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Beta testing has begun for a new Facebook feature, Facebook Questions, which allows users to ask and answer questions via the social media network.

The Questions product is strongly reminiscent of Yahoo! Answers, whererin users exchange questions and answers by posting to message boards.

Currently only 1% of Facebook users are able to access the testing version of Questions, with Facebook planning an eventual universal implementation of the feature if it proves to be a success.

Users will be able to ask Facebook Questions in a variety of ways: by updating their statuses, via the search field, or by using a new dashboard specifically developed for Questions. Popular Questions will be able to be identified by user-added category tags for ease of reference.

One might think that asking questions on a social media platform would personalise the task of online information-gathering, with users going to their friends for answers instead of the whole of the Internet. Not so – every question posted via the new feature will be entirely public. No exceptions allowed.

Then again, this is Facebook. User privacy is not its forte.

Beyond giving Facebook users access to the collective wisdom of their 500 million plus online brethren, the upcoming format will present new opportunities for using social media in business.

A brand’s Facebook fan page will be enabled with the Questions feature – so expect to see Coke and McDonalds asking and answering their way to real-time consumer research and viral marketing in the near future.

At least they’ll probably be giving away freebies in exchange for answers.

Facebook’s casual attitude toward its users’ privacy is not recent news. However, security specialist Ron Bowes has shown just how shockingly easy it is to snap up user information from Facebook.

Bowes has set up a website after crawling through the Facebook online directory. The open access directory lists all the users who have their profile security preferences set to public. Facebook enacted a universal privacy reset last year, enabling both search engines and netizens to access the profile pages of its users.

Despite the backlash from privacy-conscious users and consumer rights advocates, some members of Facebook remain unaware that their private information has been released online. Or had tried to reset their profiles to private, but found the process too complicated.

As a result, the Facebook open directory contains 171 million entries, relating to more than 100 million individual users. Bowes compiled all this information into a torrent that can be downloaded from his website. The torrent file itself contains user account names, dates of birth, addresses, phone numbers and each user’s profile page.

Yet given Facebook’s sketchy history with user privacy, this is hardly surprising. In January, the site’s co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg declared that with the advent of social media, the age of privacy is over. His sentiment is that people have more important things to worry about then who can access their user information.

Given that Facebook boasts 500 million users (and still growing), it appears Zuckerberg may be right.

So the first question is: have you changed your privacy setting on Facebook yet?

If not, then the second question is: is it because you don’t actually care?

For full details on this story, click here.

Apparently there was an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico little while ago. A big one.

Admittedly, I’m a little out of touch with current events, unless of course they relate to search engine marketing. Which is how I came to hear rumours of this alleged oil spill – according to articles on online marketing sites, BP caused a massive environmental disaster on May 19 with the accidental detonation of one of their offshore drilling rigs.

What interests me as an Internet marketer is how BP is fighting the public relations fallout of their Gulf catastrophe with an extremely aggressive online PR campaign. The oil giant’s level of commitment to the damage control of their brand name online is extraordinarily comprehensive.

For a start, the BP website has undergone a revamp, with the creation of a new section dedicated to the disaster. There are daily news updates and blog posts, press releases and videos, and the interface capability for site visitors to share information on Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter.

BP’s Facebook page is also being utilised as part of a social media initiative dedicated to minimising bad press. The company has also bought the keyword phrase “oil spill” in Google AdWords, so when a user of Google.com enters that search query, a PPC ad runs linking back to the BP website.

A quick look at the page’s source code reveals that even some SEO work has been done to optimise the site’s relevant keywords.

After looking around the BP site, I’m forced to concede that the company’s apparent ongoing dedication to cleaning up their spilled oil is impressive – almost as impressive as the effort they’re putting in to make sure that everyone knows about it.

Buzz at the moment is on how Amazon has thrown its hat into the social networking arena with the online shopping giant’s recent acquisition of patent for a ‘social networking system’. 

How Amazon plans to use the patent is The Question. Its social network patent was approved by the United States Patent and Trademark Office last Tuesday, meaning that Amazon may be planning to offer similar services to social media users as those provided by Facebook, MySpace, Google Buzz and Friendster.

The patent “provides a mechanism for a user to selectively establish contact relationships or connections with other users” and “automatically notify users of personal information updates made by their respective contacts.” Ring any bells?

