Hi all, I started this site years ago to blog about all things digital. Since then a lot has changed and I have blogged elsewhere and on different things. I always thought I’d come back to this one but alas, I haven’t.
From now on I will be blogging at RKTumbles tumblr so check it out, I will also be editing and blogging about football from One Foot In the Game again from April 2013, so check that out too.
More about me at my portfolio site too – RobertoKusabbi.co.uk
Image via CrunchBase
I haven’t blogged here for awhile, something I am very keen to change in 2012, but for those who don’t know I do blog every other day (if not every day) on my football blog though.
But today I felt compelled to blog again, and that’s because I came across new Facebook advertising package “The Reach Generator”.
As we all know, Facebook ads tend to have a low click through, especially the basic link ads. What we also know is that as a Facebook Page we never reach 100% or even 30% of those who like our page.
That’s why Reach Generator is a very interesting prospect for brands and organisations.
In a nutshell Reach Generator allows advertisers to pay Facebook on an on going basis rather than the CPC or CPM model. Once switched on Reach Generator (and Facebook) guarantees a 75% reach of one story every day, over a month long period.
Apparently Ben and Jerry’s have been using this and they were able to reach 98% of their Facebook which is pretty astounding.
There is little more information at the moment, but what an opportunity for brands to reach even more people. Some may be cynical and say but we should be able to reach everyone who likes us, and yes I can see the point of view, but at the same time we know the game and we need to play it. It is also worth noting that the more engaged your page is, with better content, the more likely you are to reach more of your fan base too.
The only documentation on Facebook’s site I can find is a PDF of basic Reach Generator info but I can’t wait to get my hands on it. I also agree with as @BenAyers that you need scale and backing for it to work, which makes me think that the best use will be for big launches, big campaigns (like @TheBHF Vinnie Jones CPR anyone?) and brands with big existing reach.
The price? Not sure yet…
I came across SoloCo during Social Media Week Scotland and was immediatlely intrigued.
I remember when the Obama campaign was in full swing and I was working in my first charity job (many years ago) as Assistant Web Producer and my then CEO asked how could we fundraise like Obama did.
Not easily I remember thinking.
But that may change, SoLoCo is in Beta and is already looking pretty slick. At the moment it is Scottish based and there are 11 projects bidding for funding, including:
But in the current climate for charities with reduced incomes it could be one to watch.
So what do you think of the crowd funding model? Is SoLoCo the future for community and smaller projects? Will other charities follow (CRUK are already doing something similar with MyProjects)?
Be great to hear your views.
Image via CrunchBase
From today you will start to see a ‘new’ newsfeed on your own Facebook profile. The two biggest features are ‘Top Stories’ feature and a ‘Ticker’ feature.
Top Stories
All of your news is now in one place with the most interesting stories featured at the top. If you haven’t visited Facebook for a while, the first things you’ll see are top photos and status updates posted while you’ve been away. They’re marked with an blue corner.
If you check Facebook more frequently, you’ll see the most recent stories first. Photos will also be bigger and easier to enjoy while you’re scrolling through.
Facebook determines whether something is a top story based on lots of factors, including your relationship to the person/page who posted the story, how many comments and likes it got, what type of story it is, etc.
How does this impact your page?
Well. We don’t know yet. But…I will be keeping an eye on how this impacts on our Facebook posts and engagement.
My theory, and it is just a theory, is that this should be a good thing for pages. Mainly because Facebook needs to be seen as a major media platform so you would imagine that they are doing this to make Brand Pages more obvious in the newsfeed. Keep today in your diary as a date to keep a close eye on your engagement stats
In addition, we may see that stories have a longer shelf life, maybe up to 5 days as people who don’t log in as much see our top story when they log in, which may be a few days after the story was posted.
The Ticker.
The ticker, on the right-hand side of your account, lets you see all your friends’ activity in real-time – yes, that’s right, just like Twitter…
When you hover over an item on ticker, you can see the full story and join the conversation as it happens….just like when you click on a Tweet on Twitter it opens that up for you.
Ticker updates itself as stories happen. This gives you a more complete picture of what your friends and Pages you are following are up to right now.
How does this impact your page?
Be really succinct, we have a rule that every Facebook post has a question or first line hook, this will become even more important to make sure people engage with us.
Finally, it will also mean – and again this is my theory – that less people will come your actual page wall but engage with you on posts that come up on their newsfeed, which is what happens already but I suspect will increase even further.
What do you think? Good or bad?
I have to say I think good and generally love the new design, wider and more relevant to me.
Image via CrunchBase
UPDATE: October 2011
Seems that with the new Facebook Insights that you can now export all the data that you need to make the below work again without using Export.ly. Plus there are some new metrics too, individual users who have seen each post as well as reach.
Good times!
UPDATE:
Export.ly seem to have been taken over by Simply Measured and don’t seem to offer the same, very cost effective, solution as what we did below. Hoping to find out more, but as you can imagine, I’m very keen to keep using them!
