“Business Insider” recently published an article highlighting a new feature in Facebook that has the potential to be huge for businesses and brands.

To summarize the article, Facebook is hoping to make its new Timeline layout even more interactive by allowing developers to add in customizable action links to posts that are generated from apps.

For example, when you see a friend check in on Foursquare in your Facebook newsfeed, instead of simply commenting or liking the post- you could interact with the post in a new way. You could save the location so that you can remember to visit the location in the future.

So far this is only going to be occurring on posts that come from apps (Spotify, Socialcam, Foursquare, etc.) – which I think will be interesting and positive for businesses. However, what I find to be exciting is the potential for this to expand and really affect the work that we do with our clients. What if in the future posts that we create or promotions and giveaways that are shared by our fans have the potential to have action links as well (which could lead to say, an e-commerce store or where-to-buy page)?

How do you think the addition of action links will effect businesses and brands using Facebook?

According to this article from Mashable, Facebook announced today an organ donor status option for Timeline. This adds to “Facebook’s socially conscious policies including an anti-bullying initiative and a referral system for friends expressing suicidal thoughts.” In an interview with Good Morning America, Mark Zuckerberg explains why this option was added. Zuckerberg has noticed that people weren’t just using social tools to keep in touch with their friends and family on a daily basis, but to also solve social problems. Zuckerberg mentioned that he wants to spread awareness of organ donation to help save the lives of 114,000 people in the U.S. who are waiting for organ transplants. “Many of those people – an average of 18 people per day – will die waiting, because there simply aren’t enough organ donors to meet the need,” Facebook noted in a blog entry.  Other motivators for this move include “Zuckerberg’s friendship with Steve Jobs, whose life was extended following a liver transplant.”

Adding your donor status is pretty simple really. First, you go to your timeline. Second, click life event, go to Health & Wellness and choose organ donor. You can add where and when you register as well as your personal story. There is also a link to officially register as an organ donor that will lead you to the correct registry based on your location. As with most elements of the Facebook Timeline, you can decide who sees your organ donor status. You can make it public, or just share this information with close friends or family. Check out the “how to” video from Facebook as well as Zuckerberg’s interview with Good Morning America on Mashable.

At Bolin, we are always happy to see digital programs that help to support a cause. Over the last few years, our digital holiday cards have led our clients and friends to a website page where they can pick a non-profit for Bolin to make a donation to on their behalf. How has your agency or company used social media to help a cause?  What other social issues do you believe could be solved by using powerful tools such as Facebook?

Last week Facebook purchased Instagram, the top photo sharing app. There have been numerous takes on this acquisition, but it appears the most interesting  is coming from Forbes. When this acquisition was announced SVP of Marketing for Apple, Phil Schiller, stated that he was deleting his Instagram account and accused the company of “jumping the shark.” The acquisition and this now famous deletion came  just days after the previously iPhone only app became available on Android. In Why the Next Shoe to Drop is Apple buying Twitter for $10 Billion, Forbes dissects Phil Schiller’s statements, what the loss of Instagram means for iOS, and the the power balance between Apple, Facebook, and Google.

If you are Apple and a big business is iPhone and its big business is apps, how much business can you afford to lose/share?

To add to the blog post posted last week in regards to Facebook Timeline for Business and all of the “need to knows” for the switch taking place this Friday, here is an article from AdvertisingAge on how these changes will be forcing marketers to evolve . AdAge states that “marketers will have no choice but to evolve from the static “tabs” mindset to a “Timeline” mindset based on continually fresh, engaging & authentic content.”  Advertisers will no longer be able to use Facebook tabs as their default landing page. These pages were often used as a way to promote different giveaways, coupons, & promotions, as well as to drive “likes” for the brand. Facebook will allow you to “pin” specific posts to the top of the page, but these pins will be unpinned after seven days. These changes make brands accountable for giving their fans continuous fresh content by making them take a greater role in their page and keeping their fans engaged through posting, monitoring and responding.

Through these changes, Facebook is hitting home that they are a place for people to connect and have conversations. “Businesses which are best at telling stories and creating emotional connection with fans get talked with and talked about the most,” says AdAge. This is a great opportunity for brands to start thinking about what makes them unique, find their voice, tell their story, and explore how they can appeal to their fans’ interests & passions, as well as provide engaging content that keeps their fans coming back to their page.

