Facebook Best Practices

Since the inception of the new Facebook layout in March, 2009, company best practices for using Facebook have changed. Now, the site is dramatically less reliant on independently-developed applications and much more focused on fan pages. The following are company best practices, mostly from outside of the sports property sphere, for developing a fan page.

Integrate other platforms. On the “Year One” page, fans have the option to play “Rock, Paper, Spear,” a clever game that redirects fans to YouTube. After a quick video that ties in the new Year One movie with a humorous version of rock, paper, scissors, fans play a two-round game of rock, paper, spear with a tribal warrior. The video then directs viewers to watch the movie trailer.

Converse with fans. The Disney fan page is a leader in this practice. With increasing frequency, the Disney asks its fans questions to create a conversation. After Disney recently asked, “Who is your favorite Disney couple?” 1,294 fans posted comments in the first two weeks. Talk about engagement.

Another way to engage with fans is through the “reviews” feature on the Facebook fans page. Several brands make excellent use of this feature, such as EA Sports in its FIFA 09 page. Here, fans have free rein to post unfiltered opinions about the game, some of which are vulgar, others unfavorable, but most of which are overwhelmingly positive.

Get and use feedback. In a recent conversation with Pat Coyle, former Executive Director of Digital Business with the Indianapolis Colts, I asked haw the Colts get feedback. A major source of feedback is forum threads about marketing issues or emotional topics, which they use in various ways.

Use Flash. Fox news goes a little overboard with its Flash games, but is a good fan page to look at to see the different applications of this tool. Here, Fox News has a “Fox News Flair” Flash widget that lets fans send buttons of their favorite conservative pundit, a “360 degree studio tour” that lets news junkies get a view of the inside of three studios and the Green Room, a Flash tile game, a “Fun Facts” widget for fans to learn more about these TV personalities, and a shop that allows fans to buy trinkets like hats and mugs.

Post events. Barack Obama used social media as a successful campaign tool, on the way garnering more than 6 million Facebook fans. Part of his success came from keeping his events calendar stocked with upcoming meetings, rallies, and speeches.

Create albums. Just like individuals, brands are starting to create photo albums. A classic example of this is the Coca-Cola page. Here, Coca-Cola has 11 different albums with hundreds of photos, in categories like “Coke is Everywhere,” showing cans from around the world, and “Coca-Cola Archives,” displaying vintage advertisements. The site also allows fans to post Coke-related photos, which has led to more than 1,300 pictures of fans engaged with the brand.

Twitter Best Practices

I recently had a conversation with a senior executive at an NBA franchise that opened my eyes to how much corporate leaders distrust Twitter. There is a commonly-held view that Twitter is populated by ego-driven geeks who drone on about what they had for breakfast. While there is certainly some of this, brand managers should also be aware that Twitter is filled with millions of users who are talking right now about their needs, their likes & dislikes, and about your brand.

Hundreds of companies are using Twitter to successfully promote their brands and engage with customers. Here are six best practices for Twitter:

1. Provide customer care and feedback. This is the most talked about brand management tool available on Twitter. Ford, JetBlue, and ComCast all put tremendous effort into responding to customer complaints, praise, and questions. By using the search function on Twitter or more advanced listening tools, brands can immediately redirect frustrated customers toward the help they need, often turning a bad experience into a positive one.

2. Engage your audience. Customers want to feel like they have a voice. Starbucks asks its followers to come up with new ideas, EA asks its gamers what they’re playing now, and 10 Downing Street (Tweets from the Prime Minister’s office) asks followers to throw questions out via YouTube.

3. Start a conversation. Whether it’s Al Gore reflecting on the market for electric cars in China or John McCain lambasting the Wall Street bailout, Twitter is a public forum for conversation. Brand spokespeople can make use of this great feature, too, by authentically raising a concern or praising an achievement. It’s best if the achievement isn’t their own.

4. Learn about customer needs. Marcel LeBrun, CEO of Radian6, encourages companies to use Twitter to answer key questions about their customers. What other things (besides my product) are customers interested in? What are the most important subjects being talked about by people who use my product? Who are the key influencers?

By learning and listening, companies have the opportunity to meet their customers at a point of need. Most people won’t open an email coming from a lawn-care company, but are happy to listen to a pitch right after they complain about their brown grass.

5. Advertise an event or promotion. AdidasRunning promotes running events around the world, Powell’s Books lets readers know when an author is coming to Portland, and Samsung pushes cell phone deals and giveaways. All these companies are taking advantage of their large voice that comes with thousands of followers, brand loyalists, and industry influencers.

