With the help of Facebook engineer Arturo Bejar, an article entitled “Facebook tracking is under scrutiny” on the USA Today website reveals details of how members are tracked on the social network, whether connected or not, and how their stored data is used. Visitors who do not have accounts on Facebook are also involved. The social network uses tracking codes, also known as cookies, which are placed on the user’s computer during a website visit. Widespread, they are useful to sites and online services to see if a user is logged-in, or if they have already visited the website. A good example being when you shop on Amazon, the products you were shopping for last week are staring you straight in the face this week.

Different cookies for members and visitors

Facebook uses two types of cookies: one for members and one for non-members of the social media platform.

For members with an account, Facebook uses a session cookie to keep the user connected as long as the same browser is used. The cookie stores and compiles data such as name, email address, friends’ lists and preferences. It also stores unique elements such as the IP address and technical information on the configuration of your computer and browser. Finally, it logs the page views that contain a Facebook plugin such as the “Like” button with time and date and internet address (URL).

Non-members who are sent a link to a Facebook page, as well as members disconnected from their accounts, are also tracked. In these cases, a browser cookie replaces the session cookie. A unique identifier replaces the personal data such as name and Facebook data. Although no longer associated with the account of the social network, the rest of the information collected does not change. The technical information is retrieved from the computer (browser, operating system, IP address) as well as the date and address of visited web pages, particularly if they contain one of the many Facebook plugins: “Like” button, shares, comments, activities, etc.

Facebook has no plans to stop collecting this information and this stance is further supported by its representative Andrew Noyes. He explains that Google, Microsoft and other major Internet behemoths already use this method for targeted advertising. The social network with 800 million members said they use different data for advertising to members connected in Facebook.

For ordinary visitors, the tracking is helping to improve security and the user experience. According to Facebook’s spokesman, the connection logs are used to identify fake accounts and block misuse. The collected data is used to understand and improve the use of plugins.

The choice to the user?

Cookies in themselves are not dangerous files from a privacy perspective. And, it is possible to filter or block cookies for individual websites or services, but it also eliminates handling the practical side of this file tracer. But whatever the purpose, a visitor or user of a service should be able to choose whether to accept the tracking of their browsing activity.

In 2012, the W3C standards body will set the standard for DNT “Do Not Track”. It will allow the user to indicate whether he wishes his surfing habits to be used. Facebook, as well as Google, Microsoft and other major internet players took part in the discussions.

At Banner, user privacy is paramount. We constantly monitor legislation to integrate the latest directives into our campaigns and we use a carefully selected suite of online marketing tools that enable us to protect the user’s rights.

Interested in finding out more? Why not read our white paper: ‘Here comes the cookie monster – making sense of EU Data Protection Legal Framework’

Sound familiar?

Certainly, if you read many of today’s marketing blogs, you’ll be left with the impression that these days there’s virtually nothing you can do to create, improve or sustain a compelling brand. The growth of social media and other peer-to-peer communications has meant that customers don’t need to listen to companies to get their information any more. They are more than happy to form their own opinions thank you very much. As the Cluetrain Manifesto says:

“People in networked markets have figured out that they get far better information and support from one another than from vendors.”

And anyway, with the focus ever-increasingly on demand generation, who has time for branding anyway? We all remember when we had to spend too much time and money “developing” our brands before we could get anywhere near generating a lead. Try that one on today’s board!

Balancing the picture on branding

There is of course some truth in all this. The days of the big brand campaign are pretty much over. But does that mean branding itself is dead?

Branding did, and still does, offer tangible benefits to an organisation:

• Increased recognition – which in today’s ultra-fragmented media is no bad thing (now what was that URL?).
• Greater perception of quality – when your competitors are creating cheap alternatives, how will you stand out if you can’t (or don’t wish to) compete on price?
• De-commoditisation – increasingly, especially in the tech industry, all products are tending to look the same. Standards rule. Any advantage tends to be fleeting. Successful branding creates meaningful differentiation.
• Stronger loyalty – it is so easy to switch vendors these days. Search for any product on Google and you’ll get gazillions of options back. But a strong brand relationship puts a brake on customer defections.
• Focus – really knowing who you are, what that means and why customers should care brings focus for all your activities. It gives you a foundation on which to base your communications and programmes.

