Facebook Your Campaign

“Facebooked” as a verb has been around forever in internet time, referring to the practice of HR professions seeking information on people as part of their hiring due diligence. It’s starting to take on a new meaning for marketing types.  Blogger Jeremiah Owyang was tipped off to a new console game release called Prototype by Chris Pan of Facebook. The Protoype game’s website goes beyond personalization by linking ads with in-game content, or allowing users to upload their pictures to create e-postcards as JibJab does. Prototype’s website asks users to log in using their Facebook credentials, and uses profile photos and other Facebook profile information to create a trailer customized for the viewer.

Below is my experience with the Prototype site, which I encourage you to try yourself here.

What was fascinating from the beginning is how minimal the initial investment in time is. Simply log into Facebook and the website does the rest. No photo uploads, no questionairres..

Once you log in, the loading sequence begins. It takes a while, but it’s worth the wait…

Once The sequence began, a movie-like clip began playing…

Now I’ve read some of the other blogs covering Prototype, so I expected to see my own Facebook data. Imagine my surprise when a picture of my 4 month old son came up (the original here) ..

and of course I showed up as well. It’s hard not to be drawn into the experience when you see yourself in it…

It’s a bit hard to see because of the masking, so here’s the original photo …

The information doesn’t simply include my own picture uploads, but also uploads from friends’ photo albums (which I haven’t posted here for obvious reasons). The video also incorporates profile information.  Funny enough watching the video made me realize I needed to update my home location on Facebook.

Anyway, here are my key takeaways from the experience:

• Asking for logins will become commonplace. Using existing Facebook requires minimal time investment, cutting abandonment.
• Viral is the new norm. These After the personalized experience, users are likely to invite friends to watch (or even *ahem* blog about the experience) if invited to. Protoype asks you to share the website with your friends at the end of the playback.
• Marketers will increasingly bundle the extended network. The marketing message is powerful if you bundle it with the user’s data, but even more powerful when you include photos, videos, and profile information from connections (friends). I found myself running the video a couple of times to see if other friends would show up. They did.
• Expect Orwellian / Big Brother argument to pick up as personalized viral marketing beomces more commonplace. there will probably be plenty of initial freak outs, but objections will become less commonplace as contextual ads become more commonplace.
• Cross-network advertising is still a question mark. If meta logins (OpenID) pick up steam, expect a number of contextual marketing campaigns to ask for a meta ID and include content from a number of social networks. Someone will probably try to combine Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, and other networks rolled into one spot in the not too distant future.
• Someone’s political campaign will probably follow suit, rolling out videos which pull at the heartstrings using your own data. An appeal asking for support for health care reform is more powerful if superimposed on pictures of family members, but I suspect most users will be far more wary of providing a politician’s website with Facebook credentials. Game sites are far more innocuous.

Twitter and Facebook Visual Comparison

Click the picture for a larger (readable) version..

Twitter: The Voice of a Disenfranchised Populace

Defying the curfew

Earlier blog posts about “Twitterquakes” and other media travelling at speeds greater than media coverage were an entertaining curiosity. Today that curiosity became an agent of change in the disputed Iranian elections as large numbers coordinate, communicate and corroborate via microblogs.

Within 2 hours of the polls closing in the Iranian election, the “supreme leader” Ayatollah Khamenei rushed to bless President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for winning the election, calling on Iranians to line up behind the incumbent. That’s when the questions began to erupt on the microblogs and mobile phones. How could the challengers lose by such an overwhelming percentage in their home cities? How do you count almost 40 million handwritten paper ballots in two hours and declare a winner? Why shut off mobile phone networks if the election was truly transparent? The iron clerics have a bit of a problem: while they control military, the judiciary and all public broadcasts, the supreme leader would find it difficult to shut down all leaks in an age of proxy servers, satellites, and microblogs. They also have a bit of a problem in that they can’t turn off the country’s collective ability to sniff out obvious bullshit.

