Facebook just released news about Facebook Answers. They say that:

Today we’re introducing Facebook Questions, a beta product that lets you pose questions like these to the Facebook community. With this new application, you can get a broader set of answers and learn valuable information from people knowledgeable on a range of topics.

I suppose the publishing and speed up process of this beta product is a result of the news being released today that Google is partnering up with Zynga and other Games producers to develop games for some new platform that Google will launch in a while. I would love to work at one of those companies right now. When WAR is on and competition is fierce I excel like a… I just love the sensation of competing.

Facebook Questions will be available from your normal status bar:

The whole point is that you can ask any question you like and get real time answers from all your friends, but also from their friends. Thus you will reach outside your normal sphere of contacts which are your closest 250 people. I am sure we will se some creative spamming done in this area. hehe..

You will be able to add polls or images to your questions. You will be able to tag it with a specific topic so that people with that interest will be able to see it in a more promoted space. I am sure Facebook will develop experts functionality here as well so that people can develop status within certain fields of expertise.

They will also develop a kind of directory of questions and answers and you’ll be able to follow a flow of questions and answers.

Anyhow. More about Facebook Questions can be read here.

A lot of us have been talking about it. Very few clients have dared to implement it. Perhaps not that surprisingly, Amazon launched their facebook connect integration yesterday. It is perhaps the best eCommerce integration I have seen and it is based upon Amazons normal way of presenting offers, but with a twist.

You do not only get the recommendations based upon what you have bought. You get recommendations based on what others in your network have bought. This is perhaps an even stronger sales argument. Previously the recommendation was “People who have bought this book, also bought”. Now they can use the recommendation “Person x an y in your network bought this book as well when buying that book.” They have also included a gift recommendation area which is so good that it almost makes me cry out of joy.

Amazon Facebook Connect Integration – how it works

A user is promted to log in.

On the right side there is the option to connect to your network on Facebook.

Then you go through the sign on process to connect your two accounts. If you want to do this on your own website it is important that you pay notice to the copy here. They are answering the most common worries amongst Facebook users and privacy advocates. It is extremely important to put another step into the connection process just as they’ve done here. They both answer the Why should I? and the Do I dare? questions.

Now the juicy stuff can start to happen. As you log in you get your friends in a list. You get the ones with a birthday on top and you get a couple of other suggestions beneath. Click the image below to enlarge it.

• Popular Among Your Facebook Friends
• Birthday and Gift Suggestions for Your Facebook Friends
• Recommendations Based on Your Favorite Music on Facebook
• Recommendations Based on Your Favorite Movies on Facebook

This is really how eCommerce and personalization should work with regard to social networks. Imagine the implications on your margins this could have if you use the OpenGraph API to suggest packages of products based on networks to your site visitors.

• Imagine if they have added that they like a specific artist, and you can offer them the same deal as that artist likes.
• Perhaps 5 people in a specific persons network have bought one specific camera? Then perhaps that’s a good thing to tell the visitor about.
• If a person has bought product A but all their friends bought product B as well, then an integration as the above could help out with suggesting this to the person
• If someone has a birthday and they have bought stuff from your store to other friends, you should be able to remind those receivers that they can return the favor once it is the first persons time to have a birthday

The extensions of eCommerce in a social environment are limitless. You will earn loads of money and since you don’t have to maintain the database/CRM yourself, as it is hosted, managed and updated by the users themselves, you don’t have to worry about your investment growing old either. Data has gone from being an asset into being a common good. It is what we do with the data that creates value or doesn’t create value.

This is the second post in the summer school edition. For most people, search is synonymous with Google, Yahoo or Bing. In fact, this is what most SEOs are talking about when creating strategies for search. How to rank in search engines which sole purpose is to display search results.

However, searches are being conducted all the time. The difference between standard engine search and social search is that social search is created through spontaneous interaction rather than contextual belonging. Think of it this way. Any update we post on facebook, twitter, wordpress etc. could be seen as a search query. We are posting our thoughts, our questions or some other resource that we want to share with the rest of the world. We search for content consumers with our content sharing. At best, we anticipate that this post will induce some sort of reaction. This reaction is generally spontaneous and based on what we manage to trigger in the people who see our post.

