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tIt’s becoming something of a common occupation: predicting when Facebook Facebook is going to stop growing its user numbers. We all know that it’s going to happen at some point: the interesting thing is when? In he mature territories it appears that the when has already happened:
Facebook’s popularity is slumping in the UK as users become fed up with being bombarded with advertising, a YouGov survey has revealed.
In a report examining social media use among web-savvy Brits, the market research firm found a 9 per cent drop in Facebook usage since April 2012.
This doesn’t, by any means, spell doom and gloom for Facebook. At least not yet it doesn’t.
There are really four numbers that matter concerning the company. How many users it has, how long they spend on the site, how many ads the company can show them in that time and the price that it can charge for the ads. Clearly, everyone would like those four numbers to be rising. But it’s not a disaster if some of them do not, as long as the others do.
Total Total numbers of users can still rise even as people leave in some of the more mature markets: there’s a lot of countries out there and Facebook hasn’t penetrated all of them just yet. And there’s good evidence that the company is getting to grips with the switch over to people accessing the site from smartphones, which should increase ad rates there.
However, that people in those mature markets are leaving the site does undermine one part of the total story. Quite how many people ever really believed this is a good question, but a part of that story was that Facebook would simply become part of the routine infrastructure of life. Given that almost everyone was going to be on it then everyone was going to organise some part of their social life around it. Facebook was going to end up in that highly desirable and very profitable position of being a utility. Simply something that everyone needs to use. It’s that part of the story that seems to be cracking a little now.
It can still be a large and profitable company of course. It might well make money for decades to come: but that end state of being a necessary part of everyone’s life seems unlikely to happen.
Article source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/05/24/another-peak-facebook-prediction/
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Remember Me
2 hours ago
Being perched on the precipice of a new console generation has made video game developers reflect about their own relationship with technology. Ubisoft’s new open-world game “Watch_dogs” is at once exceedingly ambitious and cripplingly self-conscious, asking players to live in a world where the tech industry’s wildest dreams about interconnected smart devices and augmented reality systems are as ubiquitous as they are immediately hackable. It’s a fascinating concept, no doubt. But will “Watch_dogs” end up being anything more than an attempt to recast “Grand Theft Auto” with smartphones instead of guns?
The real question here is how, exactly, gameplay weds with storytelling. This is the tension at the heart of “Remember Me,” a new game from Capcom and the French developer Dontnod Entertainment that will be released early next month.
At its core, “Remember Me” is a beat ‘em up game in the “God of War” and “Batman: Arkham City” tradition. Players control a lithe assassin-like figure named Nilin, mastering increasingly complex combinations of kicks and punches to fell enemies.
Like the “God of War” and “Arkham” games, “Remember Me” excels in this regard. The combat I was able to sample during a recent preview event was incredibly satisfying and deceptively complex. Taking a cue from the cult favorite “God Hand,” “Remember Me’s” developers pared down a potentially overwhelming combat system by allotting four separate combos at a time. Players can tinker with these combos and create their own with a feature called the “Combo Lab,” which leaves the gameplay open to creative experimentation without sacrificing the simple pleasure of being able to punch bad guys in the face.
Thing is, Dontnod doesn’t just want “Remember Me” to be a game about punching things. Like “Watch_dogs,” “Remember Me” is set in a dystopian near-future that takes some of technology’s most pressing moral dilemmas and stretches them to their logical extreme. Only instead of smartphones, this game is about social media and the concept of oversharing.
Jean-Maxime Moris, the co-founder and creative director of Dontnod, told NBC News that his game was originally a similar beat ‘em up title with a thematic focus on global warming.
“But then we began to think about the recent explosion in the use of social networks and began to wonder what could happen if this ability to share experiences became even more prevalent,” Moris said.
What if our current immersion in the digital worlds of Facebook and Twitter “reached a point where you could digitize these memories and no longer simply share, but actually trade and purchase them? This was when ‘Remember Me’ became the game it is today.”