I was having a chat with a colleague last week and she asked me why we update our Facebook page twice a day and how do we make that decision? Was it just a guess or a hunch?
The answer to both was by using data.
At the BHF we have a very healthy Facebook community with lots of engagement, take a look – I am very proud of it. We have worked very hard to make sure that we are talking to our ‘likers’ every day and engaging them in conversation not just broadcasting at them, using our top class content to build better relationships.
But how did we make decisions about when we should post a Facebook update?
In April, we used Export.ly to export the previous 12 months Facebook data to a huge Excel file.
Our Analytics Executive Dan manipulated the Excel file and in a few hours we knew:
Now we had all that data we could cross reference the time of our updates by comments and likes and find out when updates had higher levels engagement – allowing us to make decisions on when we post using data rather than just a hunch.
We are due another data mine soon and due to the substantial increase in ‘likes’ that we have had since April I think that our timings may change slightly. I’m keen to find out whether our updates with a question are more engaging with our ‘likers’ than one’s without too as well as some more extensive work into what topics get more engagement (if you’re reading this Dan then that’s what I’m going to ask next week..).
For the record, our highest engagement came between 11:30-13:00 and 18:30-19:30…
N.B We had to pay $50 dollars for our Export.ly file due to the size of our Facebook page, but if you’re managing a page with less ‘likes’ then you may not have to pay at all. (We have 100,000+ likes now).
I’ve been involved in online communities since I can remember, having grown up with an Ollivetti PC with AOL dial up; forums, messageboards and chat rooms were all we had until MSN really kicked off. Building an online community at the British Heart Foundation has been a huge challenge; the community “soft” launched today, please do visit the site and tell anyone you know that is interested in the BHF.
Here is my (rather long) experience…It would be great to hear your thoughts!
For as long as anyone can remember our supporters have been asking for a space online where they could meet other people and share experiences. That might be talking to others about their heart condition, or talking to a group of people who are trekking to China to raise vital funds for our work.
Two years ago we began a global navigation review of our website. This was a nine month project looking into our website, how people used the site and how they wanted to.
We ran lots of focus groups with every person imaginable; teachers, current users of our site, doctors, professors, people who take part in events and even people who hated going online and found out what made them tick and what they wanted or didn’t want from our website.
We put our users at the heart (excuse the pun) of our website and it paid off hugely. We now have a fantastic website that was developed in partnership with our audience with innovative features like our patient pathway (the strap across the front page from Prevention to recovery).
People wanted to connect
The feedback from the review told us in no uncertain terms that our supporters wanted to connect with people in similar situations. Similar sentiments were coming in from all areas; focus groups with our Health at Work practitioners were telling us they wanted to talk about delivering Health at Work with other practitioners online. Our eventers wanted to share tips and meet others going on treks or taking part in marathons online. Our Facebook audience was increasing at a phenomenal rate (from 20,000 12 months ago to 98,500 today) and they wanted to share their stories and how they were feeling and we wanted to build these relationships between our supporters and with us. People were even going away and starting their own forums but without the infrastructure or man power to deliver. We knew we had to step in.
A year ago we started in earnest to look at what a BHF online community would look like and how that would work for us. Like many large charities we have a lot of audiences and we also have a lot of data which we wanted to make sure was connected. Someone told me (outside of the BHF) that if they wouldn’t start an online community in a charity today because it is a data and registration nightmare!
How do you solve a problem like “Single Sign On”?
We didn’t want the community to be an add on or a second thought, but rather a hub of conversation about people’s experiences and what people were doing so that people could build relationships with each other and with us.
The biggest beast to tame was “Single Sign On”. Because our community is a different platform to our main website and hosted elsewhere we wanted to make sure that if you were a member of any of our online environments that you could use 1 login and you could use them all and for that solution to be scalable for any other online space we may add in future. Trust me when I say that this was a huge project but one I was lucky to be managing.
The people and the platform
We decided to talk to 8 agencies that had experience in building communities. We knew we wanted a community for all, not just for an event or for delivering health advice. We wanted a community that was for the whole BHF and we wanted our users to be able to seamlessly be able to engage and use their existing membership with us.
We decided to pick SIFT Groups. They work on the Drupal platform which is open source and have experience in charity working. It seemed like a great fit, they also brought a vast amount of experience in community management and training. We were all especially impressed with Elena Goodrum – a community manager and how she trained and spoke so passionately about community.
We already had buy in from the very, very top, we knew our supporters were chomping at the bit and we had our platform. The next step was to work very closely with SIFT to make the user journey as simple as possible, using all the information we have from the past two years we stripped back the community as much as physically possible. Do we need this? Do we need that? Can we ask our users about this bit? We questioned everything. But when we got to UAT and live site, it was all worth it.
