Inspired Thinking

Facebook Home: Implications for Brands

April 15th, 2013

By King Hill

The world’s largest social platform, Facebook, has been built around the mission of “giving people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.” Facebook is now expanding its mission to make smartphones built around your connections, not your apps. In this post, we’ll get Marcus Thomas’ Natalie DeGrandis’s take on what this means for Brands.

On April 4, Facebook announced Home, a software integration with Android that puts Facebook services front and center. A suite of Facebook apps, Home overhauls a user’s smartphone device, turning it into a Facebook phone.

Today Facebook Home will be available for free download through the Google Play store   for four Android phones including Samsung Galaxy S III, the Samsung Galaxy S4 and the Samsung GALAXY Note. A fifth phone, the HTC First, will also be available for purchase with the Home software already installed.

Each month, Facebook will be updating the software, as well as making Home accessible   for more smartphones.

FEATURES

• Cover Feed
  • The most prominent feature of Home is the cover feed, which overhauls the mobile device’s home screen and the lock screen, essentially replacing the home screen with Facebook
• News Feed.
  • Cover feed will provide updates on what friends are doing without launching an app or even unlocking the phone. Facebook has confirmed that updates and photos from Pages will be supported in cover feed.
• Chat Heads
  • Chat heads enables users to chat with friends as they use other apps, such as email, the Internet and even Twitter. When a user receives a message from a friend, a chat head – a picture of your friend’s face – will
    appear on the user’s screen. Chat heads will appear even if users are communicating via
    traditional texting.
• Notifications
  • Through Home, notifications will be more visually appealing, enticing users to re-engage with the social platform more frequently.

IMPLICATIONS FOR BRANDS

• Engaging Content
  According to the recent study by Flurry Analytics, a consumer spends an average of two hours, 38 minutes per day on smartphones and tablets. 80 percent of that time is spent inside apps and 18 percent specifically in the Facebook app. With Home, users will automatically launch into their cover feed, making it the primary place for engagement. This reinforces the importance of producing engaging content that is easy to interact with directly in the user’s feed.
• Visual Appeal
  Engaging images will become more important than ever as images will dominate even more real estate in a user’s cover feed. According to Facebook, the following stories will be supported by photos in a user’s cover feed:
  • Updating your profile photo
  • Updating your cover photo
  • Open graph stories with user-generated photos
  • Liking a photo
  • Tagging someone on a photo
  • Commenting on a photo of someone
  • Sharing a photo
  • Non-photo stories include Updating your status, Place check-in with a message, Sharing URLs by clicking the “share” button on another story, and Posting a URL from your Timeline.

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Research Technologies: reading the pulse of your target audience

March 22nd, 2013

By King Hill

The emergence and growing influence of digital technologies has created a surge of new marketing research platforms, to meet quick-response, behavioral and mobile research needs.

The good news is that this demand is being met. The bad news is the demand is ever-changing and the solutions will require constant exploration and evaluation. To assist in this on-going challenge, we’ve asked Marcus Thomas’ Audience Insights Manager Jessica Folger and Associate Research Director Edwige Winans to provide a concise review of some new platforms they’re employing for our clients:

Quick Turn Solutions

“For those situations where you need 24-48 response and you’re on a tight budget, there are many options for quick turn research,”Winans said, “but the three below are solid choices built on solid platforms and utilize sound methodologies.”

Marcus Thomas’ research team uses these and other technologies to produce audience profiles, which help shape creative, touchpoints and engagement strategies.

QuikTake — For quick quantitative surveys of 20 questions, we can get 100 responses in five hours or 1,000 responses in up to two days. The panel sample is balanced to the census, representative of the U.S. adult population. QuickTake is great for concept testing, brand awareness and perception and ongoing tracking; and for market sizing.

AnswerTap — This is a great video-conferencing solution that allows researchers to get one-on-one with respondents, whether it’s one or a hundred. Great tool for understanding consumer preferences or behaviors or to validate assumptions, ideas or to explore a topic.

GutCheck — If you’re looking to validate a concept or need broad reaction to specific questions, GutCheck is an emerging platform that give us quick response across a big pool of potential respondents. It’s chat based and secure, so it can be used to explore new concepts.  Typically, the chats are 30- to 45-minutes in duration and there is a 25 participants minimum. Again, great tool for evaluating ideas, concepts and gaining insights.

“Keep in mind, while these platforms are connected to large reputable panels, they’re best suited for easy-to-reach audience groups, e.g., general population segments,  rather than niche segments.”

Behavioral Tracking

“It’s always important to watch what people do rather than just listen to what they say they do,” Winans says. Which is why she, and others, love interactive tracking approaches.

