This week, instead of reporting from the red comfy chair in the living room, I’m reporting from sunny – if cold, Lake Tahoe – where MediaPost is hosting its first-ever Social Media Insider Summit. By day, we’ve been attending panels and keynotes about where, when, how and if employees should tweet; by night we’ve been using Google Sky Maps to figure out what the constellations are above our heads. Yes, it’s a geek-a-thon!

But since I’m not just a geek but an alleged wordsmith, one of the things that struck me is how important language is to at least some in this crowd, even if it is often communicated in 140-character bursts that often resort to abbreviations. Here’s when it struck me: when Forrester Research senior analyst Augie Ray, during a panel on privacy, walked the assembled multitudes through some language that is being used by Amazon to tell people how it would use profile data for those who connect their Amazon accounts to Facebook.

We all know what this normally looks like — it involves some form of legalese that makes leveraging one’s Facebook friends for any purpose seem to be troublesome, invasive and worth having second thoughts about.

But Amazon, by actually thinking of this language in a marketing context, managed to make the idea of linking one’s Amazon and Facebook accounts together sound useful and appealing – like you might actually want to do it. Here are some excerpts of how it explained the deal. Connecting Facebook and Amazon together would let the user:

·       “Discover Amazon recommendations for movies, music and more based on your Facebook profile.”

·       “See upcoming birthdays and find your Facebook friends’ Amazon Wish Lists more easily.”

·       “Get gift suggestions for your friends based on their Facebook profiles.”

·       “Explore your friends’ profiles and see who has similar interests.”

“Now, that’s something I could use,” a potential user might say. It also uses clear language to make clear all of the potentially troubling ways personal data will not be used.

So why I am so focused on a few sentences? Though I hadn’t really spent a lot of time thinking about it previously, much of the language used to describe privacy policy is off-putting, when it should really be part of the marketing program – telling you why you might want to do something instead of making you feel you might not.

It’s something marketers need to think about more. Amazon could have used more strictly legal language; it also could have done what most companies do when they launch a Facebook app: default to intimidating, boilerplate Facebook-ese. That’s not just lazy; it’s a bit self-defeating. While most of us in the business gleefully skim past the verbiage about what personal information an app we’re downloading has access to, many people find that verbiage to be a deterrent. Why not, as Amazon has, explain precisely what the benefits of using the app might be?

Maybe this is a topic only a linguist could love, but I think it’s about more than that. It’s part of building trust, and that’s central to what good marketing is about.

Author: Catharine P. Taylor
Via [Mediapost]

Rivaling the ubiquity of Google’s search bar, Facebook on Tuesday firmly lodged itself on the front page of NYTimes.com. “The functionality appears to be similar to Facebook’s recommended articles social plugin, with users being required to opt-in to the service,” notes All Facebook.

“The most notable aspect of this new service however is that the typically design-conscious company, has a plugin which doesn’t align with the rest of the site.”

According to The New York Times, the only information that will be displayed on one’s Facebook profile is recommendations that they chose to share on Facebook. What’s more, all information being used by NYTimes.com will be explicitly stated.

What the partnership does not do is integrate Facebook with the New York Times’ existing TimesPeople social news network. Rather, as All Facebook reports, “The company has chosen to use a number of separated social tools for providing more interaction among its users.”

via [Mediapost]

Usually, new vehicles are unveiled at big marquee auto shows in places like Detroit and L.A. But Ford seems to have done well to launch its Explorer crossover virtually, on social media.

The reveal’s physical occurrence was in the middle of New York City, on a faux hillside right in front of Macy’s. But Jumpstart Media, a Hachette Filipacchi-owned network of auto-centric Web sites, says the real jaw-dropper may have happened online.

The firm says the reveal of the 2011 Ford Explorer on Facebook caused a 104% increase in the number of people going to Ford Explorer pages in Jumpstart’s network of Web sites on July 26, the day of the unveiling.

Ford took the unusual tack of unveiling the vehicle on Facebook, and subsequently doubled the daily users researching Ford Explorer across Jumpstart’s online automotive shopping and enthusiast properties, compared to the average daily usage for the month of July, per the firm.

Jumpstart says the boom continued with successive daily improvements in usage versus the average, of 66%, 25%, 13% and 8% by July 30.

The firm says that because of engagement during the Facebook reveal, Ford got a greater share of SUV shoppers across Jumpstart’s 13 automotive shopping and enthusiast Web sites, including Vehix, Consumer Guide Automotive, JD Power Autos, Shopping.com Autos, Car and Driver, Road & Track, and U.S.News.com. The network says Ford’s share of SUV shoppers grew by 52% on the day of the unveiling to become the most-researched SUV.

Joe Kyriakoza, VP of marketing communications at Jumpstart, said in a release that the Facebook effort managed to encourage a high volume of in-market shoppers to consider Explorer. Kyriakoza says that after trailing Grand Cherokee — which also recently launched a new design for 2011 — for most of July, Explorer soared ahead of it and the rest of the competition for the remainder of the month.