Back to The Question: what Amazon will do with this patent? The history is that Amazon planned to develop a network service (PlanetAll) which it acquired in 1998. However this was shut down after two years in 2000.

What Amazon may plan to do now is a little mistimed considering the level of competition in the current market. Pre-MySpace and Facebook, Amazon had the technology and the concepts but it culled PlanetAll and absorbed its features into Amazon’s Friends and Favorites technology.

Does Amazon hope to compete on a large scale with the likes of Facebook and Friendster? Would it seek legal avenues to enforce its rights to the patent, trying to make other networks change their current models?

This is unlikely in my opinion. It’s more likely that Amazon would use it to build its own social network based around its products and services, in order to benefit the sharing of information and increase sales.

With so many different types of social networks around at the moment and the many more we will surely see in the future, each changing how web users interact and find information, I am keen to see what eventuates and to find out what Amazon can bring to the social networking table.

A new social media company Syncapse has released a report on their research on the true value of a Facebook fan, by asking 4,000 social media fans of top brands such as Coca Cola, Red Bull, McDonald’s and PlayStation.

The objective of the report was to try and put a monetary figure on the value of a Facebook Fan. In summary, the main points found:

• An average fan is worth about $136.38
• On average, fans spend an extra $71.84 they would not otherwise spend on products they describe themselves as fans of, compared to those who are not fans.
• Fans are 28 percent more likely than non-fans to continue using a specific brand.
• Fans are 41 percent more likely than non-fans to recommend a product they are a fan of to their friends.

With social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter, the number of fans and followers have become a big numbers game, and almost a competition between businesses. However with almost anything, quality over quantity will trump.

How can you measure the quality of fans or followers?

• Updating and evaluating fans on Facebook by looking into their user information such as demographics and like can help you determine if they are in the same industry as you, or would be interested in your products or service.
• Ask questions and feedback from fans and followers. You not only are actively engaging with your current/potential clients, this will help  you determine how active and eager they are.
• Google Analytics is also a great way to track the number of users coming through the referring sites of Facebook/Twitter. If you are an e-commere store, specific tracking on your shopping cart system can be set up so you can specifically track sales from social media sites.

There has been a lot of fuss about the new privacy policies defaulted by the most visited site on the web.  And there have been a lot of mainstream media articles and blog posts.  Lots of users have been planning to leave because of this, and lots of people have left because of this.  One group have even organised a day to quit!

It has been confirmed that on the 31st of May over 30000 users left and deleted their accounts.  Although this is but a ripple in the Facebook ocean of founder Mark Zuckerberg’s 500 million minions, it sends a clear message that people aren’t happy.

The main reason for the disgruntled user base is largely due to a new privacy dashboard that resets all privacy settings.  Zuckerberg has said that any setting applied to Facebook accounts would also be applied retrospectively, and that any new features or elements added to the Facebook site would automatically default to that privacy setting.

Although indirectly, Zuckerberg is basically saying that we have no rights, and that anything they want to change and will change without either the knowledge or the approval of the users.  From a business perspective, this makes sense.  Microsoft installs updates every week on my computer and the changes that are made are both unknown to me, and could potentially threaten my security and personal information.

So if you think about this logically, if Zuckerberg hid these settings, and told no one that they were being implemented and classified as a policy update, these would potentially go unnoticed and unknown.

Also from a user’s perspective, this change has in a strange way turned out to be a positive.  It has made the security features known to most users, and through mainstream media many more users now know about the update and the security settings.

The competition for social media supremacy online is heating up between Google and Facebook, as both are realising the potential long term revenue stream of that market.

The Basics

Google created Google Friend Connect to allow people to become a member of a network. But the benefits of using this service were not as clear cut. Then came Google Buzz, which again was integrated with Gmail but has not been widely adopted. Then came Google Wave which would allow complete engagement with Google profiles and most websites.

Facebook Connect allows you to leave a comment on any sites that have this function enabled. If someone decides to leave a comment, it will copy the profile picture and then provide a link to your profile on Facebook.

Social E-Commerce

The next step is obviously doing business via the web of social networks. Based on Forrester reports, there are 5 eras of social media, with the final step set to begin in 2011. This is termed “social commerce”, where social networks become part of the buying process.

Virtual products are profitable (Facebook gifts, smartphone applications, elements from the game Second Life). The market has the potential to exceed $1 billion in just the USA alone. China’s larger population and social networks is worth and estimated $5 billion.

