Aug
23rd

Oneupweb : Facebook Questions Personalizes Your Queries

Posted by Leah on August 23, 2010 at 1:06 pm

I have a hard time remembering things. And because of that, I regularly go to Google.com to search for the things I can’t recall. Things like, “What’s the shortcut for the trademark symbol?”

From my Google search, ironically, Yahoo! Answers will be the first or second search result for my specific query. Et voilà, my answer is ALT+0153 ™.

Yahoo! Answers has been around since December 2005, and with such an extensive history, its results rank high in search engines.

Enter Facebook Questions.

Officially introduced last July, Facebook Questions “helps you tap into the collective knowledge of the more than 500 million people on Facebook. For example, if you’re vacationing in Costa Rica and want to know the best places to surf, you can use Facebook Questions to get answers from nearby surfing enthusiasts. Because questions will also appear to your friends and their friends, you’ll receive answers that are more personalized to you,” as stated in a recent Facebook blog post.

In other words, the social media giant is leveraging the success of user-generated information like Yahoo! Answers and Wikipedia, but with a twist—answers will be more personalized because of your social network.

Below is a list of features that allow you to have more personalized answers in Facebook Questions:

* Add photos or polls. Curious to learn the breed of your beloved mutt? Add a photo of the pooch along with your question. Unsure what hybrid car to buy? Include a poll for users to submit their opinions.

* Tag themes related to your query. If you are interested in playing roller derby but you’re not sure which skates to buy, simply tag @roller derby in your question so more targeted Facebook users see your query.

*Ask questions to your friends or a specific group of people. Simply ask your question as a status update targeted to the specific group of people you’d like to ask. Please note: all questions and answers posted using the Facebook Questions application are public to everyone on the Internet, not just people on Facebook.

* Follow Topics. If you are interested in a certain Facebook Questions topic, you can follow the question so you are notified when users post new answers.

Is Facebook Questions available for your profile yet? If so, what do you think of it?

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Mar
5th

Rice University Professor, Alum Conduct Facebook Page Experiment

Posted by Leah on March 5, 2010 at 11:30 am

Facebook Insights can tell marketers how many fans their Facebook business page has, how engaging their posts are, how many unique page views it has, and more. But Insights doesn’t tell you what’s happening between your Facebook presence and your customers offline.

Utpal Dholakia and Emily Durham wanted to explore this void to find out if businesses really influence consumers when they launch Facebook pages. Dholakia is an associate professor of management at Rice University’s Jones Graduate School of Business, and Durham is a Jones School alumna and founder of Restaurant Connections, a Houston‐based restaurant consultancy.

The duo decided to conduct a little experiment to see if one Houston-based company could influence its customers offline using Facebook. The company, Dessert Gallery, is a popular bakery and cafe chain.

The team surveyed Dessert Gallery’s 13,000+ mailing list customers, asking their opinions about the bakery and their shopping habits – nearly 700 responded. They then launched the bakery’s Facebook page and invited all mailing list customers to become fans. The chain then updated its page several times per week with contests, promotions, photos, etc.

After three months, the researchers resurveyed the mailing list customers – this time over 1,000 responded. Dholakia and Durham reported their research in Harvard Business Review. Here’s what they found:

> Dessert Galleries Facebook fans increased their store visits per month after becoming fans and generated more positive word of mouth than nonfans.

> Facebook fans went to Dessert Gallery 20% more often than nonfans and gave the store the highest share of their overall dining-out dollars.

> Facebook fans were the most likely to recommend Dessert Gallery to friends and had the highest average Net Promoter Score* — 75, compared with 53 for Facebook users who were not fans and 66 for customers not on Facebook.

> Dessert Gallery Facebook fans also reported significantly greater emotional attachment to the chain — 3.4 on a four-point scale, compared with 3.0 for other customers.

> And lastly, Facebook fans were the most likely to say they chose Dessert Gallery over other establishments whenever possible.

Dholakia and Durham noted that the “results suggest intriguing possible correlations rather than definitive causalities.”

