So, what happened at Facebook Studio Live? Hundreds of agency heads, clients and industry professionals gathered together on a rainy Wednesday afternoon at the trendy space at Carriageworks in Eveleigh. There has always been a cloud of mystery and secrecy that surrounds the Facebook brand, which was evident upon arrival. Small Facebook branded moleskins were handed out and guests not knowing what to expect were ushered into dark auditorium with microkitchens on either side of the room that included unlimited refreshments and snacks, we later learned a staple feature of every Facebook office. The crowd got to hear from superb speakers about the Facebook hacker culture, the evolution of Facebook over the past decade, creative solutions for advertising, and the deepest level of Facebook insights and metrics available to brands with additional ad spend (of course.) My top four key takeaways I took from the day are summarised below:

1) The most successful social campaigns have impact through ALL of the following: connections, engagement, influence, and integration. The best social marketers in the world don’t create campaigns that just have the BIG idea any more, they create social programs that scale in all four categories. How do you do this? It all starts with the standard creative brief and asking two key questions a) What is the key engagement insight? b) What is the social insight?

2) Don’t underestimate the power of the conversation calendar. More and more marketers are fighting for the same short-attention span on Facebook. So, what does this mean for brand pages? Facebook is about creating authentic relationships and creating a community management strategy and conversation calendar that demonstrates the following:

• Understand what motivates social behavior
• Have a clear purpose and authentic voice
• Create many meaningful and light-weight experiences
• Posting is like a dinner party, be a brilliant conversationalist
• Creative is both an art and a science

3) Facebook Studio online offers a fantastic wealth of global information and resources available to all marketers, brands, and agencies. The site aims to celebrate the great work of agencies and marketers and inspire others, while sharing resources to help strengthen existing Facebook campaigns. Take for example the Flair Fashion Tag campaign. This highly innovative and creative Facebook app developed by Belgian agency Duval Guillaume Modem allowed people to easily tag pieces of clothing in photos and share them with friends. All “fashion tags” were then displayed on the Flair Facebook Page and the top submissions were also featured in a magazine, a nice integration between Flair’s offline and online presence. This campaign was one of the first ever to be featured on the site and even earned a Media Lion at Cannes last year.

4) The possibilities for brands on Facebook are boundless. Facebook allows brands to connect with consumers in a digital world with the same authenticity as the real world. According to Mark D’Arcy, Director of Creative Solutions at Facebook, successful Facebook campaigns for brands focus on utility, relevance, caring/sharing, and light-weight design, rather than disruption. If used smartly and strategically, a Facebook brand page is one of the most amazing devices for storytelling and understanding consumer insights.

There are just a few of the takeaways I took away from Sydney’s first ever Facebook Studio Live. I will be sharing more content and key learnings over the next few weeks!

Ultimately the socialisation of the “moment of truth” will impact every brand. We’ve collated a few case studies, and some of the emerging providers because though the breakers haven’t yet hit Asia’s shores, the wave is forming.

Case studies

1. Diesel (and other fashion houses): http://mashable.com/2010/05/11/fashion-foursquare-diesel/
2. McDonalds: http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/foursquare-campaign-brings-in-33-percent-more-traffic-to-mcdonalds/
3. Zagat: http://eater.com/archives/2010/02/09/zagat-and-foursquare-team-up-to-make-going-out-even-more-fun.php
4. Local Advertisers: http://mashable.com/2009/09/21/foursquare-for-business/
5. NHL: http://www.superswarms.com/2010/10/07/nhl-debuts-on-foursquare/

Group Buying, location or shopping based networks, photo streams and promotions:

• http://www.groupon.com
• http://shopsocial.ly/
• http://gowalla.com
• http://whrrl.com
• http://www.getupandrally.com
• http://blockchalk.com
• http://brightkite.com
• http://www.loopt.com
• http://www.thefind.com/

Sephora Smelt It, Blippy Dealt It. Fragrance Retailer Takes Shopping Social
http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/26/blippy-sephora/
Blippy, the controversial credit-card-transaction-sharing social media platform, has partnered with beauty/fragrance retailer Sephora to make a Sephora-specific area of its site.

Not to forget how 7-Eleven in Hong Kong are using augmented reality collectibles to draw people into their convenience outlets.

• notifications
• Group chat
• document sharing
• a much nicer interface

What it is not unfortunately is a new way to manage privacy. When I initially saw this announcement, I thought they would match Diaspora’s ‘aspects’ functionality. Especially given Zuckerberg’s blog post:

“The biggest problem in social networking is helping you easily interact with your friends and share information in lots of different contexts.”

An aspect is exactly that, a reflection of an aspect of your real life. Aspects of your life might be family, close friends or work colleagues.

Diaspora allows you to place people into these aspect groupings so that content you share with those aspects remains within the aspect. So an off-colour joke to your close friends is not shown to your work colleagues. People in those aspects don’t know they’re in the aspect. And more importantly they can’t add people to the aspect, only you can.