The reimagined “Remember Me” is set in a futuristic version of Paris unimaginatively called “Neo-Paris.” Token giant evil corporation “MEMORIZE” has invented a new gadget known as the “Sensation Engine” (Sensen) that’s sort of like a more advanced and neurologically invasive version of Google Glass — users broadcast their memories, no matter how private, across the social Web. And instead of some environmental freedom fighter, Nilin is a “memory hunter” employed by MEMORIZE to steal and alter people’s memories. That is, until she wakes up with no memory of her own left and ends up going rogue.
Besides the colorful world of Neo-Paris itself, the main way that this “Blade Runner”-meets-”Inception” expresses itself is in a feature known as “Memory Remix.” Essentially, these are interactive cutscenes that the player can fast-forward and rewind, sifting through them like puzzles to find key details to alter. In the one Memory Remix I played through, for instance, Nilin messed with different objects in the hospital room of her victim’s husband until she remembered him being murdered, however accidentally, by his doctor.
The scene is provocative, no doubt. But all I had to do to finish the entire “Memory Remix” was press back and forth until I highlighted the right things to mess with — a far less engaging and dynamic experience than the one I was having just moments before punching the living daylights out of some futuristic French cops. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, mind you. Many games have cutscenes that are entirely unresponsive to player control. But I’d still like to see “Remember Me’s” most ambitious narrative moments, like the disturbing hospital scene, brought out in the actual gameplay.
While Moris insisted that other elements of “Remember Me’s” gameplay were adjusted to suit a new narrative, he did ultimately admit that he wanted to limit some features in order to tell a clear story.
“While we do encourage the player to deviate from the path to a certain extent to uncover pick-ups, it is true to say that ‘Remember Me’ is a linear experience,” Moris said. “This was a choice we made at the beginning of the project so we could tell the story of Nilin and ensure the player is immersed in the narrative, which does mean controlling the action, and therefore the emotion.”
Will “Remember Me’s” story be worth these potential sacrifices? Check back on June 4 for our review.
Yannick LeJacq is a contributing writer for NBC News who has also covered games for Kill Screen, The Wall Street Journal and The Atlantic. You can follow him on Twitter at @YannickLeJacq and reach him by email at ylejacq@gmail.com.
Article source: http://www.nbcnews.com/technology/remember-me-beat-em-video-game-facebook-generation-6C10072770
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Facebook
2 hours ago
Plans to launch the HTC First, aka the “Facebook phone,” in the U.K. have been indefinitely delayed and pre-orders refunded, according Facebook and the carrier that was to carry the device exclusively. In the United States, after ATT dropped the device’s price, that seemed like confirmation that sales have been nowhere near what was hoped.
The HTC First was announced in April; with bold colors, decent mid-range specs, and a nice HD screen, it seemed a reasonable device on which to launch Facebook’s new Home platform for Android. Home, as the company described it, enhanced the Android experience and added better chat, an attractive new lockscreen, and other Facebook-centric features.
However, Home was also released for a number of other smartphones shortly afterwards, and it wasn’t long before it became clear that the new software wasn’t quite ready for prime time. Features prized by power users and valuable to casual ones were omitted, and many were wary of a phone controlled entirely by a social network notoriously cavalier about privacy.
Meanwhile, the HTC First has apparently languished on the shelf, as evidenced first by a $99 price drop (to 99 cents on-contract) after just a month of availability. Rumors abounded that it was being discontinued, though ATT characterized the drop as promotional pricing.
Canceling the U.K. launch on the U.K.’s EE carrier suggests things may be more dire than that. Facebook issued a statement to NBC News saying it was working on refining Home based on customer feedback:
While we focus on making Home better, we are going to limit supporting new devices and think it makes a lot of sense for EE and Orange to hold off deploying the HTC First in Europe.
Both Facebook and HTC declined to comment on sales of the First or plans for a later launch of the phone in the U.K.
Devin Coldewey is a contributing writer for NBC News Digital. His personal website is coldewey.cc.