So the benefits haven’t changed. What has changed, however, is the communication landscape.

The way we engage with customers is less spun (or should be) and more direct and conversational. It is about helping customers get stuff done – typically with useful, engaging content. Having a strong sense of who you are and what you are about can only make these interactions stronger. And stronger interactions deliver better results.

We held another successful Huddle over at the Banner offices yesterday. The subject was all things mobile. And, over the course of the next few blog posts, I’ll be taking you through some of the insights from the various speakers who generously gave their time to make the afternoon such a success:

• Simon Silvester – EVP Head of Planning, Y&R EMEA
• Christina Carstensen – Director of Mobile Strategy, IDG
• Matt Findel-Hawkins – Sales Director, Nikkei BP Europe
• Mark Challinor – Director of Mobile, Telegraph Media Group

Here are a few initial out takes and general trends from the sessions:

• QR codes – they’re on every flat surface in Japan and will become a core component to bridge the gap between print and mobile marketing
• Near Field Communication (NFC) is coming, you already use it in your Oyster cards. And, once built into your mobile devices, it will be used for payment, couponing, events, etc.
• Don’t ignore SMS, it’s still a powerful medium and can be the best first step to get your audience engaging via their mobile devices
• Augmented Reality – as more phones are enabled with the software, marketers will need to seize the opportunity to market in this new view of the real world
• Location-based services will become ever-more important. Where content and experience must be relevant to the person’s location.
• When developing a mobile strategy, don’t start by thinking “What do I want to say?” instead think about how mobile can enhance your service or extend your proposition.
• Mobile CRM – marketers will need to think of new ways to engage with their audience over the whole customer life cycle.
• Mobile should be used to help your customers and prospects. Reality is that many people will prefer support through their mobile rather than face-to-face interaction.
• Mobile will be the primary screen for social media. But be aware that people’s mindsets are different when in “socialising” mode compared to “buying” mode. So you’ll need to engage through these channels rather than push your message.
• When advertising on mobile, response rates and engagement rates are much higher than computer-based interaction. So, make sure you take advantage of the “newness” of the medium. And, video engagement is six times more effective on the small screen.
• But, just don’t do any mobile advertising until you’ve sorted out an optimised mobile destination. And, make sure you don’t just make your website suitable for the smaller screen, think about the content and functionality people actually need when they’re on the move.
• If you haven’t integrated mobile into your event and trade show strategies, then you’re really missing an opportunity to engage with your prospects.

The feature is simply called “plus one”. If you’re familiar with Facebook adverts and likes, the concept is not very different. When users are logged into Google, they will be able to rate individual search results and adverts by clicking the “plus one” symbol. Their friends will then see the endorsement.

The idea is of course that these trusted recommendations will increase relevance and consequently click through rates. I’d like to highlight two points in particular:

• The organic rankings are now directly impacted by the recommendation.
• While the recommendation doesn’t directly impact paid search ad quality score or rankings, it will likely indirectly impact click through rates of your’s or your competitor’s ads

At the moment of writing, according to Google, the launch has only been fully rolled out in the US with the UK to follow “imminently”.

What’s next?

Google has already announced that the “plus one” feature will be extended to websites. The big question here is exactly how this will be implemented and how it will possibly impact search engine rankings. But in any event, get ready to slap yet another social badge on your website.

Let me explain. Back in the bubbly days at the end of the last millennium, everybody was talking about how to define and adopt a new media strategy. These days, nobody would consider a new media strategy, but instead how digital should be used as part of a broader marketing communications plan. It’s the same with social media.

