Facebook introduced Timeline for Pages and it’s the largest, most significant design changes for brands. From now till end of March, brands get to preview and curate their Timeline in a safe environment that is only visible to its Page admins. This curation period allows brands to get familiarized with the features and to understand what works best for them. Brands can publish their Timeline anytime until March 30^th 2012, after which it will automatically become visible to all.

Facebook Brands Timeline Video

So, why did Facebook introduced such radical changes for Brands? Well, there is a host of motivation driving this change – from creating a consistent design for personal profiles/brand to enhancing brand experience, to setting a more potent ground for its advertising revenue – we think the changes are a great step ahead for marketers to create richer brand experiences and deeper connections with its fans.

Overall Look and Feel

You will notice from the first glance of the Timeline that it is highly visual. The Page is no longer just a news feed providing timely updates. Rather, it’s a brand’s storybook – offering depth and richness in content that is visually driven. From the cover photo to larger posts, brands can truly create their own stamp of presence with clever and consistent use of imageries.

Summary of Changes

Here is a quick summary of the key features and the implications to your Facebook strategy.

Cover photo – As Facebook Product Director of Ads Gokul Rajaram says, “its goal is to symbolize what an organization is all about. For a restaurant it could be a popular menu item, a band could display album cover art, and a business could show a picture of their customers using their product.”There are specific guidelines on what should NOT be in the cover photo as recommended by Facebook.

· Landing Page – There is no default landing page when an user arrives at your Page. However, according to our partners at BuddyMedia, you can still “likegate” but moving forward it will be less of a strategy.

· Page Apps - Apps have been relocated from the left navigation sidebar to the right side of the About section. While they appear with thumbnail photos instead of as text links, they’re overshadowed by the massive cover above. Marketers need to figure out how attention can be drawn toward the apps as well as the content on the Timeline. That being said, apps will own a bigger space on their own page allowing marketers to fit in more than the previous constraint.

· Messages – This function enables users to send direct, private messages to the Page. This can be used as a new customer service channel where you can address users’ concerns without having to discuss issues publicly on your Page’s wall. Pages cannot proactively send messages, you can only respond to users that have already contacted you.

· Pinned Post – You can select any post (old or new) to be pinned at the top left spot of the Timeline feed for seven days at a time. Pinning can be used to direct users to an important promotional app, show off a special photo, or display a timely status update. The feature gives you significant control what visitors to a Page see first

· Friend Activity – Located at the top right of the Timeline, visitors will see the faces and number of their friends that have liked your Page along with one most recent Friend comment of your brand. Since the post is prominent and content relevant (friend’s opinion), you want to ensure that negative comments are addressed and controlled.

· Milestones – You can select to publish special Milestones stories such as founding date, product launch dates, or achievements such as getting your 1,000,000^th fan. According to TechCrunch, “these updates are likely favored by the EdgeRank news feed visibility algorithm, and may receive more impressions in the news feed and more prominence on Timeline than standard posts”

· Reach generator - Today, content posted to Facebook Pages reach only 16 percent of fans. It allows Brands to pay money to guarantee that your posts get to at least 75 percent of your fans each month, doubling average reach. This means that engagement will more than double as more fans are engaging and exposing these Posts to their friends (who are not fans of the Pages).

· Premium Ad platform – On top of the old Marketplace ads, brands have an extended menu to buy the attention of their users. The catch is – the ads pieces are based on the Page posts. This means that brands need to strike a balance with their content value of postings with a “ad friendly” copy. It works well for both brands and fans as the main focus is on fan engagement with the value of the content in these ad-post pieces.

To further deep dive into the details of each of these feature such as the mechanics, dimensions requirements and case study examples, download our Facebook Timeline Updates presentation.

The third and final day of the iMedia Agency Summit was packed with presentations on digital marketing outside of the norm and some roundtable discussions. Since this was a looooooong and packed day, I’ll use bullet points and focus on my takeaways to keep this readable.