So. If we consider all posts, updates and entries of media into the web as a search query. What used to be static content, becomes dynamic and social objects of data that are searching for context and people to like them. As the social web allows for human interaction, this is the most logic elaboration of the content, links and people components that the web consist of.

Facebook Search

This post however, will be about something more down to earth than the philosophical question of what the web is about. This post will be about how to rank in Facebook Search.

There are basically two ways in which you can rank in Facebook search.

• With a Facebook Page
• With a standard HTML page on your website

Ranking with groups, applications etc. follow the same theoretical ground so you should be able to use this knowledge if you’re running those kind of campaigns as well.

Ranking with a website, page or group in Facebook Search

When Google started out ranking pages they constructed a metric called PageRank. This PageRank was dependent upon how many people had referenced a specific page and what words they were using on the linking page. Thus, it was no longer as important to cram your website with a specific keyword, but it became more important that other people used that important keyword on the page that they were linking from. Even better, if they used that keyword to link to you.

In the world of Facebook, they are also using a sort of validated PageRank to index their pages. We generally call these links “fans”. Facebook has changed the button name from Become Fan to Like or Recommend. The fact however remains that Facebook has created their own type of PageRank where they index and rank different online resources – personal profiles, facebook pages, groups and applications – based on how many fans they have that are related to you.

The last part of the above stated is probably the most important. It is not the nominal number of fans on a page or in a group that makes your page rank. It is the social closeness of the page to the searcher that makes it rank. It is important to understand this concept, especially when optimizing your ad campaigns for Facebook pages. You cannot just create a facebook campaign based on keywords, but you have to move your campaign between different demographics, acquire some members until you start ranking in that demographic, then move on to another one. The more successful you are in analyzing how many fans you need in a certain group of people in order to rank as number one, the more successful your growth will be in Facebook Search.

This means you shouldn’t spend all your money becoming number one. But you should spend your money on acquiring the right people to put you as number one, making you show up to all their friends and friends of friends when they search on related topics to you.

Thus, ranking anything available on Facebook is a question of acquiring the right kind of fans. In order to rank your webpages as groups, pages and community pages on Facebook you need to make them into social objects. These social objects shall be given the OpenGraph properties so that Facebook can add them in the right way.

Adding your website to the Open Graph – create social objects

Below is a video on how to add your web pages to the Social Graph by including the OpenGraph protocol on your pages. This will take you approximately 30 minutes to do if you know what your website is about. If some of you don’t, call me!! hehe…

This is the code that you should be adding. You can look at the source code of my website. I have written a stand alone post on how to add the “Like” button which you can find by clicking Like Button for Facebook. You can find the rest of the OpenGraph protocol source code here.

<html xmlns:og="http://opengraphprotocol.org/schema/"
      xmlns:fb="http://www.facebook.com/2008/fbml">
  <head>
    <title>The Rock (1996)</title>
    <meta property="og:title" content="The Rock"/>
    <meta property="og:type" content="movie"/>
    <meta property="og:url" content="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0117500/"/>
    <meta property="og:image" content="http://ia.media-imdb.com/rock.jpg"/>
    ...
  </head>
  ...
</html>

The most important fact you need to pay notice to is that this does not make your pages rank. The liking does. Not the inclusion. I have no idea on when Facebook will actually start ranking more pages, but here is a ranking example of how TripAdvisor have managed to start ranking in Facebook search.

1. Search for TripAdvisor
2. On top should be the TripAdvisor page
3. Click “Pages” in the left hand menu
4. Your search result will look different from mine but somewhere you will find a snippet that looks like the one below with a web address in it

In this search result it is the second snippet.

1. Click the link
2. Watch how Facebook redirects you to a “normal” web page and not a standard Facebook Page

These types of rankings can be obtained by integrating your web platform with the Facebook OpenGraph protocol and adding a like button to your website.

Link Values from Facebook

What the Facebook OpenGraph integration also give you is a load of links to your website from Facebook profiles. That is if you are successful in getting people to like your content.