Article source: http://www.nbcnews.com/technology/facebook-phone-launch-canceled-u-k-home-gets-facelift-6C10056898
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Casey Schwartz, an eighth-grader in Millburn, NJ, is 14 years old. She got her first computer (a toy) when she was 18 months old. She got her first cellphone (a real one) when she was in the second grade. Casey now owns a white iPhone 4S — a device she takes with her to school. And keeps on the table at meals. And carries around her house. And stores next to her pillow when she sleeps.
Here are some things Casey told The Huffington Post’s Bianca Bosker about her digital life.
On her iPhone:
“I bring it everywhere. I have to be holding it.”
“It’s like OCD — I have to have it with me. And I check it a lot.”
On the social necessities of owning an iPhone:
“[A friend] wasn’t in the group chat, so we stopped being friends with her. Not because we didn’t like her, but we just weren’t in contact with her.”
“[That friend] has a smartphone now, so that’s what gets her in. We always loved her and she was always our good friend, but she was excluded — and she knew it, too — because she didn’t have an iPhone.”
“We’ll be sitting on a couch next to each other, texting each other,” she notes. “We text in the same room. It’s weird, I don’t know why.”
On the 56 text messages she and seven friends exchanged, as a group, 4 p.m. on a weekday:
“That’s not even a lot. That’s small. And we were in school the whole day also.”
On Facebook:
“It’s not like I want to or I don’t. I just go on it. I’m, like, forced to. I don’t know why.”
“I’ll wake up in the morning and go on Facebook just … because.”
“Facebook takes up my whole life.”
On technology in general:
“If I’m not watching TV, I’m on my phone. If I’m not on my phone, I’m on my computer. If I’m not doing any of those things, what am I supposed to do?”
“I think that in a few years, technology is going to go back and people won’t use it anymore because it’s getting to be a lot. I mean, I don’t put down my phone. And it makes me wish that I did. It’s addicting.”
Casey may not be representative of her generation, or of her gender, or of the subspecies of humans sometimes classified as “digital natives.” But her comments are revealing nonetheless. She seems to love her phone — and her Facebook — in spite of herself. She seems not to want the constant connection the digital world provides — and yet to be, finally, unable to escape it.
“It’s getting to be a lot,” she says. Before, probably, returning to Facebook.
Article source: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/05/im-like-forced-to-i-dont-know-why-facebook-takes-up-my-whole-life/276231/
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Summer’s coming, and with it, a good chance teens will be hanging out doing what teens do these days — sharing everything online. A little harmless status-update between besties is one thing, but letting strangers know what you look like, where you live and what you like to do in your spare time, when you’re only 13 or 14 years old? That’s creepy. According to a new Pew Research Center survey, a whopping 91% of youngsters say they share personal photos via social media, while 71% said they share sensitive information, such as the name of their school and hometowns.
The good news is, many teens report closely monitoring who they friend and what they post. Not surprising — most parents aren’t convinced. The Pew study shows 49% worry about their children’s online reputations; 53% fear their kids will interact with strangers. These seem like valid fears, since teens brains often just aren’t wired to fully fathom how one outrageous party-pic or ill-timed rant could come back to bite them a decade later when it shows up in a job interview.
I sat down recently with Facebook’s Manager of Privacy and Safety, Nicky Jackson-Colaco, to get some insider advice — one busy mom to another — about just how safe Facebook really is for teen – and what guidelines she puts in place herself.
1. FOLLOW AGE GUIDELINES
First and foremost, Colaco says, don’t let teens sign up for an account until they’re at least 13 years old, the sites’ minimum age requirement. When they do sign up, be sure they don’t lie about their age, because Facebook adds layers of privacy protection specific to minors.
Nicky Jackson-Colaco: “When kids sign up and say they’re 14, we automatically do things to make sure they share with a more limited audience, that they’re not easily contacted by people.”
Also important, be sure teens don’t accept friend requests from people they don’t know. Colaco says Facebook is always on the lookout for older people who might be creating fake Facebook profiles in order to gain access to teens — but that savvy social media know-how is still the best defense.
