facebook application development

Our list of Facebook hires this week is a little thin but includes new adds to engineering, and advertising staff. The list, generated via LinkedIn, in alphabetical order:

• Roger Chen has joined Facebook as an engineer and comes from similar work at Greater Boston Area Information Technology and Services and Panjiva. He also interned for Qiming Venture Partners and Microsoft and previously did research at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab.
• Jocelyn Goldfein is now Director of Engineering at Facebook, which we previously reported. Her previous work was as a VP and general maanger at VMware.
• Richard Sim has joined the company as a product marketing manager of performance ads; before, Sim held a similar position at Anchor Intelligence, although he also worked as a product manager at MSN/Microsoft and atKeynote Systems.

And, for a closer look at what jobs are opening up in the industry, be sure to check out our new Inside Network Jobs Board.

Ford used the Facebook Page of its iconic Explorer to reveal the 2011 model to the public. The campaign has been building for awhile — the company has been posting teaser photos and videos to the Page after it first announced the launch in early June.

Scott Monty, Ford’s Multimedia Communications Manager, tells us that launching the totally redesigned Explorer through Facebook was the most effective way to get the word out about the new model, and the numbers from the first day of the launch back that up.

The Ford Explorer Page began the day with about 42,500 fans, and Monty was hoping to end the day with 50,000. The Page passed that mark, increasing its fan numbers by about 25% to more than 53,000. The launch of the redesigned model also included individual reveals around the U.S. and Canada, all documented with an often-updated Flickr stream that was linked to the Page.

“We wanted lots of engagement,” said Monty. “The Reveal tab had a lot of action, and we had live participation as well as on demand content for people that missed [the initial reveal].”

New car and truck models are traditionally revealed at large auto shows, where any one new model can be overshadowed by the hundreds of other new autos in the shows. Monty saw a bigger problem with using the auto show stage to introduce a redesign of the Ford Explorer.

“Typically at an auto show, with any auto show scenario, we’re talking to ourselves. We needed to step out of that bubble to get that message out there. This is the 100% reinvented Explorer – we needed to reinvent how we get out to the people.”

The Explorer’s Facebook page was used to reveal teaser photos and videos of interviews with designers and engineers in the weeks leading up to the reveal. While the new Explorer was featured in a segment on NBC’s Today Show, the Facebook audience was the first to get a look at the redesigned 2011 model a few minutes earlier, as well as a full day of videos, live Q&As, and more surrounding the model.

The blanket coverage on the Facebook page speaks to Ford’s overall strategy on the social network. At first glance it appears that the auto manufacturer has much lower fan numbers than some of its competitors, but Ford has made the conscious decision to segment its Facebook presence into particular model pages instead of under one large brand umbrella. Monty feels this is an important element to the Ford approach to appealing to the Facebook community, giving the brand the ability to customize content based on what fans want.

Ultimately, choosing Facebook to reveal the redesigned Explorer was an easy decision for Monty. When it comes to choosing the most effective avenues to reaching the largest audience, his approach is simple: ”Our fans tell us where we need to be.”

Facebook launched a Page for media properties yesterday that includes best practices, tools to drive traffic and other insights for promoting news on Facebook. The Page launched earlier this month and currently has more than 1,100 Likes.

The media Page joins several other company-run Pages Facebook has launched in the recent past, including the Comedy Page, Politics Page, Global Relief and U.S. Congress Page.

In a blog the company announced that it’d conducted an analysis of the 100 top media sites utilizing Facebook’s social plugins and developed a list of best practices.

Some of these include publishing earlier or later in the day for higher engagement, including thumbnail photos of a user’s friends for three-to-five times higher click-through rates, placing the Like button at the top and bottom of news items and using social plugins above the fold on multiple web pages to increase clicks up to ten fold. Also, stories that revolve around visceral topics or big sports events see two-to-three times more activity than other stories.

As for how media properties should manage their Facebook presence, the blog  suggested that posting simple questions or encouraging users to Like a story increased activity two or three fold. These types of insights are sure to be useful to media companies, which as we previously reported, have begun to see increases in traffic as a direct result of Facebook’s social plugins.

The Media Page includes information for developers, such as tips on how to drive engagement, as well as advice for journalists on how to drive traffic on Facebook. Many more insights about driving Facebook traffic can be found in the Inside Facebook Marketing Bible.

When Dave Kerpen and his wife Carrie founded TheKBuzz in New York back in 2007, the idea was to build a company around word of mouth marketing, he tells us. Then Facebook came into the picture. Since, the company has expanded to Boston and Chicago without any outside funding, changed its name to Likeable earlier this year and set its sights on providing brands with customer service solutions on Facebook.