As most of the info pages are public on Facebook and as they are being crawled by Google, this must help you a lot with your standard SEO work. Remember that you can probably build a great microsite network by integrating all your micro websites in the OpenGraph protocol. Just a thought … hehe…

SEO tactic for Facebook

So, as your strategy shall basically come down to “creating compelling/extraordinary content” you should really focus on the tactics. The tactics are the difficult and fun part of working in Social media. The strategy is the dull and boring part of the work. As I said, all it comes down to is virtually – hire great people, who are social and can create great content, be transparent in your intentions and always treat others like you want to be treated. If you do not know, ask the community to help out.

I guess that’s what my next post shall be about.

//Jesper

As you have seen my summer school plans haven’t really added up to what neither one of us expected. It is not that I haven’t got any posts to write or publish. It is just that I haven’t had the motivation to do the last bits and pieces and secondly because my blog got hacked.

This post will help you get rid of the adsttnmq1 hack.

The adsttnmq1 hack attacks you from the hosting end. It is thus not an update error in your WordPress version or such. This attacks you when you are on shared hostings or hostings with low protection.

The adsttnmq1 hack puts two or more directories into your root directory. These contain the code that will be placed into your index.php file or equivalent. What you have to do is to first remove these directories and then turn to your index-file to remove the code generated there. This code is not visible until you remove the directories.

Just watch the video explaining it below. But first some general thoughts on link hackers.

Let’s start with some booring. Let’s have a look at how to setup a Facebook Application. This is the part that you will have to do whenever you publish a new Facebook Application to anywhere on Facebook. This tutorial replaces my iframe solution I posted a couple of months back. This is also within the Facebook guidelines – well, depending upon what you put on your tab it is. Read them through. So let’s look at some of what you need before you start:

1. Facebook Account – you can use your own
2. Knowledge of what an FTP is – File Transfer Protocol
3. Some knowledge in HTML or “cut and paste” – I will give you all the source code you need so if you can cut and paste you should be fine
4. Patience – things WILL go wrong and you will have to redo and then redo again to make things work for you
5. Some kind of web hosting – I use HostGator as my solution, but you can use any kind of webhosting that runs a WordPress blog

If you got that set for you, this will be one of the more interesting and learning weeks for you when it comes to Facebook Application development. To make it easy for you I have made a video that shows you how to set up your first application. There is some language in the tutorials that you might not understand. Facebook actually offers you an explanation to each and every form you have to fill in, but I will make an attempt to explain what the different fields we enter information into actually does for you and how you can use them to optimize your presence on Facebook.

What this application does is that it writes HTML to a standard Facebook Canvas Page. This means you can more freely create tabs for your company/blog page on Facebook. I will show you how to fully utilize the available standard features in coming posts, but this takes aim as setting you up to strike the ball. So bare with me!!

Resources

Now, these files that I am about to share with you have been co-developed by me and several others. I just made them as available as they are right now. Ie. I rearranged them so that you will need to know a very limited portion of coding to actually follow this tutorial. I will provide source code as we go and you need to be able to cut and paste to follow along.

• The Facebook Application Files for your server

Steps in this tutorial:

1. Give your application a name
2. Create application and get API key
3. Upload files to your server
4. Complete registration
5. Make the application information available on a tab on a page

Remember that you can always follow these tutorials and their progress at facebook.com/jesperastromcom. Enjoy the video.

No excuses anymore

There are several things I like about waiting to blog again. First of all is that the traffic to the blog has remained, and secondly it is the puzzle with motivation to get back on top of it. Last week I got such a motivation when I was working with the new Facebook platform. I was trying to find something written about it that takes a novice into a doer in just a matter of weeks.

There was still nothing about it and so I have decided to write up a summer school program for Facebook Applications.