6. Be creative. Ashton Kutcher is quickly becoming best known for his Twitter personality, thanks in part to the gauntlet he dropped at the feet of Larry King and CNN to see who could be the first with 1,000,000 followers. EA has taken advantage of the media hoopla to offer Ashton’s 1,000,000th follower 10 EA games, and a role in the Sims 3. EA’s individual titles also creatively use Twitter to engage customers. Battlefield Heroes, for example, holds Twitter trivia contests and gives away swag to the winners. Great publicity, and a model for Twitter best practices.

@SamBoush

adidas House Party

In late November adidas Originals launched a marketing campaign called “House Party,” designed to garner attention for the 60th anniversary of the brand. While the campaign includes live events, real house parties, commercials, and other media buys, House Party has enjoyed its largest successes in the digital sphere, where the campaign attracts viewers on YouTube, Facebook, and on the adidas corporate Web site.


In the House Party video—the focal point of the campaign—celebrities (Young Jeezy, David Beckham, Kevin Garnett, The Ting Tings, and others), as well as hundreds of good-looking young people, congregate at an urban house party where they skateboard inside, paint on the walls, and dive fully-clothed into a backyard pool—all-the-while conspicuously sporting the three stripes and adidas Originals logo.

Response to the campaign has been overwhelmingly positive. The YouTube video has 830,000 views to date, the adidas Originals Web site continues to hawk online spin-offs of the campaign (like The Ting Tings paint party), and the adidas Originals Facebook page (with more than 1.5 million fans) threw a house party for a lucky fan.

The important question to consider, though, is whether adidas loyalists have found the campaign authentic enough. While Adrants.com called House Party “an ego-fueled, self-indulgent, hipsteresque, celebu-fest,” most blogs have been on fire with praise for the campaign, and one TV station even created a knockoff of the ad to promote The Simpsons. It’s clear from a look at the online chatter over the campaign, that the vast majority of online creators, critics, and collectors agree with themusingsofondolady.blogspot.com that House Party’s use of skateboarders, hip hop, motorbikes, and graffiti all contribute to the authenticity of the campaign.

While the most successful attribute of the campaign is authenticity to the brand and to brand loyalists, the campaign didn’t take full advantage of the Web’s most fascinating feature: user-generated content. House Party is hugely successful in a Web 1.0 world, where adidas has pushed excellent content on the consumer. On the adidas Originals Web site, viewers can even get more in-depth in the house party by choosing a room they’d like to see more of—the living room, for example—and can witness more footage of people drinking, dancing, playing poker, and painting on the living room walls.

However, nothing put forward by the campaign allows users to interact on a more personal level, or create their own content. Wouldn’t it be a more successful campaign if users were uploading their own house party videos, using social network to create a virtual house party, or pulling content onto their own sites?

Moving forward, adidas might consider revising their campaign to make full use of the following online tools:

1. Twitter. Adidas Originals has 108 followers of their Twitter profile. So few because there are zero Tweets coming from adidas Originals. Adidas could quickly start a conversation (and, more importantly, be a part of a conversation) by updating their fans and asking questions of the roughly 8 million people who use Twitter. It’s a small number, relative to Facebook, but Twitter caters to early adopters, young people, and those who like to be on the cutting edge: just the demographics adidas Originals would like to target.

2. Content sharing on the corporate Web site. Adidas should encourage their fans to use House Party to create something original of their own. To do this, adidas could allow fans to download:

• Art assets including concept art & hi-res logos
• Site design elements including borders, backgrounds, fonts, and stylesheets
• Exclusive content: Forum avatars / Messenger images

3. Ning. Why not create an online House Party? Ning allows users to create their own social networking site, which would be the perfect tool for adidas to create an invite-only virtual gathering, where invitees could invite friends, who could invite friends, who could invite friends… just like a real house party.

Interested in learning more about sports business? You might be interested in The Business of Sports, Second Edition.

Sports that Tweet

The hottest new Web 2.0 site isn’t really that new at all. Twitter—the subject of recent adulation from The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, LA Times and more—started as former Blogger creator Jack Dorsey’s side project in March 2006. Now this stripped-down, not-for-profit social networking site has an avid group of followers, estimated at around 7 million. Not so much compared with Facebook’s 132 million unique users, or Myspace’s 117 million users, but a rapidly-growing vanguard of early adopters that Web 2.0-savvy sports properties shouldn’t overlook.

So far, an impressive collection of sports apparel manufacturers, teams, sports media, and athletes have staked out virtual territories on Twitter. The NFL has 600 followers (and no posts), while ESPN has 36,000 followers and Lance Armstrong has 150,000 followers.

Among sports video games, EA Sports has some of the best content. About two dozen employees, developers, producers, and community managers actively tweet, including Will Kinsler (Raczilla), who has 1,300 eyes reading his Madden and NCAA series posts. Sports game publishers Activision, 2K Sports, SEGA, and Sony Computer Entertainment also have Twitter accounts.

