facebook application development

Today at TechCrunch’s CrunchUp conference, PlacePop officially launched its loyalty card iPhone app and social service. Instead of businesses offering deals to customers checking in to a centralized location-based service, users check-in directly to a business’ custom PlacePop loyalty card, digitally punching the card, earning rewards, and sharing their actions.

It’s a new example of companies trying to tap into social connections — on Facebook or elsewhere — to connect businesses with customers, and customers with deals.

The conference also featured Twitter discussing their GroupOn-like Earlybird deals, and FourSquare talking about the future of transaction-intiated check-ins. The trend  of the conference shows that social companies see monetization potential in helping businesses not only increase awareness and connect with fans, but in directly facilitating sales.

PlacePop allows business owners to quickly convert an existing loyalty program or create a new one, and have total control over the rewards they offer. Users toggle a switch on each card to share their actions, and can also share photos of their favorite businesses, which PlacePop saw Facebook and Twitter users doing frequently.

The PlacePop website uses Facebook for login, and makes it easy to share your affinity for places you’re loyal to. A PlacePop tab for Facebook Pages could create a powerful link between a business’ communication with customers and efforts to encourage them to visit. Investors see potential too, with PlacePop securing $1.4 million in funding from Ooga Labs cofounders James Currier and Stan Chudnovsky, Affinity Labs Founder Chris Michel, and Bebo Founder Michael Birch.

Twitter launched Twitter.com/Earlybird in early July after analyzing existing promotions run on Twitter and learning what worked best. It seeks to run promotions that stimulate conversation, like their 20% off deal with JetBlue which got users tweeting where they were flying to, broadcasting the deal to their own networks. Earlybird could become a significant moneymaker for Twitter, especially if they give the account representation on the home page.

FourSquare explained that moving check-ins to the point of transaction, instead of when a user visits a business, is core to their future. Its integration with frozen yogurt vendor Tasti D-Lite, which allows users to enable auto-checkin when they use their physical loyalty card to make a purchase has been a success, and they’re considering how to scale it to other businesses. FourSquare’s head of biz dev Tristan Walker admits that they don’t have the staff to help the thousands of companies who request to run promotions each day. This leaves room for loyalty programs like PlacePop where owners run promotions independently.

Votigo, Inc. is a social media promotions company offering a range of services, including solutions for Facebook and Twitter, as well as widgets and different APIs applicable to a variety of other platforms.

Initially Votigo focused on user-generated photos/video contests, interactive sweepstakes and online promotions, but Facebook has increasingly become a focal point of the company’s business.

Founded in 2006 by Mike La Rotonda and Jim Risner in the Bay Area to help businesses better engage customers, the company has raised $1.27 million from Headwaters Holdings and several angel investors. The company also has an office located in Hyderabad, India. We spoke with Risner recently as part of our occasional series of Facebook page management company profiles.

Inside Facebook: What products and services does your company provide to clients using Facebook? What types of clients are you aiming to reach?

Jim Risner: We focus primarily on promotions (user-generated video, photo, and essay contests, sweepstakes, giveaways, and coupons) built as applications that can be added to a brand’s Page. We are full-service, but we also license our self-service tools and APIs. Our solutions come with content moderation tools and (other) features that help users spread the word about the promotion.

We tend to work mostly with larger brands and agencies like Ford, Coca-Cola, Southwest Airlines, Sharpie, KOHLs, and Shutterfly. Agencies we work with include DraftFCB, Ogilvy, Wunderman, and Arnold Worldwide, but we have solutions that work for small to medium sized businesses and agencies as well. The types of companies that use our solutions really ranges anywhere from CPG to automakers to large retailers to technology companies. Most companies are realizing the power of Facebook and building community around their brands. Promotions are probably the best way to do it. What we do isn’t limited to one type of company or category.

IFB: Can you share some highlights of how your company has helped clients meet their goals using Facebook?