Some of the things I will go through the coming week/weeks is the following:

• How to rank with your website in Facebook search
• How to set up a Facebook Application
• How to build your first Facebook Application
• Limitations of applications on Facebook
• How to be creative on Facebook
• How to setup KPIs for your Facebook Application
• How to govern, change the rules of an application without getting bashed for it
• How to turn fans into revenue

I might not use all of those as headlines, but those are the thoughts I want to go through the coming week. To not miss out on anything I would join my Facebook Page (http://www.facebook.com/jesperastromcom) if I was you. Also, if you want to write a tutorial in any form I am starting a tutorial network in the coming weeks. I want more writers for that platform. No bs, just hard core facts and how to’s. So if you know something really good, get in touch with me. jesper.joakim.astrom at gmail.

Get with it peeps!!

Possibly related posts:

• Related posts on Facebook Applications
• How to Optimize the Use of Your Netbook « Latest Netbook Today
• Facebook Application Development-Monetize And Socialize Your …

There is a thing called promote on your posts on Facebook. The little link can be found on posts made by some applications as well as all manual posts promoted. The whole idea with Promoted posts is to draw attention to an ongoing discussion that might increase the relevance of your page.

As you can see from the screen print above there is the Comment – Like – Share – Promote option. Once you click promote a new window opens and you get to create settings or choose the default for the ad you want to create for that specific post.

Best thing about it is that you pay per “Like” or per Click. This is a new and good feature from Facebook as it allows you as a marketer to better highlight why users should become involved or interested in your social objects.

1. Use Promote a post to Build your Facebook Page

Let’s say you are working to build a following on your Facebook page but you don’t seem to get the boost you wanted out of your ordinary ads. However, your wall posts are drawing some attention and more specifically one post has had a lot of likes and a lot of comments.

Now let’s assume that this influx of interaction was due to post quality. Then why not use that post to get your following up to speed. If the users you already have enjoyed it, then other users might as well.

2. Use Promote a post for Crisis management

Secondly, you can use this for crisis management. Let’s say you are experiencing some harsh blog storm about your brand and you want to get the information out there about what you are doing to deal with the issue. Then you can promote that post towards the target group for your communication. It is almost like the “megaphone” which was the first ad format of Facebook used by people who wanted to get elected for some student council positions.

3. Use Promote a post for Event notifications

Let’s say you are looking to fill up an event but the due date is coming close to an end. By engaging the people already signed up for the event and then promoting the post you’ve gotten interaction on to their friends, then you can probably find it easier to get more people involved. They click the ad, see that other people they know are going and thus they sign up.

Finally

As you can see you can use this neat little feature for a lot of different things. The above is only a selection of purposes. I really like it and I think that it is the best ad format that has come out of Facebook since they’ve opened up.

Possibly related posts:

• Related posts on Facebook advertising
• 36545 Day 54: Facebook can put their Finger in their Bunghole …
• Please Tell Me: Is Facebook Necessary? « Jules Zunich :: PR from A …

• Related posts on Promote a post
• Lawyers Should Ignore Social Media Marketing Experts – Avvo Blog
• Is The Facebook LIKE Button Totally Worthless? | David Risley dot com

If you haven’t added Google Analytics to your Facebook Page yet, then you probably should start out here. Google Analytics is the king and queen of flexible traffic analysis right now. Most organizations do not need more than what Google has to offer. If you’re running high volume e-commerce, then yes, you probably should get one of those expensive things, but if you’re not, then Google Analytics is way sufficient to use your analysis tool for you to be able to continuously improve your website.

New analytics coming for Facebook Insights

I know I am taking a big risk right now as I am writing how to interpret the different options in Facebook Insights the day they published images from the new release. However, as I have it here in my todo-list, then I might as well just post it right? Anyhow, here are the images posted by Facebook Developer Page today.

Old Facebook Page Insights

But this post was about the Facebook Insights and what they actually can offer you when analyzing your Facebook engagements. First off you need to find them. To do this you need:

1. A Facebook page
2. The admin rights for that page

If you’ve gotten this far, then you should probably focus on trying to get some fans to come along and engage with you. I have written some tactics for that in previous posts. You can find all my Facebook blog posts from my Facebook category.