“Facebook is issuing a challenge to all marketers: be yourself, stay in touch, tell your stories in authentic and engaging ways.”

What are the biggest challenges you feel marketers will face making this change?

In five short days on March 30, 2012 all Facebook fan pages will be getting a  face lift to the already profile implemented Timeline. With this change there are a few things that all brand marketers need to know:

• The Timeline page is the first thing users will see when visiting your page. Brands should start thinking about and creating their cover photo. Keep in mind that price or purchase information, contact info intended for the “About” section, calls to action, promotional messaging of any kind and references to “like” the page cannot be included in your Timeline photo. This additionally means that you cannot set an differing page for a user to land on which was previously allowed for fan pages. You can however point users to different URLs (apps) on the page when doing advertising elsewhere.

• Brands now have the ability to reference company events that happened 10 to 20 to 100 years ago. This is a great way for companies to share their brand story. Brand marketers should add important events to their Timeline, like when they were founded, when a new product launched, and so on and so fort.

• Fans will now be able to send private messages to brand pages. This will require extra effort by brand community managers, but does some great things for opening the door to private communication with consumers.

• Custom tabs will still exist, though they’ll be larger than they are now and more prominently located. The tabs currently reside on the left of the page and are 520px. The new tabs will be on the upper right of the page and are 810px wide.

In addition to these changes, Social Media Today posted a great article offering 15 tips for Brands to successfully implement Facebook Timeline. Have you prepared your brand for Timeline? Have you already changed over or are you waiting until March 30th? What are your thoughts on how this new offering will impact the importance of Facebook in your brands marketing and business strategy?

Online customer reviews are said to be the “new frontier in word of mouth marketing,” according to Surefire Social and their presentation on Online Reviews. The conversation has switched from the one-way communication of brands shouting out their messages to their customers to consumers now conversing with each other about brands. Online customer reviews are the checks and balances of today’s consumer products. If your product or service doesn’t work, if you have poor customer service, if you are simply just not worth the money, your consumers will let you (and the world) know about it. On the other hand, online reviews can be a powerful source of free advertising that can gain you business, increase sales and offer you insight.

Consumers are more connected than they ever were before. Through mobile devices, consumers making an in-store purchasing decision are just a search term away from finding out everything you want or don’t want them to know about your brand. Another important piece is that research says consumers trust each other more so than they do brand messaging…even if they are complete strangers. This presentation from Confluence Digital on the Power of Online Reviews  states that “90% of online consumers trust recommendations from people they know; 70% trust unknown users, 27% trust experts, 14% trust advertising & 8% trust celebrities.”

How can you make online reviews impact your brand positively? Surefire Social, Confluence Digital and this article from Search Engine Land offers some tips and suggestions on how to make online reviews work for your brand:

1.  What are Your Fans Saying?: The first step with online reviews is to go out and see what people are saying about your brand. Based on your type of business, there are a number of “reviews” websites including YELP (which hit 20 million reviews this past summer) , ReviewBiz, etc. where you can check out conversation. Make sure to see where (if at all) you are showing up in search results as well to determine if you need to improve your online presence. By “listening” to what your consumers are saying you can gain powerful insights into what people think and believe about your brand.
2. Improved Organic Search: Search engines use customer reviews in their algorithm when determining how high your brand, business or company shows up on search results. Therefore, online reviews can improve you organic search. Higher rankings in organic search can give your brand more visibility and more website traffic, which leads to more awareness and sales.
3. Unique Content: Online reviews also offer up new unique content. Content you get from reviews can be posted to your website, your Facebook page, through your Twitter account, or used in advertising or on packaging material.
4. Find Your Brand Loyalists: Online reviews can help you pin point your brand loyalists. You can tap into these loyalists to spread the word about your brand, and encourage their friends to write positive reviews about your products. Tip: Make sure to give users access to review sites through your website or social pages. Ask them to review your brand – good or bad.
5. The More the Merrier: 73% of consumers read up to 10 reviews about a brand, business or product according to this article in Search Engine Land.  It’s important to actively grow your reviews online by giving customers news reasons (deals or special offers) to write a review. No one likes old reviews, so make sure to keep your reviews plentiful and recent. More reviews also means there is more conversation online about your brand.
6. Don’t Ignore Unhappy Customers: It is best to publicly respond to all negative reviews & comments when possible in a timely manner. Bad situations that are ignored could come back to haunt you, but when they are dealt with proactively, you can turn someone who had a bad experience with your brand into a new brand loyalist.  It’s also important to remember that brands gain more trust from consumers if they have balanced feedback, so welcome both positive and negative feedback.
7. Tracking: Keep track of your sentiment through a free or subscription based tracking tool to measure conversation.
8. A Chance to Say Thank You!: Probably a more overlooked part of online reviews, is the opportunity for a brand to say “thank you” to their consumers. What a great way to increase brand loyalty!