JR: It’s not uncommon to see Likes or fan bases grow anywhere from 10,000 to 50,000 in a few weeks to a month. Right now we have over 250,000 monthly active unique across our live promotions on Facebook. We also look at total user engagement. So things like the number of views, number votes, number of comments, number of shares, number entries and so on.

IFB: Overall, can you share metrics on the scope of your business?

JR: We work with over 100 different brands and agencies in North America, Europe, Australia, and Asia. Halfway through this year we’ve already doubled our revenue from last year. The size of our team has tripled since this time last year. We are profitable and growing. We are fortunate to have a lot of repeat clients as well.

IFB: What metrics do you use to determine the success of a given campaign?

JR: Success of a campaign really comes down to the client’s goals for that particular promotion. Sometimes it’s all about the fans, sometimes it’s about collecting great video content, or overall brand awareness, engaging existing customers and attracting new ones. So it really varies from campaign to campaign. I think the most common goal right now for brands on Facebook is acquiring new “Likes” (fans). But once you get the fans you need to continue to engage them. So many of the brands we work with will run several promotions throughout the year.

IFB: What have been your biggest challenges building on Facebook platform? What mistakes have you made and learned from there?

JR: The biggest challenge has been keeping up with the changes to the Facebook Platform. I can’t think of one particular mistake we’ve made, but we all make mistakes and as long as we learn from them that’s what really matters.

IFB: Beyond your own efforts, what Facebook changes have noticeably helped your company?

JR: Being added by Facebook as a Preferred Developer Consultant has been the biggest change that has helped our company in this particular area. We’ve seen a sharp and steady increase in people contacting us to create their next promotion on Facebook.

IFB: On the other hand, has Facebook made any recent changes that have noticeably hurt your company?

JR: Not really. We expect change and we’re eager to leverage any new changes that can help our clients succeed in growing their fan base and building their brands on Facebook.

IFB: If you could ask Facebook to make a single change, what would it be?

JR: Since our clients are primarily focused on Pages we would like to see more functionality in Pages including being able to leverage Social Plug-ins on them. basically right now you can’t really do anything on the pages, so just being able to leverage more the functionality for client request because they’re static pages. you have to click thru to the app before you can really start pulling in user info and seeing what they  like or recommend or tapping into any of the social info that you can capture within the app. So, those pages are fairly static.

IFB: How does your work on Facebook relate to your work on other platforms?

JR: Our promotions run across any social network, microsite, or blog. Our microsites include Facebook Connect and publishing features that allow users to post to their Facebook Wall when they do things like enter a contest, comment on someone else’s entry, or vote. Users can Like a brand’s Facebook Page from the microsite. We also have a really cool Twitter Sweepstakes solution that includes a fully branded site. I think more and more Facebook is becoming just as it is in the entire Internet world it’s becoming kind of a primary focus for us so it’s definitely  helping to drive the innovation, it’s really kind of in the last year or so kind of come even more to the forefront of what we do. Even though we offer solutions across the board, whether it’s a microsite or whatever, Facebook is becoming the go-to promotion platform. So for our clients the focus especially as of late is all about Facebook.

IFB: Do you have any specific plans that you can share?

JR: We are very focused on our Agency and Publisher tools and APIs right now. Making enhancements in that area is probably highest on our list. Making things a little bit easier to use, flow better, just making it all-inclusive and very modular so a client can just easily go into the self-serve tool and run it. After that we’re looking at ways to integrate mobile.

Buddy Media is a New York-based company that’s been helping brands take advantage of their social media presence since Facebook opened the platform in 2007.

The idea was to assist companies with establishing themselves on Facebook. “We didn’t know how we were going to do it, but we wanted to participate,” founder and chief executive Mike Lazerow tells us. “You basically could build on top of Facebook and reach consumers directly, rather than dealing with the traditional gatekeepers of the web.”

