New APIs for Facebook Pages: Which Page Management Company Will Innovate First?
Following the heels of its announcement of Timeline for Pages at its fMC event, Facebook has released a new set of APIs to help brands create more compelling stories and manage relationships more effectively. On March 14, Facebook announced the release of a new set of that reaffirm its stance of allowing third-party developers to play the leading role in helping brands leverage its platform. The new APIs will allow brands to do the following:
- Manage a Page’s milestones
- Manage a Page’s messages
- Edit a Page’s attributes and About section
- Set a custom Page apps image
- Hide (or unhide) a Page post
For marketers and agencies that manage multiple pages, the new APIs provide a way of streamlining the process of building a brand’s timeline and managing relationships. However, most brands will not be building upon these APIs directly. Instead, most brands will look to their page management vendors (such as Vitrue, Buddy Media, Shoutlet, or SpredFast, to name a few of the big fish) to release an update that integrates these new APIs as features into their existing products. NOTE: At the time of this post, none of the previously named companies have posted an update about integrating these new APIs.
The race to release that update will be a very interesting one to watch. It’s been a while since Facebook has made a platform announcement as significant as Timeline for Pages, especially one that is geared specifically for brands. In the meantime, countless page management companies have sprouted up all over the landscape, a sure sign the industry is becoming crowded. Unique differentiators among these companies are harder to come by these days, and as a result, we’ve reached a point in which most page management tools perform the same basic functions: publish, monitor, and report.
That’s why as a marketer, I couldn’t be more excited about these new APIs. Sure, they significantly increase Facebook’s value as a platform for building relationships with its consumers through storytelling and direct, one-to-one communication. That’s a given. What’s more exciting to me about this update by Facebook, however, is that it allows me to gauge how dedicated these companies are to innovating and iterating. Will they be the first to market with features that leverage these new APIs, or will they let a competitor innovate and simply follow suit? Will the big boys (I’m looking at you Vitrue, Buddy Media, and Context Optional) flex their engineering muscles, or will a smaller company prove to be more agile? Let the most nimble and innovative company win!
Social Media
Mobile Phones Key To Researching Brand Conversations
What gets people talking about brands? Hmm…Chief Strategy Officer Brandon Murphy describes how we’re going to find out.
“22squared is an agency with expertise in consumer advocacy and conversation generation around a brand. Insights from their previous research, titled ‘Why People Talk: 8 Ways to Inspire Conversation Around Your Brand,’ can be found on Slideshare…”
Read the full story here: PSFK.com
Talkable Work Strategy 4: Encourage Play
We just sent five of our key thinkers here at 22squared to grown-up spring break: the SXSW Interactive Conference.
They came back buzzing about gamification and the ‘game layer’ that will soon become a part of everyday life. “Checking in” on Foursquare is no longer a novelty, and savvy brands now harness the power of games and play to incite word of mouth. Which leads us to our 4th talkable work strategy, Encourage Play.
What is play, really? It’s part of our human nature–we’re inherently competitive, and when we engage in competition, however large or small, we want to win and we want to make sure people KNOW that we’ve won. And, as Charlie Sheen shows us, winning = talk. That’s all well and good, you’re telling yourself, but what does that have to do with making my brand talk?
It’s pretty simple, actually: if you give your consumers a platform for competition, reward them for their efforts and make it easy for them to share their victory, they’ll want to spread the word.
Here are some of my favorite examples of brands that are harnessing play in effective, innovative ways:
Puma: As I said before, it’s human nature…people are competitive, and they want to win. So Puma introduced the life scoreboard as a way for people to win in ways they’d never been able to quantify before. They could keep score in all aspects of life: who’s the better cook? who’s worse, reality stars or socialites? What’s going to prevail, me or my hangover? They turned life into one big “quasi-serious” game, and gave consumers a sharable online platform to announce their victories.
Mini Getaway: Mini staged a week long virtual scavenger hunt through Stockholm, with a very real reward; a new car. Players searched for an augmented reality “Mini” via GPS, captured its location with a photo, and got out of there as fast as they could, before their opponents could “steal” it by taking a picture at the same location. The player with the Mini on their phone at the end of the week was the victor, and in the process, Mini got an entire city talking about their brand.
AT SXSW, Seth Priebatsch (Chief Ninja at SCVNGR) gave a fantastic talk on the implications of a game layer on society at large. If you ever have an extra hour (yeah right, I know), watch it here on the SXSW Interactive site.
Brand Planning