It’s safe to say that online reviews just can’t be ignored and that they can also be powerful tools in growing your brand. How have you weaved online reviews into your marketing campaigns? What other tips or benefits do you have in regards to online reviews?

According to this article from Mashable, a web app, Pinpuff, has been developed that measures a user’s  influence or “Pinfluence” on the popular site Pinterest, a virtual pinboard where users can share their interest and favorite internet finds.

This app follows PinClout, a free service that gives the user a clout score out of 100. PinClout’s algorithm determines a user’s score by compiling total pins, repins, likes, comments, boards & followers.

The Pinpuff  app will also give the user a score out of 100 based on a variety of similar factors including the number of followers, who the user is following, the number of boards, etc. The really interesting part and what differentiates Pinpuff from PinClout is that the app also applies a monetary value to the user’s pins, as well as shows the amount of traffic the user’s pins generate. This could possibly be a way for advertisers to measure ROI through their Pinterest efforts.

Pinpuff is currently not available to everyone at this time, but the first 1,000 Pinterest users will receive exclusive invites to try it out.

As this app rolls out, do you think marketers will lean on this as a measurement tool?  Do you think these tools will have the same issues as Klout has had in the past? It will be interesting to learn more about this tool in the future and exciting to see what “Pinfluence” measurement tools follow.

The popular make-up brand, Bobbi Brown, has launched an interesting Facebook campaign which specifically rewards the brand’s “super fans” or those who frequently engage with the brand’s online community. Learn more about the details of the campaign from here.

After seeing the conversations about discontinued products and the desire of consumers to purchase them, the brand has come up with a campaign that allows fans to vote for their favorite discontinued lip color from a list of top requested colors.

I thought this was such a great idea as it directly taps into the fans that are most engaged with the brand and have been customers for an extended amount of time. Additionally, this is something that makes a ton of sense in terms of business because you are guaranteed sales.  If a consumer cares enough about the product to vote, and the product they vote for ends up winning then they will most definitely buy it.

Being a community specialist for a handful of consumer good products- I see daily requests via Facebook for products that are not longer being produced. Facebook is a pivotal platform for consumers to voice their opinions and make requests. That being said, most customers don’t understand how much goes into producing different products and the process behind discontinuing and in turn reviving a specific item.

This is a great way to make the brand loyalists feel like their voice is being heard. Furthermore, making it a voting process allows the consumers to really interact with the brand’s online community. It makes the fan feel like they really have some weight and that sharing their opinions can have a desirable result. It creates a sense of anticipation that will most likely keep these fans engaged until the end of campaign- and hopefully for life.

Can you think of a brand that discontinued one of your favorite products? If you could have a vote to bring it back, would you engage? If you hadn’t already moved on to a different brand- the answer is most likely yes, and those fans are the exact type of consumer that a brand wants to keep satisfied.

As planning is kicking off for many of our clients in 2012, we are taking special note of different media trends. We are finding more and more opportunities that tie into the ZMOT  mental model. One of these trends is happening online and in real time and on your mobile phone.  As we all know mobile is no longer an up and coming trend, it is very much happening right now and it is changing the way we shop.  This article from VentureBeat expands on this new shopping phenomenon and talks about how consumers are using their cell phones while shopping in stores to phone a friend, look up product reviews and to comparison shop.