Streamlining the Social Media Buying Process

The next step is for Google and Facebook to create simple e-commerce platforms for anyone to purchase any product with a one-click stop shop process like Amazon.

The only thing I would be concerned about is security, which needs to be more secure than it is right now.

Would social network would you feel more comfortable purchasing products over, the Facebook platform or the Google platform? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

A new search engine known as ‘Openbook’ has come about on the World Wide Web, collecting data from Facebook users which have been made public. It collates Facebook information, focusing on status updates, and allows it to be searchable on the Openbook site.

Users of this new search tool can type in a certain keyword or phrase, such as “hate my boss” in the ‘Search Facebook Updates’ field, and a list of results for all those Facebook users who had updated their statuses with that phrase will be generated in what seems like a never ending list…WOW!

As with many of the recent changes to Facebook privacy settings, the newest updates have made it very confusing and also very complicated for users to determine what is private and what is not to the online public. Many users also agree that the privacy rules are changing too often on Facebook, and reading all the fine print becomes annoying and time-consuming.

If you are worried about your privacy settings with your Facebook account, you can use the tool ReclaimPrivacy.org which shows you what is public about your profile and shows you how to secure your privacy settings easily.

On the Openbook website, the investors claim the whole site is a “parody” with no relationship to Facebook, but their main goal from this website is to “get Facebook to restore the privacy of this information, so that this website and others like it will no longer work.”

The latest comScore figures show that in the first quarter of 2010, Facebook became one of the largest display advertisers on the web. It served about 176.3 billion ads compared to Yahoo who could only serve 131.6 billion banner ads. These figures were only measured on display ads within the company website and not through external networks.

According to The Wall Street Journal,

By revenue, Facebook has a long way to go to catch up to its more established rivals. The social-networking site earned more than $500 million in revenue in 2009 and is forecasting revenue of more than $1 billion in 2010, according to people familiar with the matter. Yahoo earned $6.5 billion in revenue in 2009, mostly from advertising.
Still, Facebook served more ads as people spent more time on the site and loaded more pages. The growth also reflects increased demand from both small and large advertisers, says comScore Chief Marketing Officer Linda Abraham.

Although this is still early stages for Facebook in terms of being a proven advertiser that converts, there are a growing number of small businesses that have invested into it for promotional purposes, and affiliate marketers have also invested a budget into it as the site’s audience continues to increase. Similar to the early stages of Google Adsense, the cost of advertising is still cheap so the opportunity to run a successful campaign is cost effective.

For more information on how E-web Marketing can help you create a successful online campaign that will help a cost effective return on investment, contact us now.

A recent advertising effectiveness study released by Nielsen and Facebook outline a positive relationship between earned brand awareness (naturally earned traffic) and paid media (such as sponsored Ads on Facebook). The study found that both paid and earned media can’t be planned separately just like Google Adwords and organic traffic (through SEO).

When developing the strategy, marketers and agencies should consider:

• How will the paid media investment drive earned media volume?
• Who will be seeing the paid ad (target audience)?
• What’s the pass-along factor? What will motivate consumers to share it?
• How will they ensure that their main message remains a part of the conversation?
• What does the organic impression look like?
• What are the goals of the campaign?
• What are other ways we can measure the effect of paid and earned media across
   multiple platforms beyond Facebook?

These are some very important questions to have answered before you start any online marketing or social media campaign. Most businesses fail to plan and hence tend to be shooting in the dark with results being ‘hit and miss’.

Marketers and agencies cannot continue to plan paid and earned media separately. We’ve seen
campaigns that have driven high traffic volume to social experiences, only to have the
communication stop there. On the flip side, there are wonderful social experiences out there that have little traffic because there has been no paid media support.

In order to effectively utilise marketing through social media, the communication needs to continue beyond just driving traffic to the website E.g. Facebook and Twitter icons on your website.

There is a myth that traffic helps with rankings. Although we don’t know exactly what Google’s ranking factors are, based on our experience, it has nothing to do with traffic. Engaging in social media has nothing to do with SEO, in fact it is another avenue to engage and grow that customer base who end up on your website having found you through high rankings for specific search terms. There are essentially 2 parts to the equation: driving traffic to the website and engaging users through continued interaction resulting in long term customers.

For those already using both paid and organic media strategies, do you think it is more effective for your online marketing campaign?

For full details on the article, read the 360i report.