2. GET FAMILIAR WITH FACEBOOK; CONNECT WITH YOUR TEEN
Teens everywhere are mortified at the thought of a parent commenting on their wall. Still, it’s a good idea to spend time getting to know Facebook.
Nicky Jackson-Colaco: “Parents need to get on Facebook themselves. Anything our kids are doing a lot in their spare time is something we should have a base understanding of, so just check out the account and how privacy settings work. Try to friend them and make it a condition of being on Facebook. A lot of teens are okay with that.”
Facebook already limits who can see what teens post to friends, friends of friends, and networks. It also tries to make sure teens timelines and posts don’t show up in public Graph Search results. Still, it’s a good idea to go into the Facebook settings with your teen, and change all of the default privacy settings to “Friends” only. You can do this by clicking on the lock sign at the upper right side of the screen. When you’re finished with that, use the “View As” tool at the top right side of the page to see what your teens timeline looks like to the public, or to a specific specific person. Remind your teen that you’ll check back in every few months (then actually do it) — not to spy — but rather to make sure your child is as safe as possible.
3. HAVE THE ‘NOTHING IS REALLY PRIVATE ONLINE’ TALK
Be sure teens understand there’s no way to truly erase something once it’s posted online. Sure, you can report it (explained more in No. 5 on this list), or ask someone else to remove it. You can even pay for other services to try to bury content that might weigh against you someday, but these options can be timely, costly, and are a long way from fail-proof. This includes other posts, photos, and comments your teen might be tagged in.
Nicky Jackson-Colaco: If someone decides to hide something in his or her timeline, that photo or comment might still be available somewhere on Facebook. There’s a difference between what can be found on your timeline and what’s on Facebook.
4. REVIEW TEENS’ ‘ABOUT’ SETTINGS AND MORE
Remind kids that what they say and how they present themselves via social media is like a billboard that their grandparents, teachers, and potential bosses could see, not just today, but for years to come.
For teens already on Facebook, you can use an app like Simplewash or Socioclean to point out red flags in your teen’s content such as profanit — no-no’s that could impact getting into colleges or getting a particular job.
Nicky Jackson-Colaco: “The activity log is the summary of you on Facebook. It really shows you all of the activity about you — things you’ve commented on and tags you’ve had added to photos. Go through and say I like this, I don’t like that, and use it as a better way to control your experience.”
Also: Click on the About section that is below and to the right of a teen’s profile. Review what your teen has shared about themselves and take out anything too personal, such as home addresses or photos with street numbers, anything about their school, or other information you might not want a stranger to get hold of.
5. REPORT PROBLEMS AND THEN…RELAX
If there are problems, use the “report and remove tool” to “untag” photos. Teens can also create a bulk message, asking other people to delete a specific photo as well. If that doesn’t work, you/they can report it to Facebook.
Teaching teens how to be responsible online is just part of our parenting role now. We need to make sure they know we have to talk with them about it because it’s our job to keep them safe — and no amount of eye-rolling or “I know Mom,” is going to get them off the hook.
Nicky Jackson-Colaco: “Teens are sharing on Facebook the way they are in school, the way they are with their friends. A lot of times as parents we think of ‘offline’ versus ‘online’ and for kids — it’s just life, they don’t make that differentiation.”
Now, there’s word that teens also are migrating to Twitter as a social media outlet. Great. Getting started on that column now.
Jennifer Jolly is an Emmy award-winning consumer tech contributor and host of USA TODAY’s digital video show TECH NOW. Email her at techcomments@usatoday.com. Follow her on Twitter: @JenniferJolly.
Article source: http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/personal/2013/05/24/tech-now-facebook-5-safety-steps-for-teens/2357505/
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By Sarah McBride and Alexei Oreskovic
SAN FRANCISCO |
Fri May 24, 2013 2:22pm EDT
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Google Inc is in talks to buy Waze, an Israeli mapping start-up that has held discussions with several large technology companies, two sources familiar with the matter told Reuters on Friday.
