I first got word of Facebook’s new guidelines when I considered designing a Facebook contest for a client. After getting in contact with a Facebook employee, I learned creating a custom tab to promote a contest would cost me an ad buy of $10,000 per month.

$10,000? Facebook contests used to be free, simple, and spur-of-the-moment campaigns. Long gone are the days when any Page could ask trivia questions to their fans via wall post, and the Page would pick a random winner from the answers they received in the comments. For marketing professionals, contests and giveaways are a great way to attract new fans and encourage existing ones to interact with a brand. But now, only companies with a substantial advertising budget can use this method of increasing their fan following on Facebook.

Part of Facebook’s appeal to me is that it’s a great outlet for small businesses, new brands, and indie artists to build a loyal legion of fans. $10,000/month is out of their reach. I understand Facebook needs to make money. But once upon a time, Facebook also started out as a small start-up. They too spread virally through word-of-mouth because they found a niche market and provided a useful service. Now that they’re a big gun, I hope they don’t forget about the little guys that need them the most.

I’ve always declared myself to be (in an admittedly blissful manner) somewhat of a social media purist. For me, social media’s biggest value is that it facilitates relationships – for both the big corporation and for the local indie band. Social media is most effective when a brand is able to connect with consumers on a deeper level that is never achieved with traditional advertising or marketing campaigns. The basic framework of social media platforms allows for instant feedback, interaction, and engagement. When it comes to using contests as a strategy to quickly attract and engage fans, Facebook’s promotions guidelines give an unfair competitive advantage to large advertising budgets.

To reiterate, the new guidelines are a smart way for Facebook to make some money, and to cover their bases when it comes to liability. But I think the $10,000/month price tag is too steep, and I guess I can’t help but root for the underdog. I confess, I don’t have a solution that will make both parties happy. I’ll give it some more thought and will hopefully have some concrete conclusions in my next blog installment. But until then, there is always Twitter. Zing!

1. Use of official hashtags
The conference underwent a name change, from Sapphire 09 to SAPPHIRE NOW. To make sure social media users were clear about the re-brand, Page One made sure to use the #sapphirenow hashtag in the majority of our tweets from the @SAPPHIRENOW Twitter feed. This helped to ensure that the new name would gain visibility before the conference started. We didn’t want to risk having the Twitterverse split up mentions of the SAPPHIRE NOW conference by using more than one hashtag when they tweeted about the event.

Hashtags allow tweets to be grouped together so that they can be easily located via Twitter search. For a large conference event like SAPPHIRE NOW, the hashtags were particularly useful for three groups of people. Many conference attendees in Orlando and Frankfurt were active live-tweeters who used the #sapphire to tag their updates, especially during the keynote speeches, which were timed to be presented to both locations simultaneously. SAP also launched an innovative website that allowed people to attend the conference virtually, and many online attendees were live-tweeting while streaming the keynotes. Finally, for people who could not attend the conference physically or virtually, the #sapphirenow stream was publishing such a high volume of tweets that it provided them a play-by-play of the conference’s most important events.

The #sapphirenow hashtag collected over 12,131 mentions by the end of the conference on May 19. On May 18, during the executive keynote speeches by Jim Hagemann Snabe and Bill McDermott, the hashtag was the number 4 Twitter trending topic in the U.S. This uniform use of the correct hashtag would not have happened without establishing #sapphirenow as the official hashtag weeks before the conference.

2. Designating multiple routing paths for the Twitter concierge
In addition to being the official voice of the conference, one of the functions of the @SAPPHIRENOW Twitter feed was to act as a concierge for attendees who needed assistance with anything from finding the nearest bathroom, getting more information on a certain session, or navigating through the virtual website. Many attendees asked questions via @reply or DM, and Page One and SAP worked together to designate the proper routing path for each type of question and for each location (Frankfurt, Orlando, or online). Each routing path led to the appropriate SAP employee either on-location or back at SAP headquarters. This made sure that every question asked would be answered as soon as possible via Twitter.

A Twitter feed cannot just spew out information. It needs to listen. Social media platforms are expected to meet a higher standard when it comes to customer service. Corporate accounts are expected to have a personal voice behind the brand that engages with its followers and fans. Social media users like to know that their opinions are being heard, and when the @SAPPHIRENOW feed responded to followers who had conference-related questions, they were appreciative of our help. This helps spread positive content about the Twitter feed, and it lets our followers know that they are important to us.

The development of both these strategies helped to make @SAPPHIRENOW a successful Twitter feed leading up to and during the conference. An overwhelming majority of the Twitter conversations about the conference were extremely positive and attendees were very impressed with SAPPHIRE NOW’s social media initiatives. Key takeaway: in social media, a little pre-planning can lead to a high payoff.

For example, one of my favorite groups of people to follow on Twitter is the cast of Modern Family. A number of the show’s actors have active Twitter accounts, where the majority of their tweets are @replies to fellow cast mates.

The content is all very light-hearted – they tweet about what’s for lunch, or post photos of their travels while on the job. The key is that they tweet content the average user would post to their own friends, except these guys just happen to be well-known actors with a hit TV show. Since I follow most of the cast, their @replies to each other all show up on my Twitter feed. Reading these “personal” conversation chains on a daily basis while I catch up with the Twitterverse keeps the show on my mental radar. Essentially, it’s free advertising for the show due to the public nature of Twitter, and the direct access it gives us to anyone with an account.

Nowadays, actors can do more than appear on talk shows to promote their movies or films to reach out to their fans. By maintaining an active Twitter account, they can stay visible to their followers, and once in a while, throw in a tweet about their new movie opening this weekend, and the follower probably won’t subconsciously tag this as an overt advertisement.

For example, the actor that plays Cam on Modern Family (@ericstonestreet) tweeted the following:

To me, this is a more effective way of getting a fan to tune into a new episode than sitting through a 15-second television spot that cost ABC a chunk of their advertising budget.

This is the kind of advertising noise that I welcome into my daily media consumption. And if you find my views to be too idealistic, I understand that the actors could have “Twitter campaigning” written into their contracts and that they may be getting paid by ABC to be online ambassadors for the show. I’m also aware that celebrity accounts do not benefit Twitter financially, yet. If Twitter figures out a way to seamlessly integrate promoted tweets into our Twitter experience, much like the Modern Family cast does with their @replies and indirect episode promotion, this form of targeted advertising could be Twitter’s golden ticket to a profitable business model.

Penny and Percy (as they are known in the office) will be traveling with the Page Wonders on our various social media adventures. You can follow them every step of the way on our Facebook Page. Photos will be added regularly to The Adventures of Penny and Percy photo album, and they’ll also soon be checking-in from Foursquare.

Currently, Percy is away on an important social media business trip to Vancouver. Want to know how he’s doing? Become our fan on Facebook to receive updates!

During the half-day summit, representatives from companies such as Facebook, Altimeter Group, and Technorati gave presos that illustrated great examples of marketing and creative advertising campaigns that implemented social media tactics to yield significant metrics and results. But I recognized a trend in the case studies: they were all campaigns focused around consumer products.

Much of the consumer strategy discussed could not be directly applied to B2B companies. In fact, when an audience member asked the Building Brands panel if they could offer any successful examples of B2B social media campaigns, no one could give an answer. After a few moments of shifty silence, the best the panel could do was, “We’ll get back to you on that.”

Perhaps I should have jumped up from my seat and rattled off our clients to that audience member, but instead I will provide an answer in the form of this blog post. Page One specializes in social media strategy for B2B companies. So if anyone from the Building Brands event is still waiting for a response, take a look at the following case study videos to see the social media work we’ve done for B2B companies such as Cisco:

For two more Cisco examples, head over to Page One’s Case Study page to access videos about the IT Innovations Forum and the ISR Product Launch: Cisco Case Studies.

Yesterday evening, Michael Arrington from TechCrunch reported that Google was in advanced talks to acquire Yelp for at least $500 million dollars. It seems like a big business move, even for Google, so let’s try to break it down. Why does this potential purchase matter?

For Google, the benefit of the acquisition would be ad revenue. If this deal is confirmed, Google will inherit Yelp’s extensive network of local ad-buying businesses. They’ll also be able to take Yelp’s 8 million+ user reviews and integrate them into Google’s Place Pages – which will give Google even more opportunity for ad revenue with keyword searches.

For Yelp, a buyout from Google means that direct links to Yelp listings will show up in Google’s search results. These are not just links to Yelp’s search results page, but links taking you directly to the Yelp page for say, Bi-Rite Creamery. Oh, and of course, there’s the money. Yelp is reporting $30 million in revenue this year, but rumor has it that Google will purchase the company for half a billion dollars.

For local businesses, the acquisition is important because with Google’s backing, Yelp reviews will have the potential to reach much larger audiences. If your business isn’t already on Yelp, what are you waiting for? You can use your Yelp listing to serve as the landing page for your company if you don’t have the budget to build your own personal website. Customer reviews have always been a popular social activity on the Internet, and Yelp has fostered an intimate community of reviewers who could be spreading the news about your business for you.