At minimum, a Twitter presence can help communicate with customers and fans. At best, Twitter can build a brand by engaging a pre-segmented market of tech-hungry loyalists, sharing insights into upcoming products, pointing fans to a Web site or other forum, and relating with consumers in a non-corporate setting.

The white hot risk with Twitter seems clear, though. Even at 7 or 8 million unique users, Twitter has a lot of catching up to do before it can compete with its larger Web 2.0 kin, let alone traditional media giants. But, like Ray Kinsella in Field of Dreams, many companies are betting that if they build it, fans will come.

Facebook App -- Fan Page

The Facebook App I wrote about last time is working and in full-gear. Every day roughly 40 new users upload the application to track their favorite Olympic sports. Unfortunately, the application usage has grown linearly, rather than exponentially as we'd hoped, but there are some bright spots.

One of these bright spots is the fan page. Every application has a fan page--those users who are so pleased with the application that they become "fans." Usually this is a relatively minor percentage of overall users. For example, the Michigan St. Football Application has more than 6,000 users, but only 150 fans. Our Olympic Games 2008 application has only 200 users so far, but 44 fans.

Facebook, for all its flaws, allows for some pretty neat data collection. The fan page enables us to run numbers on even a relatively modest sample size, and to come up with some neat findings.

The table to the left, for example, shows the gender and age range of the fans page. It's startling to see that more of our Olympic Games Application fans are women rather than men. And, looking at the ages, 40% are minors.

It would be interesting to compare these numbers with Facebook's overall demographics or the Neilsen rating demographics for the Beijing Olympics on NBC. My guess is these numbers are much closer to the former group than the latter.

In an unrelated surprise: the 44 fans of the application aren't just Americans. There are users from Switzerland, New Zealand, China, Canada, Australia, Morocco, England, Lebanon, and elsewhere.

Olympics Facebook Application

I'm happy to announce that the Facebook application I created (with George Mandis of Snaptortoise) is now up-and-running.

Olympic Games 2008 is a fun way to track medal standings by country, rank, or event. And though we don't have high usage numbers yet, this project has taught me a lot about the opportunities and challenges surrounding the promotion of a Facebook application. I've put links on content-sharing sites like Digg and Reddit, posted on group forums like Yahoo groups and Tribe, and mentioned it on StumbleUpon. So far, my best luck has come directly from Facebook, where friends and friends-of-friends have helped our little sports app take off.

The best part of this experiment has been what I've learned about running a project that unfolds in real time. If Uzbekistan gets a medal and we don't have a flag ready for that country, or there's a tie for bronze, we need to adapt quickly or lose viewers.

The hardest part of this project has been entering in stats for each event. Was there a way to automate this? Next time I'm looking for an open source data feed.

Facebook Applications

Sports marketers use the popular networking site, Facebook, to promote events, market leagues, advertise media outlets, and generate excitement about sports properties. And while not all sports entities have created a presence on Facebook, those that have can claim real results for a minimal investment.

CBSSports.com has recently created the Official Tournament Brackets application. Roughly 500,000 users have uploaded this app, and most days nearly 5,000 of those users open the application to play around with it. This particular application lets users create a NCAA basketball tournament bracket, register themselves as fans of particular teams, and compare brackets against friends and other users for a chance to win $10,000.

Sports Illustrated has created a more modest application with roughly 10% as many users as the CBS sports app, which allows the user to choose favorite teams from the “Big Four” leagues plus NCAA basketball and football. It then spits out customized SI headlines for those teams.

A third, less-known company, Citizen Sports Network, has created dozens (possibly hundreds) of Facebook applications targeted uniquely to fans. Each page is a forum for fans of a team to congregate, discuss, and cheer with fellow supporters. Citizen Sports Network has highly-downloaded and viewed applications, with names like “Red Sox Nation” and “England Football.”

Many sports properties, such as Nike, haven’t necessarily created their own Facebook applications, yet still maintain a Facebook presence. A search for Nike applications, for example, yields a “Nike+ Running Monitor” app that lets users share Nike+ running progress with friends, and a few other applications designed independently from the company. Searches for “adidas” and “nfl” yield similar results.

Other sports properties have reserved the use of their name in the same way that someone might buy a domain name for future use. The difference with Facebook is that application names are free and must be at least 7 characters (thus “nike” would be unacceptable, but “niketennis” would work). Callaway Golf has reserved their name without actually creating an application, as have EA Sports and adidas. However, some companies have clearly failed to reserve the use of their names, as “IMGWorld” and “Daktronics” are still available for anyone to snatch up.

I reserved the use of some excellent application names that might someday have value just as domain names in the early 21st century came to be valuable. Perhaps years from now “icehockey,” “softball,” and “wrestling” will all be worth hundreds or even thousands of dollars. And even if these names aren’t worth anything, it seems prudent for any corporation to grab up their own name. I just registered “NorthFace” and it didn’t cost me a penny.