At the time, Facebook had about 30 million monthly active users — 470 million or so later, Buddy Media has a solid and growing business. Check out our interview with Lazerow, below, for lots of key details on its experiences to date, and its plans for the future.

Note that the company also does work on Twitter, MySpace and iPhone platforms, but has focused its energies on Facebook by offering primarily larger companies, brands and agencies a content management system that includes an application library, as well as publishing and analytics tools. Some notable clients include Anheuser Busch, Southwest Airlines, the NHL, L’Oreal and TJ Maxx.

It has raised $10 million from a variety of investors, including Peter Thiel, Ron Conway, Mark Pincus, Softbank Capital and the European Founders Fund, among several others.

Inside Facebook: What products and services does your company provide to clients using Facebook? What types of clients are you aiming to reach?

Mike Lazerow: The business is a software as a service platform, any company can subscribe or license it to help them manage their Facebook presence. Buddy Media is more of an enterprise player, versus custom app shops or the small business players. Our strongest categories are CPG (consumer packaged goods), travel (Four Seasons, Starwood Hotels & Resorts, Delta Airlines, Southwest Airlines), tech (Samsung) and fashion (L’Oreal, Diane Von Furstenberg, TJ Maxx, Marshall’s).

IFB: Can you share some highlights of how your company has helped clients meet their goals using Facebook?

ML: Summit Entertainment (“Twilight”) is a company that we started with that had very few fans. Through Wall posts and managing of very creative ad promotions on our platform they’ve gone from 4.5 milllion to about 7 million Likes since January — which has been one of our biggest fan growths. On the retail side, Redbox, we started working with them in January and they had about 400,000 Likes, or fans. They are now one of the largest in their space with 1.1 million Likes without a lot of marketing, mostly just content management. +Global (more here) lets companies scale their Facebook presence by geo-targeting by language or country, whether it’s one Page in one country or 1,000 Pages in 100 countries. According to our clients we’ve cut over 80% of the cost out of the equation.

IFB: Overall, can you share metrics on the scope of your business?

ML: Across the platform we have 80-90 million total connections, fans, Likers. It’s not unusual for our clients to have 10% of all their Facebook fans engage them on a monthly basis. We now have 75 agencies, primarily advertising agencies and public relations firms, that actually use a white label version of our platform; we let (them) do most of the creative work. Buddy Media is growing by over 50% quarter-by-quarter in terms of revenue. We’re on track to do probably over $20 million this year. We have 85 employees in New York, New York.

IFB: What metrics do you use to determine the success of a given campaign?

ML: Typically we look at client success through APIs that we can set up on our platform, which lets you track fan growth, user engagement and activation. It’s very hard ROI metrics tied to their campaign: How many people signed up for a sweepstakes, we got 300,000 people to redeem the coupons, how many people bought from a retailer, how many people signed up for a test drive? So, if you set up the dashboard correctly, everyone can be on the same page in terms of what they’re trying to accomplish.

IFB: What have been your biggest challenges building on Facebook platform? What mistakes have you made and learned from there?

ML: I think the biggest challenge for everyone working on the platform is keeping up with the changes Facebook is making. Every week there are minor changes — things open up, things close down, how you handle notifications, how you handle publishing, how you handle user data. Facebook is basically building the airplane as they’re flying it. You realize that you can’t have projects that last three months and then launch, because the platform changed. The mistakes that we’ve made have been in building things that we’ve had to rebuild because Facebook has changed. So, now the way we build our products is very open, very modular because, now we don’t need to change our entire platform — we just have to change a part of it. The changes also pose the biggest opportunities.

IFB: Beyond your own efforts, what Facebook changes have noticeably helped your company?

ML: The number one change was the opening up of Facebook Pages. That was an important change that sent our company into orbit because every company, all of a sudden, needed to manage those Pages and they didn’t have people sitting around, necessarily, who knew FBML and Javascript. The change that has recently really helped our clients and our business is the introduction of the Open Graph. The idea that a company’s web site can also be social is enormous. It’s what I call a branded viral loop, it’s basically free traffic. The other major change I think that Facebook has made is they’ve recommitted to the user experience by cleaning up the ecosystem a lot, and ultimately, that helps everyone but it also helps brand that want to be in a clean environment.