Now, go to your Facebook page and have a look just underneath the logo you’re using for your page. You’ll find the link “Edit page” there. Click that link and you’ll have a view that looks a bit like this:

On the right hand side you’ll find the option Insights and a link in the module that says “All Page Insights”. Click that link and you’ll arrive at the Insights section of the page you’re currently analyzing.

Now, this view doesn’t tell you much. Actually it tells you nothing but some nominal values giving you an indication on user demographics and page growth. This might be important for some, but it doesn’t tell you much of how you can improve your work on Facebook. As you know by now, we NEVER look at data to get a warm feeling in our stomach. We look at data to improve on the current situation.

What kind of Facebook insights are important for improvement

I guess this is a matter for the taste squad. However, for me, the most important metric of the Facebook Insights is that of “Interactions per post”. This metric can really tell you what engages your page “likers”. You can find this metric by clicking the drop down on the upper graph and selecting the second option.

1. Interactions per post

This is for my own blog, and I don’t have that much interaction. If you have regular interactions on your page however and you post quite frequently, this metric gives you an indication on whether or not you are growing the engagement with what you are doing or if you are boring peeps to death with your spammy posts.

For example. You might post 100 updates one day and get 100 interactions. The 100 interactions does not tell you anything about quality or engagement levels. Another day you might post 1 update and get 35 interactions. In my point of view 35 is actually greater than 100 in this case as it showed that you posted something highly relevant the day you only posted 1 update whilst you didn’t get the same kind of engagement the day you posted 100.

Take the data, look at what caused the fuzz, adapt it to a new setting, and see if you can regenerate the same kind of interest. Was it what you wrote, how you wrote it, or just external circumstances that made your “likers” go bananas?

2. Post quality

Please do not give a damn crap about this metric. I have managed highly successful pages with an extremely low post quality and managed extremely bad pages with an extremely high post quality. I haven’t even bothered exploring what Facebook really means. I have just seen that there is no correlation between success and post quality and thus I don’t give a crap about it.

3. Posts

The post metric might be useful if you want to govern the activity of a page. Let’s say you want to analyze why you got an increase in 6000% new fans one day but you cannot explain it by the standard options on selection. Perhaps you should have a look at your own activity that day, week or month. Did you post more than usual, did you post less?

If you have a tactical target to post at least one update per day you might want to be able to report this in or govern this in some way. Well, here you go, that’s the Posts option for you.

4. Discussion posts & Reviews

The discussion posts is if you have activated the forum/discussions tab on your page and want to monitor the activity in the forum without actually manually counting the new posts. The Reviews option is for those of you who have a facebook application or have a Facebook Page review tab operational.

5. Mentions

For me this is the most fun option as it actually tells you how many people have shared your page in an status update during the day. This is a highly intriguing metric as it doesn’t offer the opportunity to dig deeper. I want to know who mentions me, not only know that they have.

6. Total Fans / Unsubscribed Fans (or “likers”)

The second graph actually gives you better insights to some deeper demographics. Here you can find out how people engage with your resources posted on the page over time. The total fans vs unsubscribed fans show you an aggreagate over time.

7. New / Removed Fans (or “likers”)

Show you if you increase or decrease your total over time. This metric is interesting as you can use it together with the ones I’ve mentioned above to clarify if your post was engaging or not, and if you are doing a good job or not. Sometimes an update leads to a lot of interaction, but your number of likers drop of drastically. This might mean that you posted something that caused a lot of the wrong kind of engagement.

If you’ve ever had to deal with an online crisis, I am sure you’ve seen the funny looking sine-curve shape on this graph. First a lot of fans drop off, then a lot of new ones add themselves as they want to follow the debacle. Most amusing from a purely academic standpoint.

8. Top countries & demographics

Well these graphs basically show you what you see on the right. The only thing that makes them different is that you can study a region separately from the other. You get the check boxes to select or deselect in order to get a better view. Let’s say you’re running a campaign in Botswana and you want to know the development in that specific country. Well, then these are the two options where you should have more than just a sneak peak.

9. Page views

It is as simple as it says. It is the number of views you’ve had on your page. However, this number sometimes seem a bit to high even for the worst stalkable objects out there. I would look at this metric as a relativity number rather than something else. Do you get more page views when employing one kind of tactic than when using a different one? That’s the kind of question you should be asking yourself.

