Before the holiday, I wrote that Facebook was testing “listen buttons” in the Ticker. I commented that it was sure to boost activity and conversions… but what happens when the ‘action’ graph expands and there are buttons galore? A couple thoughts / notes on that:

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1. This is the first time I have now seen “Read” buttons. They look exactly like the listen button – but clearly focused on different actions, publishers and canvas apps. It really stands out.

Again: what happens when the entire ticker is action-oriented? Is it too noisy? Is there new column? Unsure… but I like the fact that posts are action-oriented.

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2. Which brings us to point #2: it is a reminder to be action-oriented and to stand out… whether you are creating content, delivering emails or crafting ad units. Great example below from Google’s own search ads.

The first unit is for Google Offers. It *of course* looks great and stands out: big branding, big imagery, etc.

The second is a little further down and is by Lonely Planet. The unit stands out because it is different and integrates ratings. The copy is action-oriented.

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Last week I wrote a post about the the balancing act of revenue versus user experience. These tug of wars appear all the time, for instance – while at eBay, I used to think a great deal about the trade-offs of SEO as compared to usability / design… tough decisions. And we see it now with LinkedIn (who recently became a public company) – whose web experience has shifted a bit towards revenue (suggested by my anecdotal, personal usage).

This is all a set up to the following screenshot of my Facebook homepage – which seems to have shifted Sponsored Posts above the Ticker and Birthday / Events alerts. Sponsored Posts are clearly the big revenue opportunity on the the homepage – and, by being above the Ticker, CPMs, conversions, etc all improve. Of course that affects interaction rates with the ticker and therefore my friends.

It’s always a balance. And it’s fascinating to watch.

This is a fun, light post from always-socially-creative Starbucks.
Starbucks is unveiling a new coffee brew (the Blonde Roast) tomorrow (January 12th). In an effort to promote the new roast, they have created a social campaign on Facebook and Twitter called “The Roast I Love”.

It’s clever because it’s simple and fun… and leverages social data. In short: users vote for their brew of choice via Facebook and that creates a mini-infographic of sorts:
- what your network drinks
- what your geography drinks
- what you gender prefers
- what Facebook fans are saying
- and what Twitter is saying

Clever. Relatively simple to create. And based on the activity stream – fans are engaging.

Editor’s note: Guest contributor Andrew Machado is the founder of Open Home Pro, which empowers real estate agents to give their clients a new type of experience when shopping for a home with just an iPad. Open Home Pro is a Dogpatch Labs Palo Alto company.

As I read Joseph Puopolo’s article regarding the WWE/The Rock and Social Media this weekend I was taken aback to see one key name missing from the article…Amy Jo Martin.  She carries with her 1.2 million Twitter Followers, has beaten breast cancer and most importantly she’s humanizing brands.

Amy founded Digital Royalty which works with great brands like Fox Sports, Nike, but most importantly people like Dwayne Johnson, Shaq and Dana White to improve their social media presence.  Her team has developed some extremely clever uses of social media over the years and I wanted to highlight three of them.

1.  Hunt For UFC

Over the last few years the UFC has not only grown it’s business ($465 million in ppv revenue in 2010), but if you look up their CEO on Twitter @danawhite you’ll see he is insanely active on twitter.  Nearly 12,000 tweets from him.  To put that into perspective that’s nearly 2x my Twitter volume and 3x Ryan’s.  

Why is he so active? Because Twitter is a platform that allows Dana to not only grow his business but it allows him to “humanize his brand“.

My favorite of their social media strategies is #hunt4UFC where they give away UFC merchandise and tickets in random locations simply by having Dana tweet out clues about where they are hiding.  The video clip below is especially powerful.  You get to see what happens within 60 seconds of the tweet hitting twitter.

2.  Shaq’s Retirement

A lot of people saw Shaq’s original video on Tout detailing his retirement.  In fact over 500k of you watched it within the first 3 hours, but of course the real magic behind all of this was Amy who is seen in the video above with Shaq before he drops the video.

My favorite part of Shaq’s retirement was not only did fans find out first, but he leverages social media to remove the red tape thats usually involved in an announcement like this.  Instead of seeing a press conference clip on Sportscenter, fans got to hear it first from the man on an overcast day in Miami.

3.  Team Bring It

Wait didn’t I just see that t-shirt on Facebook.  I uttered these words to myself as I watched The Rock roll on out to the WWE ring on RAW wearing his Boots To Asses shirt we had seen previously that morning on his Facebook page.