For social media users, the acquisition ties together the two popular trends of location-based social networking and mobile devices. Consumers could use their mobile phones to locate information through Google about nearby businesses on Yelp. Now armed with a large arsenal of local content, Google could push for more advanced mobile apps that allow users to instantly connect with others in local spaces – much like Foursquare.

With this move, Google is illustrating their play for acquiring community-based websites, and trying to magnify their presence in social networking. It’ll be interesting to see if this deal pulls through. I’ll definitely be on the lookout for confirmation.

By now, most of you have heard about the launch of Google’s real-time search, which pulls live updates from websites like Twitter and Facebook and features them alongside traditional search results.

From a social media professional’s vantage point, Google’s real-time search is a big step forward in illustrating the true impact of social media. Inclusions of live Twitter and Facebook mentions for a Google search stresses the value of having a social media presence to foster positive conversations about a brand or product. Hopefully this will convince companies who have not yet dove into the social media pool to jump in head-first off the high dive.

As real-time searches become accessible to a much wider audience, monitoring and tracking also becomes an invaluable service provided by social media professionals. Social media was once believed to be a setting for casual conversation. More and more, it’s becoming an official space for brand management and monitoring. If a person searching on Google instantly sees a negative comment about their search term, they will form an initial impression about the term before visiting its official website. It’s also noteworthy that people are more inclined to be influenced by a fellow customer than a corporate website.

Google’s real-time search is definitely a legitimizing move for the social media industry. Now it’s up to the social media professionals to develop the best strategies to leverage these new functions, and of course, be prepared for the next thing in social media.

eCairn

eCairn specializes in the blogosphere. Their Conversation application is a tool that maps out blog communities. Users manually create a list of blogs they wish to track. A proprietary algorithm ranks these blogs by “influence,” largely by measuring how frequently the blogs cross reference other influential blogs. The tool’s functions are less about search, and more about text mining.  For our agency, identifying key blogs and conversations is important, but if the tool also worked for Twitter and other social media sources it would be much more valuable.

Overtone

Open Mic by Overtone works on a platform that operates on keywords, and does a great job of analyzing data from search terms. I especially liked their emerging trend alert function which identifies potential spikes in a keyword that could lead to future trends or issues. However, Open Mic seems designed to focus on single brand topics for companies to manage online forums or customer service surveys more than for use as a general purpose monitoring tool. It’s not well suited for agencies.

ViralHeat

We signed up for a free ViralHeat trial after Mashable described them as a sophisticated, yet affordable social media tracking tool. ViralHeat pulls data from Twitter, websites, blogs, and YouTube from search profiles we create in the tool. It can tell you specific information such as the number of total unique authors who tweeted about your search term. They also pull together a convenient summary of daily metrics activity. However, a downside of the tool was that the search capability wasn’t as user-friendly and flexible as other monitoring services. Our account was limited to 10 profile searches, and it was difficult to figure out how to compare multiple keywords in the same search. Starting at $10 per month, ViralHeat is priced aggressively. But for Page One, ViralHeat would best serve as a secondary tool that would complement a primary monitoring service with better search functions and less rigidity.

Sysomos

Sysomos offers two main products, the Media Analysis Platform (MAP) and Heartbeat. MAP is an in-depth tool useful for historical analysis over time. The tool is able to identify key influencers in social media communities and uses text analytics to determine tone and sentiment. One attractive feature is that MAP’s database reaches back to 2006, and the data can be effectively categorized by geographic location. It can also monitor across multiple companies.

Their second product is Heartbeat, and is targeted for real-time, day-to-day monitoring, usually for a single brand/company. This tool tracks social media mentions instantaneously, determines sentiment and key influencers, and lets users view their current competitive landscape. Heartbeat also allows multiple users to log-in to the website at one time, which facilitates the sharing of information with your colleagues. Like most other tools, the social media data only goes back 30 days, which is hopefully something that could be tweaked in the future.

Because of its flexibility, search functions, easy-to-use dashboard, and the real-time component, MAP and Heartbeat from Sysomos appear to be good choices right now for our agency (we also plan to more extensively test drive eCairn for its blog capabilities). But we understand that social media monitoring is still an evolving service, and our monitoring needs as an agency will change over time. One thing to remember about choosing a social media tracking tool is that what’s right for our agency may not be right for you.

If you have any insights or questions, please feel free to leave a response in the comments.

Happy tracking!