Dholakia stated in a Rice University press release that “we must be cautious in interpreting the study’s results. The fact that only about 5 percent of the firm’s 13,000 customers became Facebook fans within three months indicates that Facebook fan pages may work best as niche marketing programs targeted to customers who regularly use Facebook. Social-media marketing must be employed judiciously with other types of marketing programs.”

Interestingly, Dholakia and Durham’s Harvard Business Review article states that only 2.1% of the customers on Dessert Gallery’s mailing list became fans within three months. I’m unclear as to why there is a discrepancy.

Either way, there is a strong correlation between Facebook business page fans and their loyalty to the business. It seems clear that businesses need a Facebook presence to develop deeper bonds with their clientele, which company websites can certainly lack.

Has your business seen this type of response after launching your Facebook page?

* “The Net Promoter Score, or NPS®, is a straightforward metric that holds companies and employees accountable for how they treat customers,” according to NetPromoter.com.

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Mar
2nd

Beware Foursquare: Facebook & Twitter to Expand Geolocation Features

Posted by Leah on March 2, 2010 at 10:52 am

Foursquare may need to watch its back as ‘the big dogs’ are looking to expand geolocation services within their networks.

Facebook is currently conducting background checks on a location-based social network called Loopt. TechCrunch reported on this last week. Apparently, when companies perform this type of investigation, they are usually interested in acquiring the company.

Not wanting to be left off the map, Twitter recently announced that it will expand its geo-tagging feature to include ‘places.’ Currently, Twitter’s geo-tagging only allows users to tweet their longitude and latitude, as opposed to a city or neighborhood. Twitter’s Raffi Krikorian wrote this in Twitter’s API Announcements on Monday:

“our goal is to provide a few more options to API developers (and the users they are servicing) through this contextual information. people, we find, inherently want to talk about a “place”. a place, for a lot of people, has a name and is not a latitude and longitude pair. (37.78215, -122.40060), for example, doesn’t mean a lot to a lot of people — but, “San Francisco, CA, USA” does. we’re also trying to help users who aren’t comfortable annotating their tweets with their exact coordinates, but, instead, are really happy to say what city, or even neighborhood, they are in. annotating your place with a name does that too.”

What are your thoughts about Facebook and Twitter expanding geolocation features? Foursquare users, will you abandon your badges for these new services?

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Nov
3rd

Share & Organize Tweets with Twitter Lists

Posted by Keirsun on November 3, 2009 at 10:24 am

Twitter began rolling out its Lists feature in mid-October, but now all users of the social networking tool have the ability to create and share their very own Twitter Lists.

In a nutshell, Lists let you organize Twitter users into groups and then share that list with others.

As @BIZ of Twitter points out in a recent blog post:

Anyone can curate and publish lists, so if you have an idea for one, just click “New list” in the sidebar of your Twitter account and you’re on your way. Add accounts to a list using the “Lists” drop drown on a profile page. We believe Lists will be a new discovery mechanism for great tweets and accounts.

As a user you can easily subscribe to another user’s Lists, and users can easily subscribe to your Lists. In effect this helps organize the vast amount of information being continuously shared on Twitter. By organizing tweeters by industry, location, service specialty, last name, etc. you can essentially streamline your information intake while helping Twitter to organize its users into a multi-tiered directory of tweets.

But there are limits. Josh Catone at Mashable says:

Keep in mind that each list is currently limited to 500 people, and users may create a maximum of 20 lists. These limitations could change in the future.

Twitter has already released a Lists Widget that you can easily embed into your website or blog to showcase your favorite Lists.

One of the many questions raised by the new feature is whether Lists will translate into a “popularity” factor for ranking Twitter profiles. Similar to how Google uses links from other websites to help determine organic search positioning, Twitter, or the search engines themselves, could incorporate the number and/or quality of lists as part of a ranking algorithm.

Looking at anyone’s Twitter profile, you can easily see how many lists they have been added to: