Facebook’s “Email System” is Way More than Email

This morning we let you know that Facebook was making an announcement about their much anticipated Project Titan, a rumored web based email system that would challenge the likes of Gmail & Yahoo. Well folks, the rumors weren’t exactly accurate. Project Titan, or “Messages,” in and of itself isn’t a self-proclaimed “email killer” as much as it is a convergence conversation system. According to Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook will bring in SMS, email, IM, and Facebook messages into one place.

“Messages” Foundations

Seamless messaging – “Messages” will integrate across four platforms, listed above, into one singular system. The new platform will enable sending and receiving of all four forms of messaging. Messages no longer live in independent homes – your email account, your Facebook page, your phone – but will follow you to where you are depending if you are on or off-line, or if using a Facebook app on a smart phone.

Conversation history – The new messaging system will enable users to track all communications in a single thread, going across all platforms; a “box of letters,” if you will. This history will provide context to not only conversations, but relationships.

Social Inbox – There will three different inboxes categorized by conversation type: messages, other, junk. The first will group close friends and priority conversations. The second will comprise of messages from acquaintances, group messages, fan page messages, etc. The third is obvious: junk! The user will have control over who is categorized where, and can drag threads to different inboxes. Facebook will also allow users to bounce and filter messages from those you don’t want to hear from. This makes for a spam-proof and potentially much more private system than regular ol’ email.

Rollout

Facebook isn’t planning on rolling out “Messages” immediately or all at once. It will be an invite-only system for a bit, allowing users to give feedback and for Facebook to make necessary changes before opening it up to the general public. And while we want to be a part of that invite-only community, we think it is smart for Facebook to work out the kinks of the system before inviting the world in for criticism.

The Future of Email

Don’t worry, email isn’t dead. However, we think that this changes the way that friends will communicate with one another. Email, on the other hand, will take on a different set of priorities, maybe taking on more of a business role, enabling business partners and coworkers to maintain contact with each other. “Messages” will be used more for personal conversations with close friends.

Marketing Implications

As marketers, we must always be concerned about what Facebook changes mean for our clients. However, this new messaging system doesn’t alter Facebook’s awesome advertising platform. Ads will appear just as it did before: on the side bar. The content of the conversation will not play a role in the advertising displayed. The same old rules apply: content inputted into Facebook by the user will dictate advertising targeting options.

Our one critique is that it equalizes all forms of conversation. It assumes that people want to have the same kind of communication all on one platform. It doesn’t enable the ability to choose what topics you discuss over different platforms: it is all incorporated as one. Regardless, we think the ability converge on multiple platforms has great potential.

What do you think? How will this affect the way you communicate with your networks? Will you opt in to an @facebook.com address?

Facebook’s Project Titan to Become Gmail Competitor

Project Titan is coming… TODAY!

For those of you who don’t know what Project Titan is, shame on you! Just kidding – Project Titan is Facebook’s web-based email program that is supposed to directly challenge Gmail (as well as other web based email systems). Uh oh! The name in and of itself seems quite threatening.

Mark Zuckerburg & his Facebook team are hosting a live Project Titan broadcast at 10 AM PST / 1 PM EST revealing all of the details regarding this new system, and we will most definitely be tuning in. I am eager to see how this new email messaging system will test the brand loyalty of Gmail users.

What do you think? Will you switch from Gmail to Project Titan?

Effectively Leveraging Facebook Advertising (part 2)

This is the second part of a two part series on Facebook Advertising. See part one of Effectively Leveraging Facebook Advertising here. Here are some recent graphs from a client’s Facebook advertising campaign.

In our last post, we talked about what we measure, how each metric is affected, and what they all mean. But you can’t just go sign up for a Facebook ad and automatically get these results. How do we get such great results from our Facebook ads? Read on…

Compelling Creative

We wouldn’t be in business if everyone could come up with a creative way to convey a client’s message to target audiences. Our creative team has been doing this for over 20 years, and Facebook ads are simply a new way to convey that message. When our creative team spends time working on our Facebook ads, they consistently achieve significantly higher results. We’ve tested!