Nielsen:

• advertising is not embracing Internet use as fast as consumers
• questions that marketers ask:
  • “Did the right people see my message?” — importance of data and measurement
  • “Did my message impact them?” — importance of listening (monitor communities) and asking (brand health tracking, online customer relations)
  • “Did they buy more as a result?” — intro to Nielsen AdEffectiveness

David Smith, CEO of Mediasmith, “The Medium is the Metric: Using Social and Other New Media to Track Campaigns”

• social is good for: graphical ads, real-time search, data (map of connections), consumer conversations
• how to track:
  • setup tools prior to campaign – take note of parameters, e.g. dates
  • keywords – brand/product, competitors, vertical, campaign tagline
  • plan for follow-up action
• tips: front-end planning, progress planning (before-during-after), damage control

Kim Walker, SILVER, “The Rise of the Silver Surfer”

• “Population ageing is unprecedented, a process without parallel in the history of humanity” – UN World Population Report, 2007
• in APAC, 2008-2018, ages 0-14: -6.5%, 50+: +33.5% reaching about 1 billion people
• not all are the same: demographics, culture, gender, attitudes
• APAC Aug 2009: 18.5% of all surfers are older than 50 years old, more than 100 minutes in online gaming per month
• homepage viewing time 42% longer, look at same content but for longer
• errors made: 20-50% more
• less likely to register (Forrester, Q3 2007)
• Web 2.0 technology can distract, but users embrace creating/sharing/community
• 55+ and older: 16.5 million on Facebook (fastest growing segment), 204 minutes per month on MySpace, 70 hours per month with 1.2 million active users on Second Life
• Baidu created 123Baidu with clustered search for older people
• degree of age-related: low >– importance of web as channel — what web is used for — how web is used –> high

Roundtable discussion: “The Social Media Effect”

• agencies need to invest in social monitoring, which will lead to sell-in
• objective is important, e.g. brand management, crisis control, SEO, etc.
• social networking as CRM tool –> use CRM metrics, no short-term goals
• every topic will become a social network due to “hyper-local” nature
• apps: games, polls, competitions, in China – social commerce
• many variations of the same engine, e.g. skinning, to contextualise to specific audience
• repurpose same app on different geography / networks (Friendster, MySpace, etc) / platforms (Web, mobile, iPhone, etc)
• app’s virality can depend on building virality into it, e.g. Mafia Wars
• social media is also paid media, e.g. Farmville bought ads on Facebook
• Best Buy – allows in-store staff to respond to customers through Twitter
• enable advocates, convert critics to advocates
• track sentiment of competitors, reach in different networks

Greg Paull, R3, “The Future and Getting Paid for it”

• ask clients what they want
• satisfaction = performance / expectations, need to address expectations
• 38% of advertisers cite creativity as most positive aspect of digital agencies (26% – knowledge, <5% – analytics)
• 44% cite lack of ROI as barrier to increasing digital budget (42% – marketing understanding, 41% – understanding agency)
• 69% are not cautious about spending due to current market instability
• new agency model:
  • consultative – e.g. Meikao in China: work directly with client’s CEO, flat fee, sales incentive
  • collaborative – e.g. Coca-Cola China: created own agency to bring people from different agencies together, no ego, common goal
  • creative – e.g. Mars: agency in China spent five days in US office, ran ideas of marketing director directly
  • cashed up – differentiate on results not price, seek out new relationships
• market your brand as if it was your own client

Balasingam-Chow Yu Hui, with Rueben Anthony, is representing XM Asia Pacific at the iMedia Southeast Asia Agency Summit in Phuket, Thailand. The conference is on 5-7 October at the Indigo Pearl. Stay tuned to find out what’s happened at the conference.

In my view, the iMedia Southeast Asia Agency Summit started proper today. It consisted of some presentations, the keynote address, and a panel discussion — all in the space of four hours in the morning.

During the agency breakfast, we heard two presentations, one from MediaRing Talk, the other from Eyeblaster.

MediaRing Talk:

• besides its telephony service (like Skype), it also has mobile advertising solutions – banners, skins
• case study: Singapore Airlines – 4.26% click-through rate, 2.9% conversion rate
• (what was not discussed thoroughly is that MediaRing Talk’s users are mainly in India)

Eyeblaster

• four new technologies: tabbed ads (display video, text, downloads, etc. in a tabbed banner), dynamic data (e.g. for airlines to pull the latest fares from their booking engines), behavioural targeting (ad’s content that is displayed is based on how you interacted with it previously), and smart versioning (create new versions of the same ad through a non-programmatic user interface (like multivariate testing, but for ads))
• new metric: dwell time – average number of seconds a user is engaged with an ad; sort of similar to how TV is measured, so it’s more easily understood by traditional marketers
• 2008 worldwide trend: 0.14% click-through rate, 0.32% conversion rate
• rich media increases conversion by 2.5x
• optimization increases conversion by 1.5x

Next up was the keynote by Randall Rothernberg, president of the Interactive Advertising Bureau. In his presentation, he listed seven reasons for digital marketers to join the IAB Southeast Asia:

1. networking
2. intimate association with customers through research
3. government lobbying
4. training and development
5. develop standards
6. IAB as a platform to market itself
7. stay ahead of trends

Benefits of joining the IAB include:

• committee participation
• webinars
• professional development
• networking
• access to IAB products and services
• discounts

(Note: I am not necessarily advocating IAB nor do I receive any kind of kickback for listing the above.)

