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9 Ways Facebook's New Look Affects Your Brand

You know the Third Degree Facebook page is always active. (We can't resist a good photo op.) So when Facebook changes its interface, we take notice. We’re particularly interested in how these changes impact businesses. Here are some important highlights and takeaways for you to remember:


Anyone can comment on Pages.
Any Facebook member can now comment on a brand’s page, regardless of whether or not they “Like” the page. Although there are concerns associated with this transition (like dealing with crises and spam, and reaching new customers) this will now open conversations to more users, which can in turn bring potential customers. The good news is that you can’t measure success by ‘likes’ alone, but instead by the engagement of your community. Less stress on ‘like’ forces brands to create great content that keeps people coming.


The News feed is more selective, streamlined.
The streamlined News Feed includes a ticker timeline for less crucial updates (like a friend commenting on another friend’s photo). Important events get better real estate on the bigger, traditional news feed. This is good news for business pages, since you’ll cut through a noisy feed by posting high-quality content (determined by EdgeRank).


The EdgeRank System decides what you see.
Facebook’s EdgeRank formula breaks down visibility into various categories: Affinity, Weight, and Time. Affinity increases each time you interact with a page, meaning that content will get more presence in your feed. Weight prioritizes the visibility of different content categories, like photos, videos, links and status updates, with comments getting the most priority. Time-relevant information stays closer to the top of a newsfeed. (via)

Friend activity is now public.
The Friend Activity tab shows you which of your friends visited a brand’s page, the “Likes” and comments on posts, and any mention of the page by friends. A more personalized page means more user interest in visiting and interacting with the business or brand. Users can now recommend your brands to their friends directly from your page. (Just remember to give them a reason to do so.)

Status update character limit increased over 1000%.
A status update was once limited to 420 characters. That limit is now 5,000. For users, that means a more blog-like experience with their profiles. For brands, it means you can get a little more in-depth when you share news or events with your community.

Admins have more metrics.
This one's for the real analytics geeks. Where once you could only see metrics and engagement per-post for your self-published items, now you now track broader measurements by exporting Insight reports into Excel. (via)


Insights tool is more granular.
Analytics options now include a page-fan’s friendcount (“Friends of Fans”) and weekly Total Reach. Facebook encourages word-of-mouth sharing among fans and their friends, as well as to allow businesses to measure the extent of that sharing. Now you can count the stories people share that show up in News Feeds. Likes, mentions, RSVPs, check-ins, wall posts, answered questions and other related metrics are all measured. (via and via)

New plugins share browsing activity on Facebook.
If you're finicky about your privacy settings, this new feature might be a bit squicky. A Facebook plugin on your website publishes a Facebook user's browsing activity and sentiment on their profile and wall. From there, it filters out into their friends news feed and ticker. (via)

Facebook dabbles in social listening.
Following in the footsteps of Spotify, last.fm, and Pandora, Facebook now has a music dashboard letting you see what your friends are listening. Look deeper and you'll see their top albums and singles. Whether this will drive more people to Facebook and, in turn, could boost traffic to pages remains to be seen. (via)

So that's the straight dope on Facebook's newest changes. Though still filtering out to most users, Facebook's history shows they won't be the last changes to Facebook's UI. Whatever comes, just keep your focus on quality, shareable content. Oh, and have fun!

Trolling your Social Media Campaign

Hey everybody! Tara's out of town this week so she's getting her minions to do guest blog posts. I'm Daniel, art director at Third Degree. I'm kind of the nerdy one in the creative department, so this is going to be a bit longer than Tara's usual posts. It's good stuff though!

Trolling your Social Media Campaign
You’re playing in your sandbox, building up this awesome castle with your friends. You spent lots of time and energy making a community for your toy cowboys and dinosaurs and robots to hang out together peacefully and productively.

Then some bully stomps all over the Pleasantville you worked so hard to cultivate.

You just got trolled.

When you open your social media campaign to public commentary and contribution by your community, you also run the risk of people abusing that generosity. These are “trolls,” and you gotta know how to deal with them.

Who are trolls?
There is always a risk on open-mic night that someone will use their stage time to shout profanities at the audience. You now have to make a decision:

Do you kick them off stage?
Do you respond at all?
Do you cut the mic for everyone?

It’s a tough call, but the first step is knowing who you’re dealing with. A troll is anyone who baits a community with disruptive and offensive content thereby causing people to become upset or to be insulted. In The Subtle Art of Trolling, the activity is explained with a bit of anarchist glee:

“The well-constructed troll is a post that induces lots of newbies and flamers to make themselves look even more clueless than they already do, while subtly conveying to the more savvy and experienced that it is in fact a deliberate troll.
“If you don't fall for the joke, you get to be in on it.”

It’s easy to dismiss a troll as a bully run amok in the world’s biggest playground, but it’s not so clear-cut when you have to be the judge. What you might consider a troll may be an honest critique or disappointment with your service, for example. You have to get at the heart of what drives someone to troll.

Is everyone a potential troll?
If you ask some trolls why they do it, they’ll say “For the lulz.” In other words, “because it’s funny,” or “because we can.”