Ayastoleit

It was via Twitter that the written 7 point statement leaflet distributed among the protesters in Tehran today reached the west:

1. Dismissal of Khamenei for not being a fair leader
2. Dismissal of Ahmadinejad for his illegal acts
3. Temporary appointment of Ayatollah Montazeri as the Supreme Leader
4. Recognition of Mousavi as the President
5. Forming the Cabinet by Mousavi to prepare for revising the Constitution
6. unconditional and immediate release of all political prisoners
7. Dissolution of all organs of repression, public or secret

Indeed candidate MirHossein Mousavi has also joined the microblog fray, directing protesters to remain peaceful and determined. The candidate, taking part in the demonstrations himself, has become aware of Twitter’s power to spread messaging helping protesters assemble and avoid altercations with law enforcement. He (or the person managing his Twitter handle) posted a desperate plea to the Twitter team to postpone a scheduled maintenance cycle in order to keep information flowing freely in the face of mobile phone outages:

Don't Turn the Lights off

If you’re wondering, maintenance was rescheduled as requested. Such is the power of the Twitter News Network. Once an early warning system for seismic activity and random flashmobs of no importance, microblogs (and Twitter in particular) have become the message network to turn to when other means of communication are turned off.

Update 5.16.2009 4:26 PM PST: Boing boing’s Corey Doctorow published an engagement guide located here.

Epilogue: the following are a list of active tweeters I’ve been able to find in Teharan. If you’d like to be added to the list, please reply in comments below to add yourself to the list. Best wishes and be safe.

Kamyar
madyar
Amin Abbaspour
Abdul-Azim Mohammed
Farhad
Parham Doustdar
Mohammad Ramezanpour
crash
Sajjad A. Mohammed
Yashar Khazdouzian
Mohamadreza
S T
Iran Election 2009
TehranBureau.com
MirHossein Mousavi
jim sciutto
Raymond Jahan
Parastoo
Bahador Nooraei B.
William Yong
Bahram K
Alireza
persiankiwi
Hamed
Alireza Sedaghat
ali khalaj
miriam
Jubin Ahdi
jadi
IranPhishi
Naeim Karimi
zahrahb

The Twitter Ecosystem

From Jess and Brian Solis, a fairly comprehensive map of the Twitter ecosystem, broken down into applications focusing on geolocation, stream management, trends analysis, marketing & advertising, influence & resonance, search, stream management, relationship management, event management, URL management, and mobile apps (a subset of stream management in my opinion). Click on the picture below to see an expanded version.

Courtesy of Brian Solis and Jeff3

New Media at the Executive Branch

President Obama’s director of new media released the following video guide to new media and social media services offered by the White House. Here’s the slick guide to interacting with the White House and executive branch offices via social media:

Beijing Says No More Social Media

China commemorates the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre with another crackdown.. this time on Twitter, Flickr, Bing (Microsoft’s new Google competitor), and a number of other cites no doubt deemed to carry “unharmonious” speech. Apparently some email sites, such as Hotmail have also been shut off. It seems Microsoft can’t catch a break here outside of MSN messenger, which still seems to be working as of the time this blog post was posted. By evening, residents of some cities in the southern province of Guangdong reported that television stations from neighboring Hong Kong had also been blocked.

The block was first picked up by Alice on the Danwei blog and has been carried by others. Users in Beijing reported accessing the service without difficulty earlier on Tuesday, and even successfully searching potentially sensitive words such as “Tiananmen.” My own experience suggests it may have been blocked a few hours ago, since family of mine living in China we not able to access pictures on Flickr. The large scale crackdown represents the first widespread censorship of social media outlets in China, unlike previous blocks of websites before major events like Tiananmen anniversary dates.

Warning: Flickr Image Above May Lead to Political Unrest

The takeaway here was best described by Dave Flumenbaum at the Huffingtonpost, who writes the move is..”a tacit acknowledgment of two things: Twitter’s new power in mainland China, and how valuable Twitter would be as platform to publish original news out of mainland China on the Tiananmen anniversary.” It remains to be seem whether access will be restored after the Tiananmen anniversary, but it’s a fair bet the net nannies might be playing this by ear. My own hunch is that if the locals don’t raise a stink about it, the block is likely to be permanent.