Strategic Targeting

We don’t ever just blast out an ad to “everyone.” In this business, there is no “everyone.” There is always a specific target audience, usually many, that will be more interested than others in a clients message. If we are paying to send clients’ message to the wrong people, it’s a total waste of money. What we like about Facebook Advertising is that we can target users several different ways. We can target people based on their: location, likes/dislikes, relationship status, age, school, workplace, and more. With all of those options, we can usually pare down the audience to exactly the type of people that we want to target. That way, each time money gets spent to show the ad, it isn’t wasted on people that don’t care.

Tweaking and Maintenance

No, Tweaking and Maintenance aren’t our nicknames for the office interns. Rather, the terms describe the art of a successful Facebook Ad; the continual maintenance and tweaking of things like the ad copy (words in the ad), graphics, title, demographic targeting, keyword targeting, and bidding. We don’t have time to explain all the terms here, but the idea is to hit your different audiences sequentially, instead of all at the same time, so that you aren’t spending tens of thousands of dollars in a month. Instead, you target one audience after another. We monitor the real-time statistics to help determine when an ad has saturated a certain audience. When our results decrease to the point where our clients’ money is less effective and less efficient, we tweak (or completely redesign) the ad to target new audiences, or target the same audience a different way. This might be through different keywords, different creative strategy, or any one of the myriad adjustments that we can make.

Research and Planning

We didn’t just come up with a cute ad for our client out of nowhere. We started working with this client months and months ago, as every good campaign starts, with a marketing plan and a creative strategy. That way, every time we want to create a new campaign or a new ad, we have all the information we need at our fingertips, and we are better equipped to clearly articulate our clients’ value proposition to their different audiences. Without the appropriate research and planning, we wouldn’t know who target audiences are, where they interact online, or what the client’s message should be.

So there you have it – more than you ever wanted to know about Facebook Advertising. Any questions?

The Wave of the Future: Geo-Networking Services (and thus local advertising opportunities)

In the marketing and advertising world, we must admit that we are always looking ahead for the next big thing. A few years ago, it was text marketing. Now, it is social media and mobile marketing. Emerging slowly, but with some force, is the use of geo-location services to reach and reward our audiences in new and unique ways.

Geo-networking Platforms

The combination of location based services and social networking are now represented on platforms such as FourSquare and Gowalla. And according to an article in the May 10 edition of Advertising Age, Facebook is setting up its very own location based capabilities. And with a platform as large as Facebook, which adds millions of users each day, location based marketing might take off on an entirely new level.

McDonald’s is said to be one of the first to sign up, allowing users to “check-in” at restaurants and share their food choices with their networks. This function will be going live shortly after Facebook releases its location based functionality.

Benefits

While location based marketing is still in the experimental phase, it brings great advantages to marketers. It gives you the power to communicate with an audience on an entirely different level. You can reward them for “checking in” with promotions, offers, or coupons at your store location (a la foursquare). You can also give them the ability to share what they love about your brand, service, or product with their friends, while they are at your brick-and-mortar locations. This helps your customers pass the word on even faster (beware: even if it’s negative!). Geo-location services are turning physical places into virtual avenues of communication.

Location based services are great for local businesses, too, allowing small business chains to reward their most loyal customers. They offer special promotions and offers to those that come into their store or restaurant the most often. It is a brilliant idea for driving foot traffic into the store, and making that experience an interactive one.

Concerns

While Facebook’s upcoming implementation of location based functionality might mean big things for marketers and consumers, there are some serious privacy concerns for users. With the overwhelming amount of negative feedback that Facebook received for their default privacy settings and Open Graph idea, we can conclude that users might not like the capability of letting their entire network know where they are and what they are doing. But hopefully, Facebook will allow share options once the location functionality goes live.

The Future

In most cases, location functionality is opening the door for further communication between marketers and an audience. More so, it attempts to bridge the physical gap between a company and its consumers. With the increasing interest in platforms like FourSquare, and the soon-to-be released Facebook location features, we may be looking at a new marketing phenomenon that will become part of the communication norm.