22 million and he hasn't even updated the Page.
The group Shinedown was at number 12 after adding 505,300 new Likes to grow the Page to 651,500. The band is selling iTunes downloads of its songs on Facebook, like several other bands on our list. Bob Marley's Page took the number 17 spot with 450,500 new Likes, coming in just under 16.5 million at the end of the week, and selling merch and promoting covers. Akon's Page took number 18 with 432,800 new Likes and almost 13 million total fans, selling iTunes downloads and set to perform in the Victoria's Secret show this week.
Also performing at the Victoria's Secret show is Katy Perry, whose page is up 428,500 Likes this week with a total of 14.4 million; she's also selling iTunes downloads. Finally, Linkin Park came in at number 20. The band added 426,900 Likes, passed 18.1 million and is touring, as well as selling tickets to its North American tour on Facebook. |
As part of our ongoing series on companies offering Facebook's Ads API tools and services, today we profile 
The twelve employee team is based in South London, and is self-funded by CEO and founder Peter Goodman. The SAM browser-based software is currently being licensed by roughly twenty clients ranging from social games to small agencies. Unlike many ads API tools which require clients to spend at least $10,000 to $50,000, Brighter Option does not have a a minimum spend. Clients are charged a fee for each click driven through SAM, allowing companies with limited budgets to try out the tool without making a commitment. Fees are capped for larger campaigns to encourage clients to increase their spend.
Users can view charts of the bids and performance of individual ads within a campaign. Bids to multiple ads can be changed simultaneously, either by setting a new bid, increasing all the bids by a monetary value, or increasing all the bids by a percentage. This last option is useful for when a certain campaign of ads with different bids is leading to higher conversions than other campaigns, and a user wants to increase all the bids of the successful campaign accordingly.
Clicking the analytics button presents report options where users can select a chart type, date range, interval, values within the chart type, and the statistic to chart. Users can view the report on the site reducing the need for the advertiser or agency to have an in-house data visualization specialist. Reports can also be exported as Excel files or PDFs. Analytics are pulled from Facebook every five minutes, or the Sync button can be click to instantly pull the latest data. Insights like at which step of the monetization flow clickers drop out, such as entering credit card data for those over 50 years of age, can be used to refine both bid management and site design.
To allow producers to track the success of the social updates, they can be internally tagged with the channel they’re published to, a category of content, or the name or subject of the post they link to. Producers can then monitor the Likes, clicks, @replies, or other metrics across all updates sharing a tag. For instance, if a content producer tagged and published ten different updates to their Facebook Page linking to three blog posts on the same topic over a period of six months, they could see the aggregated feedback for all of those updates, or drill down to update-specific metrics. This tagging system can produce insights, such as updates about a certain topic drive more traffic when published in the evening, that couldn’t be deduced through other publishing methods or on Facebook’s native Page analytics.
In addition, Inside Network is pleased to announce that through December 31st all customers who purchase the 
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