Facebook

Two months after Facebook Inc. admitted it had inflated the average time it told advertisers that users were watching their video ads, the company is promising better data to give ad buyers a clearer picture of how they are spending their money.

The world’s biggest online social network on Wednesday launched a new blog on its website called Metrics FYI, where it will share updates and corrections for its data.

“We want to ensure our clients trust and believe in the metrics that we are providing,” Carolyn Everson, Facebook’s vice president of global market solutions told Reuters.

Getting advertisers to buy more video ads is key to Facebook’s continued revenue growth, as they fetch higher rates from advertisers than text or photo-based ads.

Facebook, along with Alphabet Inc.’s Google and other large digital companies, has been criticized for a lack of transparency in how it measures the performance of videos.

Particularly, the lack of a universally agreed method of calculating how much time people are watching online video has been a sore spot for advertisers.

Shares of Facebook were down 2.5 percent at $114.30 in premarket trading on the New York Stock Exchange.

In September, Facebook told advertisers that the average time users spent viewing online ads was artificially inflated, because it was only counting videos that were watched for at least three seconds, its benchmark for a “view.”

Facebook left out those who watched for less than three seconds, or who did not watch the video at all, which gave advertisers the impression their videos were performing better than they really were.

Since the admission and ensuing criticism from advertisers, Everson said Facebook has been in contact with clients and ad community trade groups, including the Interactive Advertising Bureau and the Association of National Advertisers (ANA).

Facebook also said on Wednesday it is in the process of forming what it called a “Measurement Council,” which will include measurement experts from clients and ad agencies.

One of Facebook’s prominent advertisers, Swiss food and drink company Nestle SA, is already on board, Everson said, and the council should be up and running by early 2017.

The ANA, which represents Procter & Gable Co., AT&T Inc. and other major advertisers, has called on Facebook to get its metrics accredited by the Media Rating Council (MRC), an independent media measurement audit group.

While Facebook’s internal metrics are not accredited by that group, it does use MRC-accredited third-party vendors, such as Nielsen and comScore, to help advertisers verify certain data.

(Reporting by Tim Baysinger; Editing by Bill Rigby and Bill Trott)

There is a surplus of content and media in the market today. If you are small business or entrepreneur, it can be extremely difficult breaking through the noise to reach your distracted customers online. Not only are you competing with your direct competitors, but you also have to think about every company with a Facebook page and a budget.

Your customers can only ingest a finite amount of information at a given time. It’s the same psychology behind Twitter’s 140-character limit or why the average Facebook user only has a few hundred friends. Most humans cannot manage their lives effectively with an excess of media sources competing for their attention. The abundance of content vying for their attention often outweighs what they can actually comprehend or believe.

And because your customers have tunnel vision and only want to consume content that is relevant to their specific interests at a given moment in time, it’s critical that your stories are laser-focused.

Audience intelligence is the key to storytelling.

The way to break through the clutter of content madness and tell a better story than your competitors is to get a firm understanding of your audience. This will ensure that you take out as much guesswork as possible while also being more calculated when telling your story.

But how should you go about collecting audience intelligence in this digital era? Many companies begin and end with Facebook Audience Insights due to its massive user base; however, there are additional tactics for you to consider.

While Facebook’s Audience Insights can help you build a stronger understanding of how to target specific audiences based on demographics, page likes, location and language, usage and purchase activity, the problem with relying too heavily on Facebook is that you’re limiting your analysis to one audience and platform.

Related:

The typical buyer journey expands much further than Facebook and your audience analysis should as well.

For example, imagine that you work for a startup that sells API software directly to the IT community. Facebook may not be the place where the IT audience is having API-related conversations, and if they were, you wouldn’t necessary have access to all of the insights that would help you tell stories that they would actually care about.

Audience intelligence is an approach that starts and ends with the customers that matter to your business.

In this case, it would be the people who work in IT.

The key to gathering as much intelligence about your audience as possible is to use a very specific set of criteria when building your panel: self-identified IT professionals, people who follow companies in the IT space, people who share IT-related content or people who use certain trigger words when having discussions online (i.e. app development, programmable web, routines, protocols, software applications, etc.).