We spoke to Kerpen as part of our ongoing series of Page mangement profiles. Earlier this year the company changed its name to Likeable. The name change came partly as a result of Facebook’s new Like button, but mostly because Kerpen tells us he wanted the name to reflect global brands.

The Like button goes beyond Facebook, he says, “The way Google organized the web around links, Facebook is reorganizing the entire web around Like. So, to me, Likeable is not just literal, it’s also figurative: Companies need to be more likeable to win.”

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

Dave Kerpen: We are a truly a full service social media company – part consulting firm, part marketing agency, and part tech startup – providing Facebook strategy, consulting, training and execution. (This includes) fan Page, tab, and application design and execution, and Facebook ad creative, buying, and reporting. I believe that the best way to communicate with our fans is to update the stream, we are making sure our clients are communicating with their fans at least once a day. The service I’m most excited about is our Facebook Stream Management for which we develop and distribute engaging content for our clients and respond to comments and questions from fans. We work with a very wide variety of clients, from big brands such as 1-800-Flowers.com, Verizon FiOS and Neutrogena to categories such as consumer products, retailers, credit unions, travel bureaus, hospitals, nonprofits, government agencies and authors.

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

DK: Last year we drove over 100,000 fans to a 50% increase in sales on “Free Chill Zone Day,” an event created entirely on Facebook. 1-800-Flowers.com has over 10 times as many fans as their competitors and was the first company to sell products directly on the Facebook platform. We’ve helped many thousands of New Yorkers quit smoking (5,300 Likes and 1,300 e-patches sent) and have safer sex using Facebook (12,800 Likes). And The Pampered Chef launched on July 14; it’s organic, no advertisements and the virtual gift app already has about 2,000 users and the Page has 49,000.

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

DK: We were the first marcom agency in the world to have 10,000 fans on Facebook, a goal we accomplished recently. Since our founding in 2007, we have had solid triple-digit growth for three straight years. I believe that the [ed. third-party Facebook] brand business can grow over time to a $50 million business and the local business can grow to a $500 million business.

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

DK: Every client has different objectives, so it’s really important to define the metrics of success at the outset of work in conjunction with their objectives. Some clients care most about fans, others web traffic, others sales data, and others awareness and buzz.

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

DK: The biggest challenges are definitely how quickly Facebook changes and grows – because this affects planning significantly. For instance, when we saw that tab widths were due to change, we began designing narrower tabs for clients, and when those widths didn’t actually change for many months, a few clients were disappointed. We’ve learned to be very flexible and fast-moving, to keep up with Facebook – a worthy challenge for sure. We haven’t focused as much on tech as other players and, because of that, it’s not easy to fail.

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

DK: The number one change that helped was when Facebook introduced its current Page product in 2008 – which is a million times better than the original Page product for business they had, which didn’t even feed into streams. Before the Page product the way to promote a brand on Facebook was really just apps. The Page allowed brands, and those helping brands like Likeable, to really focus on building the fan base and communicating with customers. Their self-serve advertising platform has also gotten better and better, and we’ve been able to leverage its keyword targeting for clients of all sizes.

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

DK: The addition of Community Pages. It’s definitely made my clients very concerned, without a way yet for brands to manage or respond. You can imagine that if a client of mine spends big money on their Facebook presence, one thing we do is respond to every complaint on behalf of our clients on their fan Pages, so to then know that the Community Pages are potentially an aggregation of customer complains, the brand has no power to respond. It’s a frustrating situation but I’m sure Facebook will have a solution to this in the near future.

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

DK: I’d like Pages and the people who represent them to be able to respond to posts on Community Pages. I’d also like to see the homepage ad buying process and value derived from homepage ads more closely resemble that of the self-serve ad platform. I’m confident that a Facebook team that includes Sheryl Sandberg, the woman behind Google’s genius AdWords product, will make that happen.

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

DK: We are a full-service social media agency. So while Facebook, now with over 500 million users, is the obvious first part of any solution, we often work with Twitter, Foursquare, YouTube, LinkedIn, niche social networks and blogs to meet our clients’ goals. We will work on whatever platform the client needs and usually integrate our clients’ Facebook presence with whatever other social networks we’re using. It has to be all about each individual client’s objectives , so sometimes, smaller niche social networks will come into play, too. Twitter is currently the best tool for customer service, for example; if Facebook changes their own Community Pages, who knows, but for now customer service is best handled on Twitter. I am trying to build a company that meets its clients’ needs in terms of using social media to create more likeable organizations. I don’t want to just rely on Facebook, but the truth is Facebook is not going anywhere, so it’s a large part of what we do.