Google’s discussions with Waze, which one of the sources told Reuters remained fluid and could change in tenor at any time, come amid reports Facebook is willing to pay $1 billion for the crowd-sourced service, which relies on information provided by its 47 million members to craft its mobile-oriented maps.
By buying Waze, the Internet search giant would prevent the company from falling into the hands of Facebook, which is delving deeper into mobile technology as it tries to grow its user base.
Mapping services are among the five most-used applications on smartphones and are crucial to engaging and retaining mobile users. The key advantage of owning, rather than licensing, a mapping service is that it allows for the product to be tailored and personalized for users.
“Whoever holds the mapping data is going to be a hot commodity,” said Brian Proffitt, author of several books on mobile technology and an adjunct instructor of management in the University of Notre Dame. “As larger vendors acquire mapping data, businesses and consumers will discover that it’s more difficult to gain free access and correct errors.”
Waze’s real-time traffic information, generated continuously from data on users’ smartphones about traveling speed and direction, is considered a particularly valuable asset that poses a threat to the search giant’s existing offering, Google Maps.
“Sometimes the best offense is defense,” said a third source close to the situation, explaining Google’s motivation to acquire Waze.
Still, Marcus Thielking, co-founder of rival mapping service, skobbler, said Facebook could easily develop a real-time traffic service similar to Waze’s, thanks to its massive social network of more than one billion users.
As a result, he said, it would be “shortsighted” for Google to acquire Waze strictly to keep it away from Facebook.
“I can’t really see much sense in a Google acquisition, especially not at a price that’s close to what we’re talking about,” said Thielking.
Indeed, deals are heating up in the tech-startup space. This week, Yahoo Inc announced a $1.1 billion acquisition of widely used blogging service Tumblr, in one of the largest purchases this year of an Internet company.
Due diligence between Waze and Facebook had been under way and a term sheet signed after six months of discussions, Israeli business daily Calcalist reported this month.
But talks stalled over Facebook’s demand that the Waze team, working in Israel, relocate to California, the publication reported days later.
Last year, Apple Inc began offering its own maps, in competition with Google’s more widely used application.
There had been media reports earlier this year that Apple was in talks to acquire Waze, but both companies declined to comment on Friday.
Google also declined to comment.
MAPPING CONUNDRUM
Waze has enjoyed years of spectacular growth. About 12 percent of its users hail from the United States, and it also has high penetration in Italy and Brazil. Its user base has skyrocketed to 47.5 million now, from about 7 million in 2011.
Four-year-old Waze was the brainchild of Ehud Shabtai, a software engineer with a degree in philosophy and computer science from Tel Aviv University, who hit upon the idea when he realized commercially available GPS software could not reflect real-time conditions speedily enough, or provide certain useful data – such as speed traps.
According to Waze’s website, Shabtai teamed up with entrepreneurs Uri Levine and Amir Shinar to found Waze in 2008. It has raised $67 million in funding to date from firms including Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers, Blue Run Ventures, Hong Kong media and real-estate mogul Li Ka-shing’s Horizon Ventures and semiconductor company Qualcomm Inc. According to Calcalist, Microsoft Corp owns 10.2 percent of the company, but Waze did not comment on that.
Waze Chief Executive Noam Bardin and a small staff now operate out of their U.S. headquarters in Palo Alto, California, while about 90 employees are based in home country Israel.
The startup partnered with Facebook in October 2012, when Waze released an updated version of its app that allowed users to share their drive with their Facebook friends.
(Editing by Bernadette Baum)
Article source: http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/05/24/us-waze-google-idUSBRE94N02H20130524
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Robert Reimann watched the second plane hit the South Tower of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001 and then observed as his office nearby destroyed as the towers fell. Then he did something few Americans considered at the time: He took a bike tour across Iran.
“I wanted to see a Muslim country and see what people in that part of the world were actually thinking vs. what the press was reporting,” he says. “So I got my way into Iran and rode through there with a New York Cycle Club jersey on.”