IFB: On the other hand, has Facebook made any recent changes that have noticeably hurt your company?

ML: We’ve been in the business long enough with Facebook that changes aren’t good or bad, they just are changes and we basically evolve and make changes.

IFB: If you could ask Facebook to make a single change, what would it be?

ML: I think the ability to geo-target your Wall posts through third-party platforms would be amazing. The ability to target content on a more granular level through Facebook Pages would be great, whether it’s by interest or by profile data so if someone comes into a Facebook Page it would be great to show local offers on the tab. The one thing they shouldn’t change is the commitment to the user experience.

IFB: How does your work on Facebook relate to your work on other platforms?

ML: There’s no other property other than Facebook that has the scale, the reach, the stickiness globally that Facebook has (so it) ties into a lot of different stuff that you’re doing digitally. We integrate with Twitter so if you’re doing stuff on Twitter, you could very easily link to your Facebook Pages. If you’re on YouTube, you can use that content on your Facebook Wall and Facebook tabs. Most importantly, Buddy Media has been very active in linking your web site to Facebook, and Facebook to your web site. And then the last kind of area which I think it’s really important for our clients is, how does their email system and their current CRM (customer relationship management) system interface with Facebook. So, having it all work together in a way that works for the company is much more important than, “What’s your Twitter strategy?”

IFB: Do you have any specific plans that you can share?

ML: One of the areas we are most excited about right now is social commerce. We’re going to continue to roll out our +Global offering, which includes more granular targeting of content. Starwood hotels is a great example, (the company) doesn’t care about China as just one country, they care about China as a series of cities they do business in. +Global is a Facebook management system right now at its core, but as Facebook goes to 1 billion users, it’s really a web-wide content management system. There’s no reason why it just stays within Facebook. As Facebook infuses itself to other websites, we will also be able to control third-party web sites and other microsites. We’re going to broaden our reach significantly there.

Facebook Rules – Hitwise reported this week that Facebook accounted for 75.73% of all social networking visits in the U.S. in May.

16B Minutes on Facebook a Day - Data Center Knowledge reported information gathered from Facebook employees Tom Cook and Jonathan Heiliger. Some of the information reported included a guesstimate that Facebook now has about 60,000 servers, as well as the fact that users spent about 16 billion minutes on Facebook daily, that more than 3 billion photos are uploaded each month, that 6 billion pieces of content are shared weekly, 1 million photos viewed every second and the company’s servers perform upwards of 50 million operations a second.

Credits Get New Look - Facebook’s Credits Page got a makeover this week. In addition to providing all sorts of information on the Page about what Credits may be used for, the new graphics highlight why developers should use the virtual currency

HTML in App Info Cut Off - Facebook announced this week that the platform is no longer supporting HTML in application info tabs. The company suggested developers begin using custom tabs to provide info to users about the application and they no longer have to include privacy policies in the info box.

Spam Prevention From Facebook - The most common example of Facebook users behaving badly is the abuse of communication tools, according to a blog from earlier this week wherein Facebook explained in detail its spam prevention efforts. Facebook says that efforts to prevent spam attacks has often been misinterpreted as the company trying to stifle expression of a range of opinions.

One common lesson from monitoring spam is that when a user sends the same message to many people not on their friends list in a short amount of time, it’s usually spam; same deal when 75% of friend requests sent by a user are ignored. Facebook has a warning system that culminates with disabling accounts. The idea is both to prevent spam and malicious attacks on users’ computers.

News Sites Love Facebook – News sites, as rated by Alexa, love Facebook. All top 10 sites are integrated with Facebook and 26 of the top 30. This lists includes Yahoo! News, BBC News, The New York Times, The Weather Channel, The Huffington Post, NBC and MSNBC News, CNN Interactive, The Guardian and Fox News.