Don’t think about engaging with your customers in social silos or having a knee jerk reaction to your CMO saying “we need a Facebook fan page”. Look at first understanding your target audience and what you want to achieve through your communications. This should then help you to define your communications strategy. It’s only at this point that you’ll be able to define which marketing channels to use and whether social platforms are even relevant within this plan.

Reassuringly, a workshop at our recent Social Media Huddle made me realise that we’re now at a point where many of our technology clients are truly starting to integrate social media into their marketing plans. By doing this, they’re now able to add higher levels of engagement, collaboration and create dialogue with their prospects, customers and channel through social platforms. Without losing sight of the fact that these activities are part of a broader marketing mix, involving paid media, search and more traditional communication vehicles.

F-mail

First a Hollywood blockbuster, then the world! Facebook has stepped up to challenge Google and Yahoo with it’s ‘not an email client’ email client. Facebook is giving its 0.5 billion users an ‘@facebook.com’ not-an-email-address address, and launched a single portal for SMS-ing, tweeting and emailing through the Facebook framework.

The new feature-set — dubbed a “social inbox” by founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg — has critics sceptical, and I wonder if the ‘not an email client’ position is fooling anyone. Didn’t Google try something similar with its (now defunct) “Wave”?

A deck by any other name

Let’s face it, nothing beats a good 85-slide Powerpoint deck, two free hours and an audience hanging on our every word. That happens, right?

Popular website, Slideshare, put together the Zeitgeist ’09 as a (20 slide) presentation of, well, presentations, covering trends, volume, etc. To follow this up, the site Adverlab has put a concise list of some of the best Slideshare presentations out there. How do you match up?

Google… but smart(er)

When was the last time you searched online for something practical? Took a while to think about that didn’t it?

Well, it probably took you longer to find it.

Search for a topic on everyone’s favourite search engine and you find a deluge of user-created forum posts, and it takes a bit of clever hunting to get to what you are looking for. But have you thought about a more efficient way to search?

There are other great tools like Spezify, which searches, well, pretty much everywhere, and creates an ever-expanding map around your subject including images, videos, social media feeds and more.

Another great “intelligent” tool is Wolfram Alpha, which is classed as a Computational Knowledge Engine (that’s black magic to you and me), which covers science, technology, business, education, medicine, finance, mathematics, linguistics… the list goes on.

Salesforce.com build their social media strategy around three pillars of online community. Seems like a pretty straight forward model:

• First ensure that your corporate site and other owned web properties are working hard for you. Focus on building engagement through knowledge sharing, user groups, blogs and ideas sharing.

• Secondly, create your own branded channels on existing social platforms. Use listening tools like Radian6 to understand what people are saying and where they’re saying it. Engage with people where they spend their time and distribute your content across YouTube, Twitter, Flickr and Slideshare.

• Finally, create conversations across the web on sites where you don’t have branded channels e.g. Twitter, third party blogs, forums and partners sites. And, make sure your social media guidelines are up to date and disseminate the policies to your content creators.

A good suggestion that came out of this last pillar was how to calculate a rough ROI for your social activities. For example, first calculate how much a video costs to create and to upload to YouTube. Then, ascertain the £/$ value of a video view (that’s the tricky bit, but any media buyer should be able to give you a figure). Multiply this value by the number of views and divide by the cost. Easy!

There was also a debate about whether people should have multiple accounts on Twitter e.g. their “work” profile and their “personal” profile. The audience seemed split on this topic. I personally prefer a single account @Wrigsy where I Tweet about a broad range of topics (from climbing mountains to our latest new business wins). But, I suppose I’m lucky that I can also Tweet through our Banner account @BannerCorp when the topic is purely focused on work.

If you’re a salesforce.com user, start using Chatter. It’s their most successful product launch to date and gives users the sort of communication and collaboration they expect from platforms like Facebook.

If you’re interested, take a look at the presentation here.

CNN have certainly pushed the boundaries when it comes to exploring the power of recommendation and the value of shared content. Their global research initiative Pownar, illustrates why people share content, how they share it and the type of content they prefer to share. In the US and Europe, people tend to share content for altruistic reasons, whereas in Asia, sharing content is more about broadcasting your status. As you might suspect, articles with embedded video and images are most likely to be shared. And, Facebook is the primary platform used for sharing.

Most interesting from the research is the effect that sharing has on the person who is sharing the content and those receiving it. People are 3.7 times more engaged with content that has been recommended. And, those who share the content are 2 times more engaged.

There’s also an interesting uplift in brand metrics. Shared content increases brand consideration by 12%, brand recommendation by 19% and brand favourability by an astounding 19%.

The key actions to take from this research are to assess your content to ensure it’s optimised for recommendation and make it shareable. And, find a lady in Paris to be your individual broadcaster…

Take a look at the attached press release to understand how semiotics, content archetypes and biometrics can be used to understand the effect that shared content can have on your brand.

CNNI POWNAR — the power of news and recommendation

When you want to build a group on LinkedIn, it’s only going to be a success if you build it around a common interest and purpose. An empty LinkedIn group can be a very lonely place…

So, the more focused and well-defined the group is, the higher the level of participation and engagement. Also, don’t get too disappointed if most people aren’t contributing. LinkedIn reckon that for every person that contributes on the site, nine will comment and interact, whilst 90 will just sit back and consume the content.

The new inPages Platform

We were also lucky to take a sneak peak at the brand new inPages Platform. Our Huddle saw it just ahead of its global launch in New York. So, a bit of a scoop for Banner.

So, what does inPages enable marketers to do?

Well, it does seem that LinkedIn has picked up on a well known fact – recommendations from personal acquaintances are the most trusted form of communication – and introduced a new tab on the company profile page called Products & Services. This areas of the site enables companies to feature information about their products, with onward links to their corporate sites.

LinkedIn Company Products and Services Page

But the clever bit here is that the new platform enables members to feature in their profiles the products and services they use and to recommend them. This gives recommendations a new level of credibility – because they’re directly linked to a person’s profile. Thereby overcoming the concerns that many companies actively “massage” product ratings and recommendations on other third party sites. I suspect that many tech marketers are already in a mad rush to get their products and services listed.

However, on reflection, this new platform does raise a number of interesting questions:

• Will companies need to update their social guidelines to encompass their employees recommending their own products or those from other companies?
• If your profile features a large number of products and services, does this just open you up as a target for sales guys? You’re clearly a person who influences the purchase and based on the number of products, you’ve clearly got the budget…
• Looking at the demo of the platform, there doesn’t seem to be the functionality to provide negative feedback. Surely these are often more important than positive recommendations?

I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on this topic. In the meantime, take a look at Henry’s presentation below.

So first of all, a big thank you to our speakers and workshop moderator for making the huddle such a success and presenting such compelling content — Ioanna Stagia (CNN International), Henry Clifford-Jones (LinkedIn Europe), Jackie Hewitt (Autodesk), Xabier Ormazabal (Salesforce.com) and Zoe Sands (Juniper).

There were a number of common strands to the day:

• the power of recommendation and referral
• building communities around a common interest
• avoiding me-too social strategies
• content is still king and measurement paramount

Over the next few days, I will be taking a look at each of the presentations, outlining some of the insights and advice that I took from them. Watch this space.

You can see some of the photos from the huddle below, and view the Twitter stream here.

More than Twitter

In the meantime, take a look at our brand-spanking-new white paper: More than Twitter – social media and the tech buyer. This white paper takes a look at a wide range of cur­rent research into B2B social media, it examines:

• Who’s using the various social media options
• What’s work­ing, what’s not
• What cus­tom­ers are using to inform their buy­ing decisions
• And what it all means for your marketing

You can view the white paper below or download it here.