The trip had an unexpected effect on Reimann’s vocation. A former banker and CEO of a mobile publishing company, Reimann moved to Germany and, in 2009, founded BikeSherpa, a company that arranges bike tours in Europe “with a special expertise in beer-based travel in Germany, the Czech Republic and Belgium.” BikeSherpa has respectable 1,000 or so fans on Facebook, but Reimann says he’s more interested in forging a deeper connection with his existing fans than cultivating new ones.
“I’d like to increase the relationships I have with my customers,” Reimann says “I’d like to increase my fan base, but I feel that if I’m not having a meaningful relationship with them, it doesn’t bring me much.”
To help him achieve his goal, Mashable hooked Reimann up with Shane Johnston, a social media marketing consultant on our Mashable‘s Small Business Panel. The panel of consultants are paired with small businesses to see how their “social makeover” advice plays out in the real world.
Johnston’s assessment was that BikeSherpa’s Facebook engagement was low indeed. The Page had a PTAT of 4. BikeSherpa’s average post meanwhile reached 8%-18% of its fan base and was “mostly on the low end of that range,” he says. The brand also has barely any email list of customers and “no email autoresponder campaign sequences have been established for the email list.” But Johnston believes that BikeSherpa has a lot going for it. It has a self-guided e-tour mobile app that he calls “fantastic” and is in a fun category, though there’s lots of competition.
Johnston has a plan to increase BikeSherpa’s PTAT and beef up its email list. First, he suggests that Reimann install a Fan Reviews app on BikeSherpa’s Facebook Page plus an “automated follow up sequence to move prospects from leads to customers” and to move them off social media and onto email. Johnston also says that the business should follow a structured and scheduled posting and engagement plan and vary the types of posts to attempt to “attract the ideal fan.” Since Robert and his partner Anna are on the road a lot during the business’s busy season, Johnston says he can update with photos and videos from the road instead of trying to type up something at the end of the day. “Ideas for content would be the obvious such as actual tour shoots and places of interest but also raw and real stuff like customers chatting live on tour about what they liked best and how much fun they are having, to interviewing the bartender or beer maker on the beer tours,” Johnston says.
Finally, Johnston says BikeSherpa should run a contest giving away a bike tour and the mobile app. The contest is still weeks away. Reimann has earmarked $500 for the effort, which he intends to spend on Facebook advertising. Johnston recommends a Page Post Ad with a graphic image and a video with a call-to-action link to either the pre-launch opt-in or to a contest landing page, “depending on what phase we’re in.”
With the contest, Reimann hopes to hit a PTAT of 200 to 500 — a big increase over the current one.
Will it work? Check back here on June 25 to see. In the meantime check out some of the other advice from our Small Business Panel series here.
Image courtesy of Flickr, Martin Turber
Article source: http://mashable.com/2013/05/23/social-makeover-bikesherpa/
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Robert Reimann watched the second plane hit the South Tower of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001 and then observed as his office nearby destroyed as the towers fell. Then he did something few Americans considered at the time: He took a bike tour across Iran.
“I wanted to see a Muslim country and see what people in that part of the world were actually thinking vs. what the press was reporting,” he says. “So I got my way into Iran and rode through there with a New York Cycle Club jersey on.”
The trip had an unexpected effect on Reimann’s vocation. A former banker and CEO of a mobile publishing company, Reimann moved to Germany and, in 2009, founded BikeSherpa, a company that arranges bike tours in Europe “with a special expertise in beer-based travel in Germany, the Czech Republic and Belgium.” BikeSherpa has respectable 1,000 or so fans on Facebook, but Reimann says he’s more interested in forging a deeper connection with his existing fans than cultivating new ones.
“I’d like to increase the relationships I have with my customers,” Reimann says “I’d like to increase my fan base, but I feel that if I’m not having a meaningful relationship with them, it doesn’t bring me much.”
To help him achieve his goal, Mashable hooked Reimann up with Shane Johnston, a social media marketing consultant on our Mashable‘s Small Business Panel. The panel of consultants are paired with small businesses to see how their “social makeover” advice plays out in the real world.