Technology platforms like can help build, mine and provide insights into your specific audiences across multiple platforms and data sources. Here’s an example of keywords and phrases taken directly from the platform:

Related:

This is a small sample of verbatim keywords, used by a chosen audience around four specific categories – business, marketing, small business and travel. If this was the audience you wanted to reach, you would now understand the context of the conversation when they are talking about specific issues, like small business. This level of intelligence helps you prioritize the stories you want to put into the market, the words you’ll want to use when writing headlines, post copy and blog posts. It can also help determine the targeting parameters you want to include when building your paid media strategy.

But imagine that you had additional intelligence to answer the following questions?

• What type of media publications is my audience sharing?
• What kind of language and vernacular are my customers using when talking about my products?
• What keywords do my customers use in context with my brand, products or services?
• What hashtags do my customers use the most—and why?
• What are their interests and characteristics that make my customers unique from my competitors and everyone else?
• What channel(s) is my audience spending their time the most?
• What times are my customers frequently publishing content online?
• Other than my content, what are the other interests or passions of my customers? How do they vary by geography? How does that vary by lifecycle stage?

Related:

Answering these questions is critical to your business. You can begin to differentiate your brand from others and also collect insights into the patterns that define your customer’s interests and behaviors online.

Lastly, you can take these learnings, and apply it directly to a content program that matches and addresses what your customers are also talking about. It will allow you to tell stories that will resonate with them and be relevant to your brand at the same time.

If you run a business, then it is quite natural that Facebook is perhaps the first place you setup a page to promote it. Perhaps, the Facebook page may actually have been setup before the official website (or even the only platform) for fans to follow. It doesn’t take too long to see, how desperately Facebook wants you to buy paid advertisements to push your content above others.

The trick seems often too tempting to resist. By keeping costs of paid promotional for your page or posts extremely low, everyone is tempted at one of time to promote their content actively. Yet somehow, this doesn’t seem to work out in terms of actual profitability or engagement for your business – why’s that?

Here are top four reasons why paid/sponsored posts on Facebook might not be the right idea for your business:

The likes you generate might be generated for like-farms

One of the infinite secretes the internet hides behind its shiny displays of content are click farms – where hundreds or thousands of individuals engage using sophisticated softwares that change their IP addresses among other variables to log in and out of thousands of accounts and basically spend their day liking, as well as, commenting on random pages that they see. While some shady pages uses these farms to instantly get 10,000+ likes overnight on their page, there have been reports of Facebook actually using the exact same protocol to increase your likes using the same method if you bought paid ads.

Are you really targeting those users that matter?

While your ad gives you very helpful options to target only users from a particular country and those that may have similar tastes, are you really? Some independent researcher have confirmed most dummy likes, and a vast majority of likes on virtually any page arise from random clicks or users that’ll click like on basically anything and everything. That high number of likes probably isn’t even close to the number of actual people interested in your content.

Engagement matters, not likes

What use are high amounts of likes if your engagement rate is extremely low? It’s important to glance at the engagement rates of your pages regularly, because this number determines where all those likes actually evolved into. It’s important you take one good look at the number and compare them to likes. What use are 10,000 likes if your engagement rate is less than 3%?

Facebook is just a stepping stone to your real website

Unless you actually sell products via Facebook, and if you do then you have another completely different ballgame to be worried about, your Facebook likes are literally worthless. Your posts may even go viral, shares crossing 6 digits and total likes run in millions, but it’s all useless unless people actually adopt your goods & services. The priority should be getting users to engage more into you business, rather than just increase the number of likes and shares of your posts. Just remember, 10 active clients are better than 100 empty likes and shares on Facebook.

What’s your experience with Facebook’s paid promotional been like? Let us know in the comments o0n our official Facebook page

Already title is caching our attention : “First, Let’s Fire All the Managers”. Intriguing start changes in the list of charges against the modern management system. The author is showing his critic for complicated system, where we have hundreds of managers in various level. He lists three main problems. As first is the costs of management which is very expensive. At second he shows that typical management hierarchy increases the risk of “calamitous” decisions with bad judgment. And as third multitiered management structure systematically disempowers lower-level employees.

For all this three he is giving examples to make sure that readers will understand the problem. After that there is a lot of information about how this system is working and how the place of work is organized. So now we have question. Wouldn’t it be great if we could achieve high levels of coordination without a supervisory superstructure? To confirm theory author is giving very strong arguments by describing new management model called self-management which is in use at American company Morning Star.

There are no employees, there are only “colleagues” which are taking personal responsibility for what they have done. And each person is at the same level. So if there is any problem other colleagues going to help to resolve it. There are no managers all the decision are made in the group of employees : “Around here, nobody’s your boss and everybody’s your boss. ” To be sure that each employee now what he is doing and what kind of opportunities standing in front of him there are management courses , seminars which provide necessary information.

