How Can Brands Make the Most of Facebook Fans?

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As common as it is, it’s probably the wrong question to ask what is the value of a fan on Facebook–that is, the people who click a “Like” button on a brand’s Facebook page. But there’s understandably a lot of interest in how to measure marketing efforts on Facebook brand pages, which are the latest obsession of brand marketers.

Facebook Insights is the social network’s dashboard for figuring out what content is working, who’s engaging with the page, and much more. The company hasn’t talked about it much in public, but David Baser, product manager for Facebook Insights, shed some light on how to measure marketing on Facebook at a research presentation today at the OMMA Metrics conference in San Francisco.

Basically, the Insights teams models the Facebook ecosystem to explain to marketers how Facebook works. It can tell marketers about customers like no other Web site, Baser said, since most of them aren’t social networks chock full of personal information offered up voluntarily.

Facebook metrics are about people, not page views or impressions. What does that mean? The Insights team talks about “actors”: Who was it who did something on your page or app? Metrics also have to be “actionable”–that is, what caused people to do various things on a page or app, such as installing an app or buying something through it?

Another key thing about Facebook Pages is that they are much more than billboards; they build communities of people who engage in conversations, both with the brand and with each other. So acquiring fans–often touted by marketers as a goal in itself (“We have 15 million fans on Facebook!”)–is only the first step. (And by the way, being a fan is very different from being a follower, as you might do on Twitter. It’s an expression of identity with that brand, so it’s potentially more meaningful.)

Brands also have to make posts on the pages engaging, he said, because that’s the only way those posts will find their way onto the news feeds of millions of friends of the people who posted something on the brand page–and then reposted or commented upon by their friends, and so on. How to do that? One way is to make sure posts really mesh with the interests of the page’s fans. Another (and here’s the pitch for Facebook advertising) is to buy Sponsored Stories, which allows marketers to pay to turn actions people take on Facebook, such as a Like of a brand, and show them in their friends’ news feeds.

Baser also provided a scrap of insight on how to measure word of mouth on Facebook, which means how many unique people said something about your brand in, say, the last week? Facebook also measures outcomes, not just sentiment–that is, what did the chatter on a brand or product or service cause in terms of specific activities? Specifically, with data from the marketers, it can measure the impact of word-of-mouth on conversions–that is, how many bought a product.

All this is catnip to marketers. But whether these kinds of metrics will supplant traditional media metrics such as reach or impressions–the metrics brand advertisers still care most about–remains uncertain. It’s tough to tell how much of Facebook’s reported $2 billion in revenues last year (likely to double this year) comes from brand advertising, but most observers think it’s still small compared with direct-response-oriented ads from the likes of Zynga, Groupon, and a raft of local advertisers.

And that’s not the only issue. As if to underscore the continuing worries by some Facebook users and privacy advocates, the conference organizers chose to play an old Police song following Baser’s presentation: “Every Breath You Take” (… “every step you take… I’ll be watching you.”) Only if Facebook, which has repeatedly run into privacy blowups, can keep the trust of its 750 million users will it be able to offer marketers the kind of unique insights they’re hoping for from the world’s largest social network.

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Wash. tribe unhappy with Microsoft project name

TULALIP, Wash. —

Washington’s Tulalip (too-LAY’-lihp) Tribes are unhappy that Microsoft has decided to use their name as the internal label for a new social media project.

Tribal officials are discussing the issue with company officials, and Microsoft Corp. said the name was never intended to leak outside the Redmond software company.

“Tulalip is an internal project code name for the online site Socl.com, which is an internal design project from one of Microsoft’s research teams that was mistakenly published to the Web,” a Microsoft spokesman said in an email to The Daily Herald. “We have no more information at this time.”

Democratic state Rep. John McCoy, a Tulalip tribal member, heard that some Microsoft employees involved in the project live on or near the Tulalip reservation.

“By all accounts, it’s an internal project at Microsoft and not a public thing. But in reality they should not have named it Tulalip,” McCoy said. “I have no idea what our tribal officials plan to do, but technically these Microsoft employees infringed on the Tulalip name.”

John Echohawk, the executive director of the Native American Rights Fund, agrees. The Colorado-based nonprofit law firm he oversees is dedicated to defending the rights of American Indian tribes and individuals.

“It’s really a matter of common courtesy, not to say anything of the legalities,” Echohawk said. “It’s the tribes’ name and nobody should run off and use the name without permission.”

McCoy laughed when a reporter floated the idea of a new casino game called “Microsoft.”

“Well, they take plenty of people to court over intellectual property rights,” McCoy said.

Last week, bloggers from around the world speculated that perhaps Microsoft launched “Tulalip” as a social networking service to compete with Facebook and Google+.

The introductory page at Socl.com said, “With Tulalip, you can Find what you want and Share what you know easier than ever.”

Also shown were nonworking links for “See how it works,” “Privacy Statement,” and “Terms of Service.”

The page was replaced the same day it appeared with a message acknowledging the error: “Thanks for stopping by. Socl.com is an internal design project from a team in Microsoft Research which was mistakenly published to the web. We didn’t mean to, honest.”

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Information from: The Daily Herald, http://www.heraldnet.com

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