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

DK: We’re currently building Likeable Index, a measurement of how socially active, responsive and likeable brands are online, and also the Likeable Local Platform, a scalable education, training and execution solution for small businesses to leverage Facebook and other social networks. Those are the biggies – but in the meantime, we want to continue providing our clients on Facebook with the best service in the business each day.

Zuckerberg Interviewed on ABC – Facebook CEO gave an extended interview to ABC’s Diane Sawyer this week in which he discussed “The Social Network,” the 500 million user mark, the current ownership dispute and a possible IPO.

Facebook Updates Events Emails – Facebook recently updated the email interface for Facebook events this week, going from a text-only view to a more graphical interface matching with its latest events page changes.

Court Hands Down Opinions on Power.Com, Facebook Suit – After more than a year, the Power.Com v. Facebook lawsuit got some opinions this week. A federal judge gave a multi-part ruling on some aspects of the case, including the dismissal of Power.com’s claims that Facebook was a monopoly. Power.Com did not commit a crime by allowing users to violate Facebook’s terms of service to access their personal information by “automated means.” But, when Power.Com changed its IP address to do so, it might be a crime. The judge also dismissed summary judgement against both companies.

Facebook Relies on Users for Clean Content – As more people began to upload images to the Internet the business of screening these images for offensive content became a big business. The New York Times reported this week that, oftentimes, the low paid content reviewers suffer psychological trauma related to their jobs. As the article also describes, Facebook (like many other web companies) relies on users to flag objectionable content, which is later reviewed by employees in Palo Alto, Calif. or Dublin, Ireland. Some of Facebook’s content is outsourced, but not most of it, according to a company spokesman.

San Francisco’s Facebook Use – Facebook posted an interview with San Francisco City/County’s CIO Chris Vein discussing how social media might replace government web sites and the role sites like Facebook play in providing city services.

Sarah Palin, Facebook and a ‘Social Experiment’ – Former Republican Vice Presidential Candidate Sarah Palin wrote a controversial Facebook note this week that was automatically removed after blogger Brian Ries posted a screenshot on Tumblr urging others to flag the note as “hate speech.” Ultimately, Palin’s note was reinstated by Facebook and Ries said the result of the experiment was that freedom of speech on the Internet is still hazily defined.

Adobe Integrates Facebook Ads – Adobe Systems announced it was adding tools to its software this week that would allow online marketers to better integrate with Facebook ads. Specifically the changes will allow marketers bid for ads on Facebook through Omniture, a recent acquisition, and a company that has been an Ads API services provider for months.

Coca-Cola’s Facebook Faux Pas – Coca-Cola was forced to pull its Dr. Pepper Facebook promotion this week after the application published pornographic messages on underage users’ accounts. The app took over a users’ status updates.

People Hate and Love Facebook – A recent survey by ForeSeeResults led many to conclude that Facebook’s devoted user base hates the site. But as TechCrunch examines, the survey has issues. It struggles to explain, for example, why 57% of respondents visited Facebook every day, yet ranked the site worse than Wikipedia, even though only 20% visited that site every day.

Facebook in Patent Trial – Facebook was in court this week to defend itself in a patent-infringement trail. The suit revolves around a patent for managing electronically stored data issued in 2006 to Michael McKibben and Jeffrey R. Lamb, who work for Leader Technologies Inc.; they’re asking for royalties and for Facebook to stop infringing on their patent. Facebook said it didn’t misuse the technology and the patent doesn’t cover social networking anyway. Facebook has been habitually taken to court over extremely broad prior patents, and these cases have tended to not go anywhere.

BranchOut, Facebook’s LinkedIn? – Startup BranchOut launched a Facebook application this week that aims to provided LinkedIn-style business networking on Facebook. A very thorough review here.

Discovery Channel Connect Mimics Facebook - Campfire created a Facebook Connect integration for the Discovery Channel’s “The Colony” project. Essentially “The Colony” is a simulation of what a global pandemic would do to civilization via social media; electing to utilize Facebook Connect pulls up a users’ network in a simulated social network revolving around the pandemic. Users see (fake) posts from their Facebook friends encouraging them to survive the pandemic.

Zuckerberg on ‘The Simpsons’ – Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is set to guest star on the popular television show “The Simpsons” in the upcoming season. He will play himself and tell characters on the show that even billionaires drop out of school.