As author is showing company have got only great achievement and there is only few small disadvantages. He is giving very strong arguments about almost “utopia” organization where everybody are happy. Everything sounds perfect but is it real? Using the Google’s I found Morning Star company. “One of the best, world’s leading tomato ingredient processor”. And as author shows, they have got self-management system in use. As a founders of the new system they create website “Self-management Institute” which provide all necessary information about new system .

Self-Management is an organizational model where functions of a manager (planning, coordinating, controlling, staffing and directing) are pushed out to all participants in the organization as opposed to a select few. From that website we can read the main issue of new system, which is: self-directed work teams, employee empowerment, distributed decision making, “flattening” the organization, elimination of bureaucratic red tape . All of that is already successfully working in Morning Star company. To be sure author of article Gary Hamel , decide to check on his own that system.

What he saw was very fast developing company where without even one manager, people working very efficiently. And the most important is that they know what they doing and feel responsible for that. They are more loyal and are better judgment because they are not lack of context and understand the facts from the ground. System, called pancake-flat, is not complicated, because there are no bosses. But who is making the big decisions? Giving power to everybody is scary, danger, for sure there must be someone responsible more than others. Summary.

How can a big company survive without structure? For company like Morning Star where from the beginning the main system was self-management and all the structure was already prepared system was easy to absorb. In my opinion it would be difficult to put that system in mega companies with 100,000 employees. It would look like a loud school class with pupils, when teacher left for a moment and everybody doing what they want even when they were said to read book . That is why in big companies there always must be someone who is going to manage a group.

It is almost impossible that 100,000 employees will work efficiently without manager. Self-Management gives a great deal of freedom to colleagues; isn’t that dangerous? Freedom must be balanced with responsibility in any organization. Ofcourse employees need to feel free when they working no one like big pressure and stress on top of work. But if we going to say “Feel free”, probably their going to put their own targets first. If we gonna left them on their own, we will never be sure if they doing what they where asked for and don’t waste our time and money.

The company creates an environment where people can manage themselves by making the main mission the boss and truly empowering people. Where everybody are on the same level, and every one are bosses. It is sounds like “One for all and all for one”. For sure one thing is good in system like that. It is much cheaper without managers which have to be paid bigger salary. Reading this article I started to thing that that was the main problem. And thet is why new system was invented. To save the money. In my point of viewself-management system is very intresting and very innovative.

By the example of Morning Star company I can assume that it can work. Author is sure that is possible to improve this system in much bigger companies. And with that I can not agree. It can not work everywhere and with every person. It always depends on the place (where company is), kind of company, (it worked in a simple agricultural organization doesn’t mean it is gonna work at New York) and employees characters (there is always leading person and someone who only want to do his job) . References: Books: 1.

Nic Peeling, Brilliant Manager, (2010), What the best managers know, do and say, 3rd edition, Great Britain, Harlow: Pearson 2. Richard Templar, (2011), The rules of Management, second edition, Great Britain: Pearson 3. Scott Adams, (1996), Dogbert’s Top secret Management Handbook, New York: Harper Collins Publishers Inc. Websides: 1. Self management Institute, http://self-managementinstitute. org 2. Morning Star, http://www. morningstarco. com, (accessed on 11/12/11) Article which I used: Gary Hamel, (2011) First, Let’s Fire All the Managers, http://hbr. org/2011/12/first-lets-fire-all-the-managers/ar/1, (accessed on 06/12/11)

“And in the next shot, as the car races past, your logo comes flying down from the right corner and then a tight close up…” The voice drones on.You are busy checking the latest photo on Instagram. And then you look around:

You find, barring the agency team, everyone is darting glances into their mobile, either checking Messenger or WhatsApp.You decide to be polite and concentrate on the presentation, and then a thought comes:

“Tell me, how will we see this film on my mobile? Actually, how will my customers see it on their mobile?”

“That is the responsibility of the digital agency,” says one voice. “Actually that is Brand PR and being handled by our PR agency,” says another. “That’s not true!” says third.

Suddenly the meeting has come alive; the sounds have become high pitched, and you can see each one is either throwing the responsibility ball at another or trying to snatch it from another.

You say to yourself “I wanted an engaged meeting and this is what I get? Is this really marketing?”