Facebook Driving Traffic to Home Page - Facebook is trying a new way to get people to visit the site more often by asking some users to set the social network as their default homepage.

More Security Issues - The Harmony Guy reported on some recent security issues on Facebook, most of which have seen been addressed. Some of these revolve around session secrets and API requests, as well as phishing issues. Details here.

How We See Facebook - Mulley Communications published a report this week noting the eye movements of Facebook users on Walls, profiles and Pages. Preliminary results show that advertising “works” on Facebook — especially with proper targeting. Secondly, updates from Pages get noticed: 71% of users looked at homepage advertisements and 31% looked at advertisements in the News Feed. Although, users paid more attention to Page updates than ads. A few other tidbits: the average user is a fan of 28 Pages and about one-fourth of those surveyed play games.

Facebook Focuses on Russia, Brazil – “The Facebook Effect” author David Kirkpatrick gave an interesting interview with Andrea Catherwood this week in which he discusses Facebook’s plans for growth, specifically in Russia and Brazil.

Boycott BP Page Deleted, Restored - Facebook deleted a Facebook Page called Boycott BP, referring to the company responsible for the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, this week. The Page had more than 734,000 fans and Facebook put the Page back up 9 hours later, explaining that it was, “disabled by our automated systems therefore removing all the content that had been created by the profile. After a manual review we determined the profile was removed in error and it has now been restored along with the Page.”

Facebook Promotes Females in CompSci - The Grace Hopper Scholarship is Facebook’s answer to the low numbers of women in tech-related fields. Facebook’s Grace Hopper Scholarship is for 5 female Computer Science students to attend the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing conference in Atlanta, Georgia on September 28 – October 2, 2010. The award includes airfare, accommodations, a food stipend and the chance to apply for a paid Facebook internship; deadline to for applicants, who must be U.S. residents and pursuing a computer-related degree, is July 31.

Facebook and the World Cup - The New York Times created an interactive graphic illustrating World Cup football/soccer players by how many Facebook status updates, Wall posts, comments, shares and Likes contain their names by day.

Lamebook Prints Book - Lamebook, which satirized Facebook, is set to print a real book spoofing the social network. The people behind Lamebook are seeking photo submissions for the book here.

Facebook and Food - User Operations Analyst Amanda Johnson posted a blog discussing all the ways people use Facebook to share their love of food this week. She, for example, posts photos of food she eats, although food-related articles, profile interests, Community Pages, friend lists, Pages, profiles the Notes function for recipes are all examples. There are more details at the link.

Foursquare’s $80M Funding Deal, No Facebook Deal – Along with previous reports in a similar vein, AllThingsD reports that Facebook was very close to buying location-based check-in game Foursquare; instead, the startup is about to close an $80 million round from venture firm Andreessen Horowitz.

Zuckerberg Talks Growth – Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg spoke in Cannes, France at the 57th annual Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival to discuss his company’s growth this week. He said four markets — China, Japan, Korea and Russia — were vital to growing to its goal of 1 billion users. The path there is complicated and it’s not going to happen this year, he says; Russia’s sign ups double every six months, Facebook’s location features are coming out soon, privacy issues are still being evaluated and mobile doesn’t seem to be the magic ingredient for growth, either.

Photo Images Added to Notifications - Facebook has begun to display user images next to notifications at the top of the users’ Page — photos are a proven web design technique to improve engagement.

How Facebook Uses BitTorrent – Tom Cook of Facebook’s systems engineering group shared how Facebook uses peer-to-peer file-sharing service BitTorrent: “The internal Facebook swarm turns every server into a peer that helps in distributing the new code, which gets it updated as quickly as possible,” according to Torrent Freak. “Without BitTorrent this process could take several hours to complete.”