Johnston’s assessment was that BikeSherpa’s Facebook engagement was low indeed. The Page had a PTAT of 4. BikeSherpa’s average post meanwhile reached 8%-18% of its fan base and was “mostly on the low end of that range,” he says. The brand also has barely any email list of customers and “no email autoresponder campaign sequences have been established for the email list.” But Johnston believes that BikeSherpa has a lot going for it. It has a self-guided e-tour mobile app that he calls “fantastic” and is in a fun category, though there’s lots of competition.
Johnston has a plan to increase BikeSherpa’s PTAT and beef up its email list. First, he suggests that Reimann install a Fan Reviews app on BikeSherpa’s Facebook Page plus an “automated follow up sequence to move prospects from leads to customers” and to move them off social media and onto email. Johnston also says that the business should follow a structured and scheduled posting and engagement plan and vary the types of posts to attempt to “attract the ideal fan.” Since Robert and his partner Anna are on the road a lot during the business’s busy season, Johnston says he can update with photos and videos from the road instead of trying to type up something at the end of the day. “Ideas for content would be the obvious such as actual tour shoots and places of interest but also raw and real stuff like customers chatting live on tour about what they liked best and how much fun they are having, to interviewing the bartender or beer maker on the beer tours,” Johnston says.
Finally, Johnston says BikeSherpa should run a contest giving away a bike tour and the mobile app. The contest is still weeks away. Reimann has earmarked $500 for the effort, which he intends to spend on Facebook advertising. Johnston recommends a Page Post Ad with a graphic image and a video with a call-to-action link to either the pre-launch opt-in or to a contest landing page, “depending on what phase we’re in.”
With the contest, Reimann hopes to hit a PTAT of 200 to 500 — a big increase over the current one.
Will it work? Check back here on June 25 to see. In the meantime check out some of the other advice from our Small Business Panel series here.
Image courtesy of Flickr, Martin Turber
Article source: http://mashable.com/2013/05/23/social-makeover-bikesherpa/
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When Facebook acquired Parse last month, it was unclear what good could come of the deal for Facebook. On Thursday, Facebook executives didn’t share detailed new plans for its developer platform or Parse per se, but they did lay out broadly how the social networking giant can benefit.
Mike Vernal, Facebook’s director of engineering, said the integration of Parse technology could boost ad sales by making development of cross-platform mobile apps easier to build and run.
If a startup builds an iOS app with a way to connect into Facebook, great, but its reach is limited to the number of people with iOS devices. Then the developers have to start over to build a version of the app for Android and Windows Phone operating systems.
That’s where Parse comes in. As a provider of a Mobile Backend as a Service (MBaaS) with software-development kits for multiple operating systems, Parse lets developers quickly build out applications without having to worry about managing servers. When a startup expands its offering from just iOS to Windows and Phone and Android apps and drops them in app stores, promotion becomes important. Facebook can help with that, by getting ads in front of users. The ads expose the applications to the startup’s app, excite users and — here’s the important part — get more ad revenue.
Getting more from mobile has been a key area for Facebook, and that’s why the Parse deal begins to make more sense. This is particularly important following the mixed reception of Facebook Home.
Aside from being an ad revenue driver, Parse makes sense from a content perspective. Not every Facebook user updates his or her lists of favorite things and other fields, so enabling fresher content from more external sources is desirable; it could boost engagement. Facebook recently rolled out to all users the ability to be selective about what content third-party applications can push back to Facebook, and now users can confidently approve of this sharing of stories into the news feed and timelines through more and more apps that developers come up with.
Down the line, Facebook also wants to make this data more accessible through its newish Graph Search tool, Vernal said. That move would scratch another item off Facebook’s long Graph Search to-do list.
As for Parse, it will keep running the way it has been, Sukhar said, whether developers want to use Facebook as a means of promotion or not.
One unanswered question is what will happen to all the apps developers run on Parse. “It’s business as usual, so we’re actually staying on Amazon Web Services,” said Ilya Sukhar, a co-founder of Parse (pictured). But Facebook has a boatload of custom-built infrastructure. Couldn’t it just move Parse-backed apps to Facebook data centers, effectively turning Facebook into a quasi-cloud service provider? Apps will keep running on AWS “right now,” said Facebook’s director of product management, Doug Purdy. But the key words are “right now.”