The Pew Research Center conducted a survey and reported on how Americans used their phone during this past holiday shopping season. Their findings found that while shopping in store “38 percent of cell owners called a friend for advice, 24 percent looked up online reviews, and 25 percent compared prices via their cell phones.” Another interesting finding was that of the 33 percent of people who used their phone to look up product information, 19 percent ended up buying the product online rather than in-store.

Cell phones are changing the shopping experience and brands are needing to adapt.  A strong online and social presence, sampling, and increasing online conversation through reviews, etc. around products is more important than ever. What trends have you been seeing around mobile & shopping and how can brands leverage them in their favor?

What is Pinterest you say? Pinterest describes itself as a virtual pinboard, a place to organize and share all the beautiful things you find online. Think visual bookmarks or of the cork board where you use to pin magazine cutouts of Jonathan Taylor Thomas. Users create a “board” surrounding a specific topic, say Home Decor. The user then “pins” photos to the board of items and tips that they enjoy, fit their style, or would simply like to come back to later. Once a user pins something to their board, it is shared with other Pinterest users. These users can comment on the pin, like the pin, or repin it to one of their boards. Pinterest’s main mission is to connect people throughout the world via the things they find interesting. They want to expose common ground between people through visuals, taste and preference.

Sounds fun right? Well, you would not be alone in seeing a use for this type of site. In December 2011, Pinterest attracted 11 million visitors which represents 40% growth in six months to the invite-only site. This stat helped catapult the site onto the list of top 10 social networking sites based on traffic. Pinterest was also named to Time magazine’s list of the top 50 websites of 2011 and has been described to be the “Next Twitter.” It can also be seen that the site, which took a while to gain traction, is now seeing a growth rate of 50% month over month. Assuming the site remains invite-only, our projections have the site at 55+ million visitors by June 2012.

The Pinterest early adopters that are creating all of this traffic have a very specific makeup. Its 4.5 million users are 58% female and 59% are between the ages of 25 and 44. The type of content being shared on the site is a product of this group. The most popular users for the site currently revolve around sharing ideas for wedding/events, recipes, fashion, design,  home decor, photography, quotes, and favorite products. That said, as more male users begin to enter the Pinterest world there will likely be a shift in the type of content that is seen.

All of this traffic and buzz means that the marketers will be soon to follow.  A few brands have already hopped on the Pinterest bandwagon and gotten creative with the site in efforts to see what type of traction they could get. In December, Land’s End held a “Pin it to Win it” contest where users were asked to create a pin board with 10 to 20 images from the Land’s End site or repin them from the Land’s End Pinterest page. Once a user completed this task, they simply emailed the board to Land’s End and were entered to win one of 10 $250 Land’s End giftcards. The contest ran for one week and over 200 boards were created each containing at minimum of 10 images from Land’s End. This is a pretty impressive stat considering the low barrier to entry for Land’s End. Etsy, your place to buy homemade and vintage online, is seeing their individual sellers have to remove products or change deliver expectation because the demand for their products is being so drastically increased due to Pinterest. As always, the consumer brands are leading the charge with testing a new social networking platform. However, the opportunity for B2B brands on Pinterest may be greater than any social network that has been seen before. Utilizing the platform to share tips, hold focus groups, or simply educate about products are all options with Pinterest that could be strategized and executed by both consumer and B2B brands.

For any brand marketer looking to break into Pinterest, there are a few easy things to help dip your toe in the water. Make sure your website is Pin-able by adding the Pin This button to your product images and content offering. This allows users to think of your content as something they might share on their boards. Next, try the site out yourself. This is the best way to learn the culture of Pinterest and its users, while determining the best way to fit your brand into the offering. Third, strategize how your brand should be involved. Does it make sense for individuals from the organization to have boards that make mention of the brand or for the brand to have its own account? If the brand has its own account, do you share the names of the people running the board or simply share the brand? These type of questions will help ensure that the strategy fits the brand and the potential audience you are hoping to reach. Once these pieces are complete, get active with pinning, comments and likes.

What are your thoughts on Pinterest? Are you pinning away or staying away? Will this be the next big thing or a passing fad?