Previously and probably my favorite of The Rock’s social media innovations was when he took to YouTube to do a “shoot” interview about John Cena to increase buzz about their rivalry.  It’s filmed in a way that feels real, raw and resonated with viewers (500,000k).  It’s 11 minutes of pure unedited bliss.

As brands continue to adopt great tools like Instragram, Tout, Facebook and Twitter they’ll need to continue to find innovative ways to leverage each platform. Social Media presents brands with an entirely new, more visceral way to interact with their customer.

Be innovative.
Be real.
Humanize your brand.

If you read me regularly, you know that I have a major pet peeve around unoptimized (and often dysfunctional) mobile experiences. So often mobile is treated an extension of the web experience and that results in broken mobile experiences… and since so much of our content consumption is on mobile devices, the lack of attention to the mobile experience is both frustrating and foolish.

Great example here from the NBA (who I have had lots of social advice for!):

The NBA has 3,000,000+ Twitter followers.

40% of Twitter’s users access the service via mobile (not the web).

The NBA tweets a link to the newest pair of Nike Air Jordan 8.0 shoes:

Great promotion right? When you click on the link, the NBA Store automatically redirects all mobile traffic to a defaulted storefront / homepage. And thus the frustration: 40% of those who clicked the URL, with the hope of arriving on a specific piece of content, had to give up and exit.

Also funny, when you go the URL from your browser, you get another frustrating experience: a totally untargetted promotion (hello Canadian users!):

Amazon finds a promotional ad unit they like… and they stick to it. I’ve written before about Amazon effectively selling the “buy / create once, access anywhere” tagline. It’s simple and it speaks to:

Amazon being more open / compatible than most, and
Amazon’s content being portable – ‘don’t lose content you’ve already purchased’

Here is the promotion for the Kindle Cloud Reader – meaning purchases are accessible via browser, app, and Kindle. And the Cloud Reader itself is accessible anywhere the browser is … in other words, everywhere:

And here is Amazon’s Could Player unit:

Here is the original Kindle promotion:

Almost exactly two years ago, Facebook introduced a series of new ad units around gifting, polling, liking, etc. Two years later, here is a view of the new Facebook Bud Light campaign – which is an expanded unit and includes several social functions…. think of it as a miniaturized fan page: the unit contains / enables all of the core functionality a page does.

The single sponsored unit contains:

- Your friends who like the the page
- A link to the advertiser’s page
- Related posts
- A link to the advertiser’s album
- A larger-than-normal photo from the album
- Expandable likes and comments
- A like button
- Ability to comment in-line

After my rather public Netflix cancellation , I was lured into Hulu Prime with their Facebook Connect promotion: a free month of Hulu Prime if you connect your Hulu account to Facebook.

Smart for Hulu because it’s smart for me:
- Hulu Prime is a better product with Facebook Connect. Browse is better. Recommendations are better. And it is more fun.

- The value of me being socially connected is absolutely worth a free month to Hulu. Again, better data and virally shared content.

- It is an instant reward (of decent value) for a instant social share (of greater value). The moment I start my account, it is shared on Facebook and that alerts my network that I am a Hulu Prime user and that I got a free month (so they should too).

- … And the math obviously says that the cancellation rate must be far lower than the continuation rate.

Consequently, this is a better way for Hulu to run an introductory promotion (as compared to 25% or 1st month free) and it’s a more compelling experience for me (even better for Hulu).

Not entirely sure what to make of it but I am seeing an significant number of empty Apple ad units: “Test Advertisement: This confirms that test ads are running correctly”. It also (potentially) confirms that iAds is lacking advertiser supply? It is strange to see big, black, empty ad units across popular apps… particularly with a bold Apple logo beside each. You would think that, at a minimum, Apple would not display an ad unit or would run default ads to iTunes (and deliver a rev share). This strikes me as a bizarre user experience and a very public reflection of the iAds business:

I write a lot about Facebook Deals and I start each post with something along the lines of: I am not sure what Facebook Deals will become, but I give Facebook a lot of credit for the rate of innovation and their UI / UE treatments.

Facebook Deals continues to test new visual treatments (examples here and here)… and here is yet another clever, compelling one.

Facebook’s stance with Deals has been to overlay your social graph with your geography and your Facebook Places activity. They have done a good job merging those in the web experience… and here they do it via email. The first thing you see in the email is *not* the deal or the deal provider. It is the list of your friends (and their Facebook profile pictures) who have either liked the deal or the deal provider. Eventually it could of course be the friends who have visited the location, purchased the deal, etc (as we have seen in their online units

As your inbox gets more crowded -and marketers / brands fight for your time - this is a powerful way to capture your attention, improve conversion and tell a unique, differentiated story:

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