Jumpstart also said the Explorer Facebook reveal did better than Super Bowl ads for other automakers. Ford outdistanced other automakers’ share-of-shopping increases the day after they had run 30-second Super Bowl commercials this year. The firm says Super Bowl auto advertisers saw average share of shopping lift by 14%. But that was less than a third of Explorer’s growth from the Facebook unveiling.

“While it’s unclear what Ford paid for the Facebook reveal, I’m confident it was nowhere near the cost of even one $2.5 million Super Bowl commercial,” said Kyriakoza. “Ford’s campaign clearly demonstrates that while traditional media can be highly effective in driving consideration, a well-executed and deeply influential online program can shift car shopping intent with immediacy and efficacy.”

via [Mediapost]

Eye tracking study shows that more people look at normal Facebook ads (on profile pages) than Home Page ads (on Newsfeed), and that they spend longer looking at the normal ads.

Key observations

71% of users looked at adverts on their Profile pages but only 31% of users looked at adverts on the News Feed page (homepage)

We analysed data to see if users looked at adverts in Facebook and which adverts on different pages received more attention. On average, across all page, 42% of users looked at adverts. However there is was a big difference in which adverts received more attention on the different pages. 31% of users looked at adverts shown on News Feed Wall pages, 39% of users looked at adverts on TV pages and almost double the amount of users (71%) glanced at adverts on their Profile page.

Users spent more time looking at adverts on profile and TV pages than adverts on News Feed page.

During testing, users spent the most time on News Wall pages (13.8 seconds). Despite this fact and the fact they spent almost half that time on profile pages (8.2 seconds), they looked at adverts for more than three times longer on Profile pages (0.2 seconds vs. 0.7 seconds), i.e., about 10% of the total time spend on that page.

Link to PDF

Ian McKee
CEO of Vocanic

Google arms itself to take on social networking.

There is an increasing drumbeat among technology analysts that Facebook is heading towards oblivion, not in days, or even months, but certainly in the next couple of years. If this seems a perverse judgment in the face of its claim to a virtual society, half a billion people strong, its underlying logic is compellingly Darwinian: The mobile web rewards increasing simplicity, and it doesn’t make sense, in the long run, to have multiple social networks, each with their own sign-ins and passwords, their own assemblies of non-collaborating address books, applications, and data, and multiple levels of interaction with other users.

This social multiverse may be manageable on a desktop or laptop, but a multiplicity of structures for similar personal information and interaction are potentially overwhelming on a mobile device. For example, the average European mobile user has four separate address books, according to a 2009 survey by Critical Path, and he or she is a) frustrated about updating them, and b) enthusiastic about the idea of being able to syncronize all of them.

So it’s not surprising that mobile network operators have realized that there’s a need for aggregation and syncronization–and therefore an opportunity to monetize, albeit in a limited sense, social networking on the mobile Web. Orange’s Social Life, for example, allows simultaneous posting across different networks, while Vodafone 360 is able to sync contacts between the phone, Facebook, Windows Live Messenger and Google Talk. But why stop the evolution there–why not fully integrate everything in one system that is scalable to meet the luxury of indolence or the demands of business?

Whether this is the strategy Google will take, only Google knows; but after abandoning Buzz and Wave, it is clearly going after Facebook with more and better firepower, by simply buying into or buying better mobile Internet arms suppliers. Its recent shopping splurge has led to investments in social games maker Zynga in July; the acquisition of Slide, a maker of Facebook apps in early August; and, last week, the purchase of Jambool, which runs virtual currency systems for social games. As Augie Ray of Forrester Research told the Financial Times, “We are going to see a more cohesive, confident and sensible social push from Google in the coming months.”

For the moment, Facebook is the top mobile social network destination, especially among young people. But young people are fickle (see MySpace); and while time is on their and Facebook’s side (in terms of updating), the reality, as one social media expert/technology veteran put it to me, is that Facebook is “something for non-productive people to engage in.” If you’re actually busy, maintaining the site is simply too much work. Anything that can deliver the useful essence of Facebook without the effort has a distinct advantage; the problem for Facebook is that, for all the redesigns it imposes on its users, it is not designed specifically for the mobile Web. Google, by contrast, has an elegant e-mail and location system, a good instant chat system, and an as-yet unbeatable search engine. Imagine if it organized your Facebook content better than Facebook.

Google’s salient strength is aesthetics. “All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music,” wrote Walter Pater in The Renaissance, a collection of criticism that scandalized Oxford in the 1870s by its apparent advocacy of sensualism and momentariness. Pater, whom W.B. Yeats described as one of his key philosophical influences, and who was the inspiration for a generation of dandies, including Oscar Wilde, argued that music, when it was successful, obliterated the distinction between form and content. It may be grandiose to call the mobile Web an art, but it seems reasonable to suggest that the technologies that will succeed will be those that reframe the current relationship between form and content into something intuitive, immediate and scalable.

So what does this mean for the news industry? If your mobile Web strategy does not have equal space at the management table, you better make space for it and quick. You need to be adapting your story and editorial decision-making for the mobile Internet. You need to hedge your bets on Facebook by partnering with a variety of social media. And you need to be thinking about how other kinds of partnerships can push your mobile presence.

As Pater said of life, there is an “awful brevity” to technology.

via [Forbes]