Welcome to the world of new age Marketing.Where the lines between content, companies, and customers are getting blurred. 

The traditional models of interruption have broken down, but like dinosaurs, some are still roaming around, waiting for their demise.

What has changed and how do you navigate these seas of change? Use these 5 Lighthouse markers to leave behind ineffective methods, steer into the new world of permission marketing and forge deeper relationships with your customers

More permission, less interruption

In the good old days, size mattered.You went with the largest advertising budget.  You bought a maximum number of TV, radio spots and billboards and blasted your message.Then you waited and hoped that something would stick.

By lovingly calling it “consumer touchpoints”, marketing was a full contact sport. Everyone was trying to muscle their way into the consumer’s living room or car. Much has changed now.

Permission is the new currency of marketing.Actually, it always was. But somewhere down the road marketers forgot about it.Marketers now have to seek permission of the customer to come across the digital barriers.

With Ad blockers, gated sites and option of calling out a campaign as Spam, marketers have to develop content which entices the customer to open the digital doors.

More digital, less offline

An increasing number of people are on digital medium.Facebook, Instagram are like countries with their own borders and rules.

As per the KPCB mobile technology trends report, Average US consumer is spending 39 hours in a week on digital, out which 51% is mobile.89% of users access Facebook on their mobile devices and check Facebook 14 times a day.More importantly, search and social has redefined the way we consume.

Consumers search online for products and check reviews before they purchase. Not only has Social proof become important but getting it has become easier. One bad customer review on Amazon can impair a product’s sales.

The news is now consumed on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter.Companies are screening possible recruits on social media.Digital has managed to break the personal and professional barriers.

Marketers are struggling with the new reality. While they know the importance of digital, they often say “Nobody knows how to monetize the digital world!” Well, the online learning industry is USD 165 Billion.

The reason why it is difficult to monetize the digital world is that the old rules of offline don’t apply to digital. Consumers today have more choices.

Media choices changing rapidly

Just when you thought you could shift your advertising to digital, there are two distinct changes which are happening.

First, Google and Facebook are becoming giants. Every 7 out of 10 dollars of incremental advertising goes to only these two players. They already account for 50% of all digital advertising.So should all advertising shift to Google and Facebook?

Well, there are other players which are challenging their position.Amazon has now become the second largest search player.Second, digital habits and preferences are changing fast.

The average US teenager is reducing his Facebook consumption and increasingly spending time on Snapchat and Instagram.Instagram is estimated to bring USD 1.5 Billion in mobile ad revenues this year and $2.8 billion in 2017.

How does a marketer respond to these tectonic shifts? Either become a digital native or collaborate with digital natives. This is where influencer marketing has become so much more important even though the level of trust has reduced.

Less trust, less attention

We live in a world where trust for brands has reduced.Gone are the days when brands had “badge power” and were defined by the trust they had over commodity producers.

Today, the consumer’s trust has to be earned and it is a hard to get it.Add to this the proliferation of channels means that the ability and quantum of attention that the consumer can give has reduced drastically.

More than 85% of google search users click only the first four links. Anything below the fold is gone.Marketers are battling the twin deficits of trust and attention.

Seth Godin says “Connection and Trust are only two important metrics today. Every marketer needs to ask have I increased trust and connections better than yesterday or last month?”

Every business is a media house

The content generation wave is rising and rising fast.Businesses are embracing Inbound marketing and the foundation of inbound marketing is Content. Content which is relevant to the audience and talks to their interests and needs; not advertising.

So the traditional lines between journalism and business are blurring with businesses generating more consumer interest stories.

If a business is on social media esp Facebook and Twitter, then it is generating content whether it realizes or not. If they, consciously, have blogs or vlogs on their website or YouTube, then, they have become a media house.

Businesses can bypass traditional gatekeepers and reach their target audience directly by developing an extensive social followership

Check out Delta Airlines Twitter account. From new destinations to app launches to social impact programs, Delta Airlines uses the Twitter account to give information and brings excitement to its 1.2Million followers

Expectations on both quality and quantity of content have increased. While entertainment is often the thrust of the content, consumers are also consuming content which is educational and inspiring.

Phew, that’s a lot of change. Where does one start? Take one step at a time. Get to speak to digital natives. Immerse in their world. Embrace Digital in your life.

Practice having a conversation with people around you. Take that quality of conversations to your customers. Treat your customer as a person, a living person.

Listen, Learn and be led by your customers.