At the same time “Single Sign On” was ongoing as a separate project. We were working both with SIFT and our web development agency Positive Technology to make sure that we could build a “passport” for users who sign up to the BHF website (to register for events, order publications and our Heart Matters service) so that they wouldn’t have to login to a new website, this had to work and was a critical part of the tech side of the project. We also had to make sure if a supporter signed up to the community they could sign up to all the other great things our website offers. All on another online environment. Tricky stuff! But we got there, and I won’t bore you about the tech side. Feel free to ask me any questions though!
But back to the people… (The best bit).
We had been working with our staff from the get go. Now we started working with the whole organisation on the community. We trained up 20 Heart Health nurses on how to use communities, how to moderate and how to engage online. We then trained our events staff so that they could help in the community management of the site. We got our customer service teams involved, how to moderate, how to engage, tone of voice. Luckily we had social media guidelines done and dusted and we also had a tone of voice guide, so this was a bit easier than it may have been elsewhere. How useful they proved to be!
We then started recruiting champions outside of the organisation. We used our social networking channels, we used our emails lists and anyone who had shown an interest in the BHF and doing more. We then invited them in to meet us, and gave them a sneak preview of the community. It was difficult, but it was so worth it when they saw it, we speak to the regularly, updated them about progress. We just kept them up to date and they loved being part of something. Sounds so simple huh.
Only at the first step…
All through this process we had been tweaking and adding to our growth strategy. With the different types of audiences and the sheer number of people who we talk to on a regular basis we wanted to make sure we didn’t launch with a big bang only to whimper a week or month later. We decided to phase specific audiences on to our site at soft launch, we picked our heart health audiences and eventers will be sign posted to our site and then a gradual evolution both natural (them finding it on our site) and us prodding them via email. We have a plan from launch in June all the way through until November already and that is just phase one of our growth.
I am sure I have missed lots; it was a huge team effort with a lot of highs and a lot of lows. We have a lot in the pipeline and our site now is going to be very different in 12 months time. But it was a fantastic journey for me personally and one of the biggest projects of my career.
We have been on a hell of a journey already, and the first step only starts today.
P.S – if you’ve read to the bottom here – thank you!
Image via CrunchBase
Our Analytics Executive Dan (who has no social media presence – through choice) went to a high level meeting about the potential cookie laws, I thought it would be interesting to get him to blog on the very complex subject, here are his notes.
“Cookie Law The Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations 2003 are expected to be adopted into UK law around the end of the month although this may slip.
There is no clarity around what companies should be doing to ensure compliance. Thankfully the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) has indicated that they won’t be expecting compliance from companies for at least a year after the regulations are adopted.
Wording of the regulation:
‘Member states shall ensure that the storing of information, or the gaining of access to information already stored, in the terminal equipment of a subscriber or user is only allowed on the condition that the subscriber or user concerned has given his or her consent, having been provided with clear and comprehensive information in accordance with Directive 95/46/EC, inter alia about the purposes of the processing’
There are different interpretations around what constitutes consent/what counts as functionality and what counts as clear information.
What will this affect?
Services which use cookies will be affected. This includes:
What we know works
The DCMS has said that the voluntary frameworks published by both the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) and the European Advertising Standards Alliance (EASA) would be considered compliant with the act but that they are not the only solutions to the issues. They have also been very clear that they are likely to be very tough on what constitutes essential site functionality (shopping baskets would be acceptable, recommended products would not fit in essential functionality)
Unclear Issues
Worst Case Scenario
Best Case Scenario
Currently consent is considered to be given because browser settings allow you to choose the level of cookie you’re comfortable with. Ideally, this would continue to cover all the responsibilities in the directive.
Most likely Scenario (Dan’s interpretation) – We would need to update our privacy policy with details of what cookies we may have in place and how we use them. We would also need to include a link to Your online choices website.
If we were to run behaviourally targeted advertising then we would likely need to sign up to the IAB’s technical solution (not yet created), but this is likely to be handled by the networks rather than individual companies.
We have a year and most people seem to be waiting to see what other companies do. Unfortunately it looks like much of the clarity will come from breaches of the regulations being pursued.“
So I have the new iPad and it has given me inspiration to blog again (simple pleasures/simple minds).
On Saturday the WWF tweeted at me asking to spread the word about earth hour. I had no problem helping out, I like the WWF a lot and my first memory of a “charity” was of the WWF logo back when I was a child.
I noticed that they had also asked a lot of other people to do the same. Again I didn’t mind at all, I have done the same thing at the BHF to MP’s to support some of our campaigns, all part of trying new methods of engaging and experimenting, we have also had some MP’s who we were not as warm with talk to us because of it, which can only be a good thing.
It did get me thinking though, do people find it spammy? Or is it just another way of using Twitter with “influencers” to spread the word? Does it make a difference? And please…no mentions of slacktivism.
Be really interested in your thoughts.
And a big well done to the WWF for another year of earth hour and raised awareness of global sustainability.
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