Purdy made it clear that Facebook wants to just enable third-party developers to build and run apps that people can enjoy regardless of the device they choose. It turns out that’s in Facebook’s best interest, too.
Article source: http://gigaom.com/2013/05/23/facebook-sheds-some-light-on-what-it-can-get-out-of-parse/
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This is a guest post by Resolution Media Director of Client Strategy and Development George Manas.
Marketers seeking better ways to reduce waste, influence buying behavior and strengthen brand equity are likely to embrace Facebook Partner Categories. Launched on April 10, this new self-service capability puts a rich array of data-driven targeting segments at advertisers’ fingertips, helping increase the precision, relevance and effectiveness of their Facebook campaigns.
Partner Categories uniquely combines data describing both the online and offline purchasing behavior of consumers in more than 500 segments and relies on data from third-party firms Datalogix, Acxiom and Epsilon. Marketers of all sizes can benefit from Partner Categories’ easy access and no-minimum-spend requirement.
The new service is the latest in a series of targeting enhancements introduced by Facebook to improve advertisers’ results. Partner Categories likely will attract as many or more advertisers as has Facebook’s recently launched Custom Audiences program, which provides the ability to import customer data to improve targeting.
Partner Categories integrates with other targeting options within Power Editor (Facebook’s advanced self-serve platform) and is available through select paid media APIs. U.S.-based advertisers can begin using Partner Categories immediately, while advertisers based in other countries must be white-listed to use the service and may only target U.S. consumers at this time.
Although we see almost daily examples of new technology empowering the consumer’s evolution, it’s important to also acknowledge the vital impact of new advertiser services like Partner Categories, which keep marketers ahead of the curve.
Making It Work
Advertisers can leverage Partner Categories in designing Facebook buys through the Power Editor interface, selecting specific consumer segments much as they would select Facebook’s native targeting segments like Age, Gender, Broad and Precise Interests, and so forth. As with other Facebook targeting services, the advertiser only sees the size of the audience and receives no information about individuals included in a category.
To further refine targeted buying, advertisers may combine Partner Categories with native Facebook targeting filters, Custom Audiences and Lookalike Audience options. For example, an advertiser might target female yogurt buyers under age 35 by layering gender and age parameters to the “Yogurt Buyer” Partner Category segment. The ability to combine both native and third-party data gives greater depth and precision to the Facebook buy.
Partner Categories delivers three key benefits to marketers. First, it minimizes wasted spending by more precisely reaching and engaging the consumers that matter most to them, boosting cost efficiency and effectiveness.
Second, the service enables advertisers to influence buying behavior by delivering brand messages and incentives to consumers who are category buyers or in market for specific products. As such, Partner Categories can help drive purchases or influence purchase decisions.
Third, Partner Categories can build brand equity by providing advertisers with additional opportunities to drive visibility of their brands and branded content to core consumer segments at scale. Combined with Facebook’s self-serve targeting flexibility, Partner Categories enables advertisers to boost brand relevancy by delivering messages tailored to the precise purchasing behaviors of specific consumer segments.
Facebook’s Partner Categories demonstrates Facebook’s commitment to helping marketers better reach and engage the consumers who are most important to them. Advertisers can expect Partner Categories to help drive sales, build brand health, and ultimately achieve better ROI and more effective media buying.
George Manas is Director of Client Strategy and Development at Omnicom Media Group’s Resolution Media. Specializing in Search and Social Media, George helps some of the world’s most recognized brands navigate the transforming digital landscape that has become so central to today’s consumer. PepsiCo, Warner Bros, Discovery Networks, and Showtime stand among some of the brands with whom George has worked.
Article source: http://www.insidefacebook.com/2013/05/24/guest-post-advertisers-likely-to-flock-to-facebooks-new-self-serve-targeting-feature/
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