“There are a variety of tracking technologies available. We are watching ZQ Intelligence; it’s a promising solution. It relies on a panel of respondents who meet specific criteria. The panelists sign on to allow tracking of their activity on the PC. (Table and mobile versions of this are in beta.) Tracking takes place for 30-60 days and it’s a great complement to self-reporting techniques.”

“Tracking technologies are great for gathering audience insights on where and how they engage,” Winans says. “They’re also great for assessing digital advertising effectiveness.”

Mobile

On the mobile research front, there are a number of companies serving this market, with more soon to enter the fray. Most provide capabilities to survey via SMS, browser or app, depending on the mobile usage and adoption of your target consumer.

Folger says they’re particularly useful for qualitative work, including diaries, ethnography studies or communities, with opportunities to collect multimedia content.  “Say you wanted to learn about the skincare habits of college girls. You could have them take photos of the products in their bathroom, and then have a roommate videotape their skincare routine.  There’s so much to be learned through the non-verbal, and applications like these really get an audience engaged.”

Location-based mobile research is also maturing, with GPS technologies allowing us to understand where people go, the routes they take, and the amount of time they spend at a given location. “Locately is one partner we’ve been watching closely. They are really making a mark in consumer location analytics.”

Folger suggests you can also use geo-fencing technologies to ensure, say, a survey is only sent to people who are inside a convention center for a specific trade show.

So why mobile over more traditional research methodologies? Mobile technologies are incredibly useful for capturing real-time insights, because you can engage with users while they are in the middle of an experience. There are, obviously, fewer memory recall issues; no need to be physically present; and you can get easier access to hard-to-reach samples, like Hispanics, men 18-24 and Physicians.

“Mobile research really helps create a 360 degree view of a consumer/customer by combining the ‘who’, ‘what’, ‘where’, ‘why’ and ‘when,’” Folger says. “We can gather a lot of information passively without having to ask, and we get more candor, because the respondent is using his or her own device.”

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Facebook Briefing: News Feed Changes

March 20th, 2013

By King Hill

This briefing was kindly provided by Monina Wagner, social media community manager at Marcus Thomas. It is a follow up to an earlier post announcing Facebook’s News Feed Change.

Introduction

In order to foster relationships with fans, brands must remain current in the always-changing social space. Facebook recently announced several changes that will affect how users view their News Feeds. The platform is placing greater value on images, as more and more content posted to the site is visual. The News Feed changes have several implications that will impact how brands manage their communities. Facebook is rolling out the changes slowly. While we cannot yet predict the extent to which these changes will impact brands, they do provide several implications that can help guide content to further engage consumers.

Consistent Design

Key Change – Facebook’s redesign will now position posts in a similar manner, whether the platform is accessed by desktop, tablet or mobile. The look is clean and simple, unifying the Facebook experience across devices.

Change Implication — Posts will now dominate a user’s News Feed. This will give users – and the brands they “Like” – wider image space. Brands will now need to consider how to leverage the dominant design space in the News Feed.

Multiple Feeds

Key Change – There will no longer be just one feed for all of a user’s friends and Likes. A user will now be able to focus on stories from people and pages they care most about through separate feeds.

Implications

Users will choose how content is filtered and can toggle among several feeds including “All Friends,” “Following” for public pages like those of brands and public figures, “Music” and “Games.”

Potential benefit: Consumers may discover more content from brands through a more prominent “Following” Facebook feed.

Potential disadvantage: Fans may visit the “Following” feed less frequently than other feeds. Because brand content will no longer be disruptive, brands must think more carefully about the value they deliver to their audience to drive them to toggle over.

Bigger Everything

Key Change – Larger, vibrant images will now share what’s most important in each user’s life. As with the introduction of Timeline, brands can leverage this opportunity to tell their story in a highly visual way.

Change Implications

• Greater emphasis on images will place high expectation on brands to produce and share eye-catching photos.
• Page Likes will display the brand page’s Cover Photo in the News Feed.
• Photos will appear with status updates (text) laid over the image.
• Third-party video will now be treated like native Facebook video, allowing full width viewing
• Brands will have to utilize high-quality images in larger (55 2px wide) sizes.
• Community managers must evaluate how fans consume, and engage with, various types of content.

ADDENDUM – This week Facebook officially announced improvements to its Timeline, enhancing user experience. All posts will now be positioned on the right side of a user’s Timeline, with photos, music and other activity on the left. In addition, users may organize their interests, such as “Music,” “Books” and “TV Shows,” and showcase them on their Timeline. In keeping with its move towards a cleaner design, this new Timeline has a more streamlined layout. Facebook has not yet stated whether the Timeline changes will affect brands.

There will no longer be just one feed for all of a user’s friends and Likes. A user will now be able to focus on stories from people and pages they care most about through separate feeds.

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