Inside Facebook
Inside Facebook |
- Collect Surveys and Facebook User Info With Techlightenment’s Social Research Platform
- Reppler Scans Your Facebook Profile for Objectionable Content and Security Risks
- Obama and Zuckerberg to Field Questions From Users at Facebook Live Town Hall
| Collect Surveys and Facebook User Info With Techlightenment’s Social Research Platform Posted: 05 Apr 2011 02:49 PM PDT
By using Social Research Platform brands can attain demographic, interest, and opinion data cheaper and faster than through other mediums. The research could be used to help brands decide what products to release, to determine preferences on ad creative or copy, or to market test games, film trailers, commercials or other types of media.
Mailing out paper surveys can take a long time, focus groups can be expensive, and attaining respondents to online questionnaires can be difficult. Users don’t always accurately represent themselves in manually completed surveys, either because they forget things, purposefully answer incorrectly, or only provide the minimum required info. Facebook’s interactive nature and the way its users can grant third-parties permission to access their data about their identity and behavior means the site holds enormous potential for improving quality of market research. Social Research Platform clients can create highly customized, rich media surveys that allow users to register their opinions through various answer formats on text questions, photos, videos, audio, or even game play. When users finish, they can opt-in to giving the tool access to pull their Facebook profile information in a Facebook-compliant way. Profile info is then layered over a user’s answers, and clients can track all the data in real-time through the Social Research Platform dashboard.
This allows clients to breakdown responses to see, for example, how certain genders, age groups, people who Like a certain Page, or people with more than 500 friends answered. Learning that women over 40 who live in the Midwest have the most positive impression of a product could help a company structure its marketing plan, or seeing that none of the five prototypes for its new product are preferred to its old model by users from New York could help it avoid a failed launch. Ankur Shah, co-founder of Techlightenment, which was recently acquired by credit and marketing services giant Experian, tells us that in many cases clients want to attain the most responses as quickly as possible. Clients with millions of Likes or a large email list can attain this volume on their own by licensing the survey product and adding it to their Pages as a tab application and embedding it on their websites. To offer high volume to less established clients, Techlightenment partner Adknowledge places the survey in the offer walls of popular social games. Respondents receive proprietary in-game currency, though not Facebook Credits, in exchange for their data.
Shah tells us that Social Research Platform is just phase one of his company’s plans to do with its social customer relationship management technology. The tool could be repurposed to give aggregate profiles of the audiences of fan Pages, similar to what the recently released LikeAudience by the Cambridge University Psychometrics Centre offers. Brands looking for granular market insight at one tenth of the cost and many times the speed of traditional research methods should inquire with Techlightenment. |
| Reppler Scans Your Facebook Profile for Objectionable Content and Security Risks Posted: 05 Apr 2011 12:16 PM PDT
This first iteration of Reppler has some deficiencies, most notably that it only analyzes a user’s 100 latest posts. However, more comprehensive scanning may be available in later releases, and a premium tier of the service that is currently in development could offer historical analysis, custom flagging and more.
Other online reputation management services such as Reputation.com (formerly Reputation Defender) and LifeLock provide more professional and enterprise level identity and business intelligence theft prevention. Reppler is aimed more squarely towards younger users who may exhibit more risky behavior but aren’t willing to pay up to hundreds of dollars a year for protection. SafeToBe.Me, the 4-person Palo Alto-based startup that developed Reppler, has taken a small seed round of funding led by Norwest Venture partners SafeToBe.Me’s founder and CEO Vlad Gorelik cites a Microsoft-backed study indicating that seven out of ten recruiters performed some kind of online background check of job candidates, including checking their Facebook profile. He says these checks aren’t likely to dig deeper than a user’s latest 100 posts, but that Reppler plans to provide more historical data once the service matures. The service could also prove useful for parents who want to keep their kids safe without monitoring every single thing they share. When users visit the Reppler site, they’re asked for long list of extended permissions. Once granted users must wait a few minutes for their data to be analyzed before seeing the results in four different sections: My Impression, My Inappropriate Content, My Information, and My Privacy and Security Risks. They can also connect their YouTube, Flickr and Picasa account for scanning. My Impression gives a sentiment analysis of a user’s wall, showing whether the general tone was positive or negative. Users can drill down to see the most frequently used words, posting trends by weekday or hour, a pie chart breaking down the sources of wall posts, and a bar graph showing in what categories users have the most Likes.
My Inappropriate Content flags posts with mentions of strong, derogatory, alcohol, drug, or adult language. Users can click the “Fix This” button to visit a flagged post on Facebook where they can choose to delete it. My Information scans the info tab of a user’s profile and shows links to recently tagged and uploaded photos and videos. My Privacy and Security Risks alerts users to malicious links that could result in their account being hacked. Users can manage their notification settings through a set of sliders to choose whether they’ll be notified of risks immediately, by email summary, through the Reppler site, or not at all. For being a free tool, Reppler offers a wide breadth of information about a user’s Facebook profile. Gorelik tells us that the next steps in its product roadmap include offering support for other social networks such as Twitter and LinkedIn. While Reppler can’t provide total assurance for one’s reputation yet, it can offer users a reality check of their safety, security and the impression their profile can give. By capturing younger users with a free tool now, Reppler may be able to turn them into paying customers as they grow up and more of our lives are shared online. |
| Obama and Zuckerberg to Field Questions From Users at Facebook Live Town Hall Posted: 05 Apr 2011 10:51 AM PDT
The event has been organized by The White House’s Facebook Page, which is asking users to Like it before RSVP’ing. The Page includes the option to share with friends an invitation to “Join President Obama for a Facebook Townhall” and a link to submit questions. Obama will be the first acting President of the United States to speak at a Facebook Live event, though former President George W. Bush spoke with Zuckerberg in December 2010. Facebook previously held the Vote 2010 Town Hall in conjunction with ABC during the last presidential election. By taking questions online opposed to from a physically present audience, the event will allow even those abroad to join the discussion.
Obama met with Zuckerberg and other tech leaders including Steve Jobs during the President’s trip to Silicon Valley in February. They discussed how the government could promote job creation by investing in the tech sector. Startup America, a new partnership between the White House and innovation industries, has been founded to further these goals. Facebook is participating in the initiative by planning to hold 12 “Startup Days” this year to encourage development on the platform that can lead to successful new companies. Facebook has been looking to strengthen its relation with the US government lately, staffing a new policy office in Washington with lobbyists, and attempting to hire former Press Secretary Robert Gibbs to lead its communications team. Zuckerberg has been taking an active role in this courtship, most recently sitting down with Senator Oren Hatch at Brigham Young University, and visiting Capitol Hill last year. |
Techlightenment has launched a new market research tool called the 
If clients only want data about a specific demographic, such as users who went to a certain college, who live in a certain city, or who Like a certain Page, Techlightenment can target Facebook ads promoting the survey to that audience.
President Barack Obama, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg will answer questions from users as part of a 
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