10. Unsubscribe / Resubscribers

Let’s just say that these people need help with making up their god damn mind… this is not a “dating website” for gods sake. (Yes link buyers out there… that one could be turned into a link… haha… just joking… unless you pay me a lot… like a sick amount…)

11. Media Consumption

This metric basically shows you how many times a user has clicked a play button or viewed an image in your image gallery.

Conclusion

I guess that’s it. I am really looking forward to the new facebook insights. I will write you another post on that when it comes available. It looks truly promising. My guess however is that they will charge for it…. so I guess this post will have some kind of relevance in the future as well.

All the best

Possibly related posts:

• Related posts on Facebook Page Insights
• Three killer tools to measure your Facebook clout
• Learn What to Do With Your Facebook Page Insights

• Related posts on Facebook Pages
• Facebook past present and future « Apavelescu’s Blog
• Difference between Facebook Profile and Facebook Fan Page | iClick …

Most of the time I do not only feel a bit crazy, I get told I am. That’s why I find peace in watching these kind of video clips to make me realize that what others might think of as insane, actually is what makes me sane. Change is nothing that comes automatically. It is something we have to work to achieve. I cannot work without change and I have always hoped to change some part of the world for the better. In times where I find a lot of friends working their asses off, I want to give them the hope that inspire their inner voices to continue strive for change.

No matter how difficult it might seem. Never use your brain to solely decide what is the right path. Use your stomach as well. Dare to take decisions as it is the decisions that will invoke your gut to respond. Dare to be brave. Dare to get fired if that is what it takes. If you have kids, then inspire them to dare where you didn’t.

So. Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The trouble makers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently.

“and while some may see them as the crazy ones, I see genius..”

What is it that makes the difference between a viral something and a flop? My guess, when it comes to creative virals, is that it is  the story about the story, and not the story itself. Think about it. When releasing something in the online sphere, you need to release it into a context. As the amount of content online is so vast and in many instances great, to simply focus on content quality is not merely enough.

The movie industry has been successful in doing this for years with “behind the scenes” material and story telling about the story. A good example is the latest Robin Hood movie where they have launched a full series of “epic proportion” PR releases that are being taken up by the tv-stations around the world to boost demand. The quality in the story about the story is almost as thoroughly produced as the story itself.

The Old Spice example
A good example of a commercial released lately that has a story behind the story is that of Old Spice. First the video was released. It was fabulous… it seemed as though everyone walked around saying “… look at your man, now back at me…”. The video jumped and got included in hundreds of blogs, newspapers etc. all over the world. Highly creative, great content and great scripting created an initial boost for the video.

However, the producers of the old spice commercial didn’t want to leave things to chance. They played out the story behind the story card when telling the world they had shot the full video in one shot. People now had to watch it 5-10 times more in order to be able to spot how the heck they did it. Naturally they released a behind the scenes version of the same commercial with “reviews” from the rest of the industry included into it, saying not only that this was a fantastic production, but the way they did it was fantastic as well.

An ad agency, such as the one I work for often focus on the story. The story behind the story is almost always looked past. Not only by the agency, but by the client and by the time frame of the project. This is a huge problem as the virality of a project becomes more of a game of chance rather than a game of skill. Yes, you can cheat, which most of the bigger productions do, but it just doesn’t feel right in the gut when you do. It is like winning a price but having no one to compete against.

I know I haven’t written in a while, and I know this post is not what you expect of me. However, the story about the story shall never be forgotten. I am working on a post which will get its story about the post itself… and so I wanted to share these thoughts with you as a quickie before my bomb falls this weekend.

//Jesper

Possibly related posts:

• Related posts on old spice commercial
• MEET TWO FACES OF CUP FRUSTRATION: Chris Pronger & The Flyers …
• snow mantra parka salvatore ferragamo shoes vibram …

• Related posts on story about the story
• Jodie Evans: Israel: The Truth is Coming « debt settlement,debt …
• Alice Munro’s “Child’s Play” « The StoopidNoodle