Notes on Facebook’s Growing Infrastructure - Facebook’s Vice President of Technical Operations Jonathan Heiliger spoke about the company’s growing infrastructure this week, primarily that the company should have planned better — even though it has successfully scaled along with extremely rapid growth. Thinking about scale early, replacing the way platform traffic is served, improving speed, contributing to open-source technologies and other lessons are discussed in the story from Gigaom, here.

Buddy Media Debuts +Global - Facebook Page management company Buddy Media added a new feature, +Global, this week, set to allow customers to publish custom fan Pages in multiple languages, as opposed to separate Pages for each country. The first company to use the feature is Starwood Hotels and Resorts, launching in the U.S., Spain, Germany and China. Buddy media has about 200 clients, is set for $20 million in sales this year and also works with Budweiser and the NHL.

Zuckerberg Meets With English PM - Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was in London this week to meet with the English Prime Minister David Cameron and Secretary of State for Culture and Media Jeremy Hunt. Zuckerberg praised the country’s Open Data initiative, oversaw the first official developer day, or hackathon, held outside of California and commented that about half of the Likes coming from Facebook’s new social plugins emanate from Europe. In particular Zuckerberg noted the interesting “civil or public-minded concepts” being worked on by the English, such as a service alerting people to service disruptions on the London Underground system and a site to help communities support and manage local projects.

Adknowledge Acquires Hydra Group - Adknowledge, a privately owned online ad network, acquired Hydra Group this week. Hydra Group is a cost-per-action performance marketing network and the combination of the two companies provides for access to more than 7,000 CPC and CPA offers. For the foreseeable future the Hydra brand will remain intact, operating along with Adknowledge’s CPC affiliate, Adstation; expect future integrations with Super Rewards, the company’s offer business on Facebook.

Nouns, Verbs Most Popular on Facebook - Dan Zarrella did an analysis of the types of words that generate the most shares on Facebook and found that nouns and verbs performed much better than adjectives and adverbs.

Get Tips on Facebook Photos - Nick Kelsh is a photographer and author of nine books, including several on how to photograph your child, is offering to help Facebook users. By uploading your child’s photo to Kelsh’s Facebook Page, one can receive advice on lighting, cropping, composition and other tips.

Facebook, Love Generate Similar Brain Activity - A neuroeconomist, Paul Zak, has found that social networking triggers our brain to release oxytocin, a chemical that makes us feel generosity, trust, affection and love. The very extensive profile can be found here.

Facebook Hoodie Explained - A symbol inside Mark Zuckerberg’s hoodie prompted jokes at the AllThingsD conference earlier this month that he was in a cult. Turns it was created by Ben Barry, who explained his motivations for his creation on the Q-and-A site Quora. He says he created the design after discussing it with Zuckerberg as part of a thank you gift to the company’s employees, focusing on Facebook’s core goals and looking towards the future. The design was inspired from old worker union labels and seals.

Vending Machine Trades Photos for Ice Cream - Unilever’s Wall’s ice cream created a unique way of marketing its product: Trading a photo of customers for a free ice cream. Using a “smile-activated” vending machine created by Sapient, the machine takes a photo of the customer and posts it to Facebook in exchange for a free ice cream. For videos and photos, click here.

Threadsy Uses Likes to Share - Threadsy’s goal is to put all of a users’ online communication, both email and social networking, into one inbox — with the help of Facebook’s Open Graph, specifically the Like feature. Essentially, the service provides a users’ public data to another user in the form of common interests.

TripAdvisor Uses Facebook for Travel Tips - TripAdvisor, an online open sourced travel site, is now using the Cities I’ve Visited application to allow Facebook users to give each other traveling tips.

Watch the Trailer for the Facebook Movie – This week saw the premiere of the movie trailer for “The Social Network,” based on the book The Accidental Billionaires about Facebook’s evolution from dorm room project to billion dollar global titan. Thus far the trailer is mostly just dramatic music and choice sound clips, but it’s still interesting to watch.