Randall continued with his second keynote, “What marketers REALLY want from digital media!”

• Marketers face the following challenges:
  • measurement standardisation
  • cross-media measurement
  • antiquated media-mix modeling (e.g. “we’ll buy ads in Yahoo and Facebook)
  • overuse / misapplication of direct response standards and methodologies
  • government regulations
  • creative shabbiness
• Marketers seek new insights capabilities (82% want consumer insights, 80% behavioural targeting)
  • Source: Marketing and Mobile Ecosystem 2010, arranged by Pricewaterhouse Coopers
• Marketers increasingly valuing media and media strategy
  • 58% think direct partnerships with media are more important than going through an agency
  • 60% think media should be integrated with full service agencies or build up their own (26% think media and creative should remain separate)
• Marketers want “social”, “dialogue / conversation”, “intimacy”
• Interactive advertising has ignored creativity, e.g.
  • disincentivizes greatness (e.g. no more names on doors)
  • fails to penalise mediocrity
• Interactive marketing revolution = creativity + data + analytics + digital media, i.e.
  • consumer insights
  • boundary-less creative
  • conversation and community
  • 360-degree embrance
  • metrics that matter
  • true behavioural targeting

Immediately after the keynotes, we dived straight into the keynote power panel, with Randall as the moderator. The panel was entitled, “How should agencies organise themselves to avoid extinction”. However, the panelists pretty much discussed the problem, rather than coming up with solutions. As a result, I noticed that most attendees had zoned out about halfway through and were more busy doing their own things.

For me, I thought that maybe there could have been a few intelligent audience questions, but we were all suffering from lethargy already and looking forward to lunch, thus the silence when Randall asked for questions from the floor.

The afternoon was spent at our recreational activities (snorkeling, golf, archery), in spite of the rain. But I won’t bore you with those details.

Balasingam-Chow Yu Hui, with Rueben Anthony, is representing XM Asia Pacific at the iMedia Southeast Asia Agency Summit in Phuket, Thailand. The conference is on 5-7 October at the Indigo Pearl. Stay tuned to find out what’s happened at the conference.

It’s the first day of the iMedia Southeast Asia Agency Summit, here in rainy Phuket. Yes, the rain has been off-and-on, but so far, that hasn’t put too much of a dampener on spirits, unless anyone was craving for the beach.

Today’s event started at 5pm with a “One Minute Match Up”. All of the agency delegates sat at their assigned seats, while members of the media and publishers moved around the table, kind of like musical chairs. The idea was that the delegate and media member would have one minute to get to know each other, exchange namecards, that sort of thing. Every minute, there would be a bell and a recorded voice, saying, “Please move.”

Of course, few people actually stuck to the rules. One minute was probably too short for a proper introduction. Nonetheless, in the hour allotted for this session, I got to meet a few folks, half of whom were already familiar with XM (yay!).

A cocktail reception followed, where we could mingle more casually and catch up with old friends or make new ones. Later, we were ushered to a ballroom for dinner, sponsored by Tribal Fusion. There was a short presentation about what Tribal Fusion does (it’s an advertising network that sells advertising solutions across content verticals, it’s key difference being that it also scans those content to better understand the websites in those verticals), and then the buffet dinner commenced. Another round of drinks followed after that.

Today was a short day, with delegates arriving almost the whole day. But the next two days should be packed with keynotes, discussions, and fun!

Balasingam-Chow Yu Hui, with Rueben Anthony, is representing XM Asia Pacific at the iMedia Southeast Asia Agency Summit in Phuket, Thailand. The conference is on 5-7 October at the Indigo Pearl. Stay tuned to find out what’s happened at the conference.

It’s time for the annual Singapore F1 night race, and this year, it’s XM’s last chance to watch it “live” from our office. From the 26th floor of Shaw Towers, we have an awesome view of the track near City Hall and along the Esplanade bridge. About 10 of us came back to savor the moment.

Of course, we also had the TV with us so that we wouldn’t miss any spectacular crashes — up close!

And it wouldn’t be much of a night without food. There was sushi, McNuggets, pop corn, wine, vodka… and a whole roast duck!

Big thanks to the admin team for the big spread of fruits today! *nom* *nom* *nom*