But it’s never so clear-cut as all that. Philip Zimbardo, professor emeritus at Stanford, constructed a psychological experiment in 1971. He created a prison simulation in the basement of the Stanford psych building and randomly assigned college students to be prisoners and guards. The students soon fell into their roles far more sincerely then had been predicted, with emotional trauma and sadistic tendencies soon developing in all the participants.

Zimbardo would go on to write about the experiment in his book “The Lucifer Effect.” As it turns out when most people are given anonymity and are not held accountable for their actions, they’ll pretty much turn into jerks.

These findings are further supported in 1991 research by Professor Mauri Collins’ “Flaming: The Relationship Between Social Context Cues and Uninhibited Verbal Behavior in Computer-mediated Communication.” In that paper, she proposes

“In the absence of social context cues, the level of uninhibited verbal behavior in computer-mediated communication rises…”

This is a couple years before the world wide web even gets mentioned in mainstream media, but trolls are still a problem. She goes on to site a paper by N.S. Baron:

“Baron postulates three explanations for this phenomenon: the lack of non-linguistic and visual cues puts added pressure upon the users to use any means possible (such as haranguing) to ensure they are being understood; the fact that [Computer-Mediated Communication] is a relatively new form of communication and lacks the established norms of face-to-face conversation; and the lack social context cues masks status differences.”

That citation is from a paper in 1984. Eighty-four! So, with the internet offering even more anonymity and less accountability than any other media, it’s no surprise that the occasional bad egg might stink up your community.

How to deal with a troll?
The nice thing about trolls being around since the days of breakdancing is that we have a lot more experience to draw from when dealing with this kind of behavior. Wikipedia probably has to deal with this problem more than any other online community, so let’s see what they use as best practices for their editors.

Don’t feed the troll. It’s what your mom always taught you to do when you had to deal with bullies. Just let whatever the troll says slide right on by, letting the natural flow of communication chart a course around the troll.

“While many seasoned veterans of online communities consider this advice useless, because in a community of any size, someone will react to the troll's posts, others still consider it to be the only effective method for dealing with trolls. Not fanning the fire will, at the very least, not make the situation worse. If the behavior escalates to abuse or vandalism, it is easy to deal with those things.”

Establish clear, public policies for how you deal with inappropriate content. Stick to those policies! Don’t make any special exceptions or act capriciously in your judgements. Anyone who joins a community should know there are level-headed, even-handed moderators standing by to quell abuse. This will also dissuade any potential trollish behavior on the part of community members.

“…[O]ne should keep every debate strictly factual. A heated deletion discussion, possibly fueled by inflammatory comments by the troll or his sockpuppets and allies, may increase the troll's motivation.”

Assume good faith. While you’re standing vigilant against trolls, you may end up squelching honest, genuine discussion of your services. If a comment or posting does not obviously break your terms of service in regards to profanity, vandalism or objectionable material, take a moment to consider your action. If you choose to engage with the suspected troll, ask him or her to rephrase their statements.

“Sometimes trolls live under bridges. But not everyone living under a bridge is a troll. […] Often one is accused of being a troll because one is phrasing one's views in a particularly hostile way. Consider: are you openly advocating trolling on your userpage? Are you cursing at people or engaging in personal attacks? Are you accusing those who oppose you of being in a cabal? If you stopped that, people would probably respond better to you.”

There is one additional suggestion not advocated by Wikipedia, but I’ll just toss it in:

Make everyone accountable by removing anonymity. As noted in the research by Philip Zimbardo, giving people anonymity and removing any accountability is just paving the way for flagrant, abusive behavior. Even superficial security measures like requesting full names, email addresses and recording IP addresses can help mitigate the potential to troll. Using login tools like OpenID or Facebook Connect can make your campaign easier to join and removes the temptation to troll.

Water (and trolls) under the bridge.
When you have open contribution from the general public, you open yourself up to the honest opinions of your audience. This can open up a fruitful, mutually beneficial line of communication between a service-provider and those who use that service.

Even if those comments and contributions don’t fall strictly in line with your brand message, don’t assume that those people are all trolls to be deleted and banned. Listen with an open mind and genuine interest.

When more malicious behaviors arise, deal with them fairly and consistently. Doing so will establish a common trust with your community and ensure your brand’s good standing in general opinion.

Citations
TED Talks: “Philip Zimbardo show show people become monsters… or heroes”

Wikimedia: “What is a Troll?: Dealing with Trolls”

ReadWriteWeb: “Are Trolls Ruining Social Media?”

Mauri Collins: “The Relationship Between Social Context Cues and Uninhibited Verbal Behavior in Computer-mediated Communication”

Michael Marshall: “New Scientist Technology Blog: “Don’t flame me, bro”

This Ain't No Disco

Where can you go to see some of the most creative, fun, inspiring agency interiors from around the world? This Ain't No Disco (it's where we work), is a site that showcases agencies large and small from all over the place... Boston, Finland, Brazil...

...and now, Oklahoma City!  Third Degree is the latest featured agency on today's Disco home page.  We join the ranks of some really inspiring spaces.  Check out some of the other most popular past agency features on the home page, they are truly jaw-dropping.  We may not have our own fireplace complete with smore-building station or an astroturf walkway blazing a path through our creative department, but it's still really exciting to be included among the ranks.