After some testing within the Sydney Digital Influence team we established fairly quickly that the new Facebook Groups is not the equivalent. There were several issues we found that clearly made Groups unsuitable for this purpose:

• members can add members: as the person sharing the content, this does not give you absolute control to who can see the content. Like the most recent internet meme Karen Owen. As the group admin you are able to retrospectively block and ban permanently
• the member is aware that they are in the group: which also makes it harder for you to compartmentalise people. You can’t call a group ‘acquaintances’ because the people in that group may consider themselves your best friend
• which also means that as a member if all of my colleagues had a group called ‘colleagues’ I could be a member of 20 ‘colleagues’ groups. Annoying.
• YOU MUST OPT OUT of notifications. If one of my friends sets up a group for their business or gaming site and invites me, I automatically join AND can start receiving EMAILS from them without opting in.
• The next problem with having to OPT OUT is that if a friend of mine creates a Pro Life or Pro Choice group and invites me, I AUTOMATICALLY join it! Which shows up in my group memberships. There are multiple issues with this!

Ultimately, the Groups app is actually a good app for groups to share and collaborate within. The interface is great, much better than the old groups. The problem is simply the way Zuck’s positioned it opens the company up to more privacy criticism.

For years and years, search has always been the number one reason people go online. Nearly 9 times out of 10 people will start out an Internet session by using Google, Yahoo! or Bing to find a new site or look for information about a product. Advertisers and marketers have spent countless dollars trying to get their attention through sponsored ads.

But, interestingly, new research released from Hitwise earlier this month suggests that in Australia and in other markets across Asia Pacific search may soon move to second most popular online activity – behind social networking. According to the Hitwise report:

Social networks and forums are set to eclipse Search Engines and become the most visited industry for the first time over the coming months, most likely during the weeks immediately before or after Christmas.

The report also shows that search is already the #2 online activity behind social networking in other APAC countries, including Hong Kong and Singapore. Other key findings from the report:

• 11.7% of all visits to social networks originated in Australia
• Facebook is currently the #2 Web site in Australia – and it’s projected to overtake Google
• Search is a popular activity within social networks (MySpace = artists, Facebook = entertainment/utility)
• 26 minutes, 13 seconds is the average time spent on Facebook per visit

These trends could have huge implications on the massive budgets that are spent very day on pay-per-click and search marketing globally. Already, consumers are spending exponentially more time on social networks (27 percent of all time spent online in Australia in the past month was spent on Facebook, according to Nielsen) than search engines.

As more and more brands become not only findable but engagable on social sites, we could start to see social networks as being not only the #1 online activity but the #1 place online where smart brands invest their marketing and advertising dollars to build community and engagement among their customers.

The Web 2.0 lifestyle has allowed this generation to enjoy the pragmatic processes of interaction and communication. Where once the lengthy struggle of finding what to say and how to say it involved the risk of humiliation has now evolved to a single click on a status update, a simple comment on a photo album , or perhaps a re-tweet of an interesting link.

The whole culture of social networking has begotten a totally different set of social cues, social etiquette and media. The very “wall” which it has employed others to use as a barrier for true personal identity is the very same wall the art of social networking breaks when people submit themselves to the interplay of voyeurism and exhibitionism.

And such has become a necessity, especially because we live in a globalized world where each country’s competitive advantage rests also on tangible exchanges that uncover emergent and informal communication between the parties at play.

The vital question that arises therefore is whether we are losing patriotism, local tradition and values, and in turn being Filipino by becoming social.
Philippine modern society is highly liquid, modern culture is highly individualised, and globalization produces local effects – the landscape of society, culture, and technology is constantly transforming and in response to our own interactions.

How this affects a traditionally orally based Filipino culture is seen by the statistics as the nation is now a major user of SMS (with use at 10 times the global average), with a 50% take-up rate for mobile telephony and 25% Internet penetration. Founded by a society that has a very strong private and a weak public culture, its public sphere is an unclaimed territory open to predatory acquisition (mainly by adept politicians, but also by everyday citizens). The social structure is characterised by the gift economy, and based on consociation; trust is severely limited and includes only close friends and kin, and so Filipinos try to personalise their contacts either through intermediaries or the establishment of an elaborate system of personal relationships.

Which is why much of the exchanges through such networks still only involve close friends and relations, and remain relatively banal; the main use of such messages is to maintain the relationships themselves. However, there are also text-only relationships which are not translated into the offline environment, as is the same with social network contacts. Such uses imbue the mobile and new media with a significant personal value, the phone becomes an extension of the person, and its loss is acutely felt.

The new media is therefore a technology of transformation, and banality has a significant role to play in this context; it provides a reassurance in the context of an increasingly complex and incomprehensible world. It also provides a new space for cultural participation and interaction, and the development and exploration of different personas. This significantly changes social relationships, and allows new spheres for sociality to emerge. However, most changes are also increasingly being able to be absorbed into the continuously changing systems themselves – posing the same challenge we face as new technologies arise – Do we come off better or do we actually lose more than the original problem the technology supposedly addressed?