Why is this topic a controversy today? Social media is considered to be any website that allows social interaction. (pediatrics) These include Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, YouTube and gaming sites to name a few. Social media is a controversial topic, as it is believed that the youth of today spend far too much time using social media instead of interacting face-to-face with people. Therefore it is possible that they lack the proper communication skills they will require to be successful in life.

Most jobs require face-to-face interaction. Children have too much access too and are spending too much time using forms of social media. 52% of all children now have access to one of the new mobile devices at home (smartphone, ipad, etc. )  According to a recent poll, 22% of teenagers log on to their favorite social media site more than 10 times a day and more than half of adolescents log onto a social media site more than once a day. pediatrics) By the age of 5 more than 50% of children regularly interact with a computer or tablet device, and by 7 or 8 they regularly play video games and teenagers text an average of 3,400 times a month. (www. cnn) These are just a few of the available stats to support the inappropriate amount of time spent on social media of the youth today. It is through the childhood and teenage years that one develops socially and emotionally.

It appears that most of this generation’s social and emotional development is occurring while on the Internet and cell phones. 75%of teenagers now own cell phones, and 25% use them for social media, 54% use them for texting, and 24% use them for instant messaging. (pediatrics) According to another study, kids that spent more time using social media reported lower grades, and lower levels of personal contentment, more likely to get in trouble, more sad, and more bored.  A major controversy is that some children are accessing inappropriate sites as there are no protective safeguards to prevent this. One such example is Facebook which requires users to be at least 13 years of age to open an account. Last year more than 7. 5 million American kids under the age of 13 had joined Facebook. The time spent using social media takes a child/youth away from actual physical activity. We are already considered to have a large obese population; this will just continue to foster that.

This in turn leads to other problems such as increased health issues and in turn increased medical costs for a society that already has a health system that is being taxed due to insufficient funding and staffing. A final but very significant area of controversy due to the use of social media by today’s youth is the increase in cyberbullying. It is far easier to say something online than it is to someone’s face. There are several alarming statistics with regard to cyberbullying. Below are just a few from the site  -66% of teens who have witnessed online cruelty have also witnessed others joining:21% say they have also joined in the harassment -52% of parents are worried their child will be bullied via social networking sites -1 in 6 parents know their child has been bullied through a social networking site -one million children were harassed, threatened or subjected to other forms of cyberbullying on Facebook during the past year. How are children and youth being represented? Children are being represented as the major users of social media, and therefore they are focusing their sites to attract the child users.

Children are drawn to use social media as it is a very human need to be heard and connect with others and there is a desire to make a difference and influence the world around them.  Although there are many negatives attached to social media, one of which is that social media takes children and youth away from reading traditional books. Another side of this equation is to find innovative ways to use social media to motivate children and youth to learn about books or obtaining information from other sources than traditional reading material.

Faceable have aided organizational communication by spreading information fast and father. In reality formal chain of command is an incomplete communication, so organizations need to develop informal communication network to better transmit information, such as grapevine. For example, the statuses on Faceable can contribute to the transmission of information. Although face-to-face interview is high in information richness, non-verbal language also has an important impact on the outcome of employment interview decision.

For example, with the pictures posed on Faceable, the clothing people wears can transmit clear signals. On the other hand, it is complicated to transmit information through new media because with not all informal communication bring benefit to organizations, such as rumors. Therefore, organizations should focus on rumor control, and online media (Faceable) needs to enhance private information security because personal information may be misused by hostile person.

Miranda’ reaction would not the same when she heard the rumor about Rick’s activity which is not rue because interview, including face-to-face interview, telephone conversation etc. Is relatively higher in richness than rumor which Is thought belong to “chat” type. For example, Miranda has had an interview with Rich, so Miranda has more potential information about Pick with highly non-verbal and Para-verbal cues. Yes, it reflects the “one up, one down” of gender differences In communication because men tend to be more sensitive to power dynamics than women.

For example, men are more boastful about their competence; Instead, women are low-key In showing their viability, so women Is considered In a one down position. Therefore, Deborah decreases the times of posing something on Faceable or even no accounts on Faceable. Miranda should hire Deborah. Pictures and statuses can show what Rick really looks like. Rick are more boastful about his capabilities than Deborah, and he minimizes his weakness In performance. Moreover, It Is easy to regular verbal behavior during Interview, so Miranda should turn attention to non-verbal cues. If Miranda hires Rick, uncertainty and risks will Increase.