Thanks to Studio Architecture for designing our space and Jentry and Kathleen for taking it to the next level with our recent diner addition.  

www.aintnodisco.com

"Disco" featured agencies above: Think Brownstone, Inc,  Crowell Advertising, Trust Creative Society and AG407.

Third Degree photography by David McNeese.

Work Forward Video

Chorus Line

These are our Third Degree patches.  We used a bunch of them on Dickie's messenger bags we made up for all of our team members one year.  Those bags went like hot cakes.  We don't have a single one left.  But we do have a lot of patches left over.

Headliner

And this guy here, he just made the cut.  He stars in the intro to the Third Degree video we created.  This intro, complete with brand-inspired diner background noise, is going to be the opening mainstay of any Third Degree "homemade" video we create for ourselves from now on. 

Stand-Ins

These were some of our little props that we used to take the place of real people.  Because when I say homemade, I mean designers (Brett) standing in as camera men and sound guys, art directors as voice-over talent (Daniel), and creative directors helping slide props in and out of scenes in time to the script (that would be me, Tara). 

My point being, when we do this for our clients, we usually employ some... oh, let's say actors, a crew, an animator.  But, we kind of like our quirky DYI on a shoe-string creation. 

Background

This first video is about Third Degree's social media marketing process.  We have this cool chart that outlines the whole thing, but no matter how you lay it out, any comprehensive process can be a tad overwhelming at first glance.  We wanted to create a video to bring it to life a little. 

Rock Stars

So that's Work Forward.  What's our next Third Degree video going to be about?  Not salsa chugging.  Sorry. It's going to be another glimpse into our social media approach.  And, it's going to have Roy in it, too!  So be on the lookout for another appearance of the Third Degree patch with the sizzling sounds of "serving it up" in the background .

Smile and Say "Buck It!"

When we create a campaign we can get really, really involved.  That, and none of us can seem to stay away from the camera.  Well, Kathleen can't stay away from the camera (which is a whole separate post in itself).  The rest of my team can be persuaded with a little begging, which is what I did on a recent shoot for Buck The Norm (a Gen Y initiative for Tinker Federal Credit Union) to get some of our own Third Degree-ers to become Buck The Norm-ers.

Thumbs Up!

There's art director Daniel in his closeup. He's got his Bucky face drawn on his thumb. Bucky is sort of this irreverent character who shouts out this message of financial empowerment, and also happens to be a thumb.

Argh! Rargh!

Daniel is really bringing the intensity in this scene. So these monster finger puppets are so cool. They represent "the norm," like debt and overspending. We ordered hundreds of them and passed them out at the OKC Ghouls Gone Wild Halloween parade (more on that below). Almost everyone in the agency has one or two finger monsters that have taken up residence on their desk.

Dance Montage (Deleted Scene)

Yeah... so, this one didn't make the cut.  But we did lots of dancing that day.  We were shooting for a video that we created using a series of still shots (these photos by David McNeese) animated together in sequence to bring the action "to life."

Sweet Girl

Here's designer, Liz, all pretty and coy in blue.

Mean Girl

And there's account coordinator Hallie, all up-in-your-face in blue.  

Lending a Hand

Actually, Liz and Hallie and I had a blast on the set of this video shoot. Liz helped gather and make a lot of the hand-held props like these oversized fake bills on cardboard. That guy and girl drowning in distress are young local student-slash-actors. Those hands creeping into the shot are not. Those are (you guessed it) the sweet girl and mean girl hands of Liz and Hallie!

True Colors

Okay so Hallie's not that mean! She put on a smiley-face-yellow wig and joined bespectacled and bedazzling Third Degree account executive, Kande, to march in the OKC Ghouls Gone Wild parade as part of the Buck The Norm float.

She Wore Blue... (Synthetic Hair)

Miss account coordinator Felina, also donned a beautiful hairdo and along with Kathleen helped coordinate the Buck The Norm parade float and people and buckets (buck its!) and huge finger monsters and music and video.  She, like all the other Third Degree and TFCU brave participants went hoarse after shouting "Buck The Norm" over and over again at 30,000 crazy costumed spectators. Buck The Norm actually won "Beast In Show" from the parade sponsor the Oklahoma Gazette.

Buck The 76 Trombones, We've Got Giant Finger Puppet Monsters!

Here's a video of the Buck The Norm float and participants from the actual parade.  The Ghouls Gone Wild event, now in its second year, is part of an effort to foster the creative spirit in Oklahoma City.  It's an evening event geared towards adults (but whose going to keep the kiddos away from a giant Beetlejuice float? not me!) Wayne Coyne of the world famous independent group, The Flaming Lips, is a huge supporter of the parade and his march of 1,000 skeletons attracts participants from all over the country, eager to dress up as skeletons and carry flaming torches in a surreal procession as part of the parade finale.

So What Is The Norm?

Want MORE finger puppet monsters? Want MORE Daniel and Liz and Hallie?! Who doesn't? Watch the Buck The Norm video that started it all.