Ford Shows Social Humility

In end of March this year creative agency in India mocked up some ads featuring risque content and using Ford branding. The “rogue group” were attempting to have some fun and show off their creative talents. What they didn’t expect was the backlash. By using unauthorized Ford branding and putting these three ads online, the ad agency was opening themselves up to a full-on Global response from Ford. The ads went viral and began to spread across the web and controversy exploded.

The ad, in which former Italian PM Silvio Berlusconi is shown with a bunch of gagged and crying women in the trunk of his car, was never meant to see the light of day and was made mostly as a spoof. However it somehow leaked to the Internet, and as we all know even though it never ran in paid media, once something's on the Internet, the damage has been done.
Scott Monty, Ford’s Global Head of Social Media, saw the article on Business Week right before boarding a plane in Europe. Their Asia-Pacific office was tasked with handling the fallout and subsequent buyer comments. Ford quickly issued an apology for the ad stating: 

“We deeply regret this incident and agree with our agency partners that it should have never happened. The posters are contrary to the standards of professionalism and decency within Ford and our agency partners. Together with our partners, we are reviewing approval and oversight processes to help ensure nothing like this ever happens again.”

Thanks to a quick, honest and humble reaction Fords reputation was saved. Monty credits a well-integrated team and a globally coordinated effort paired with an excellent social media monitoring system for successfully staying in front of this potential crisis. For smaller companies, the lesson is to monitor your social media carefully and make sure you have a competent social media team involved before anything happens so you’re ready to handle it.

Facebook Marketing Success

I’ll be honest. I am getting so tired of reading article after article of people writing about how marketing on Facebook is a waste of time. Whether you are a B2C or B2B company it doesn’t matter. If you are not getting results from Facebook you need to change your strategy plain and simple. While it does take a bit of time, effort and budget there is no doubt Facebook is effective and should be at or near the top of your company’s digital marketing plan.


Tips for creating a successful Facebook page:

1. Understand Facebook’s EdgeRank System
If you want to be successful using anything you need to first learn how to use it. By creating new posts that best follow the EdgeRank criteria you can guarantee that it will be seen by the most possible people. Updates are key: post regularly, include videos, photos and links, have clear call to actions, and post content relevant to your audience. Essentially, the more engagements your post get the longer they stay in the news feed. (read more here: How to EdgeRank)

2. Content is Still King
It all comes down to producing good content. No one is going to engage with your posts and you will have trouble building a quality Facebook community if you are not consistently posting content that is relevant and interesting to your network. No, this does not include posting cute puppy pictures or grumpy cat photos. Those tactics are short lived and will not provide long term Facebook success. Plus that is not what your company is about so why post it? It is good to mix in some funny posts or off topic items once in a while, but you will want to make sure the majority of your posts are related to your company or industry.

3. Sponsored and Promoted Posts
Going the free route will only take you so far. Sometimes it helps to get a little boost by trying out the Facebook paid advertising options. If you have a smaller budget try out the Sponsored Stories and Promoted Posts. These two options keep users on Facebook rather than sending to external sites and this is the preferred method of Facebook. Sponsored stories are great since those are essentially word of mouth recommendations from friends. So if a friend checks in somewhere or ‘Likes’ a page your brand can sponsor those posts so their friends will also see and be likely to ‘Like’ it as well. Promoted Posts are also great when you have an important announcement or content that you want the most amount of people to see and engage with. This option allows you to stay at the top of news feeds longer and when people engage with it their friends will also see it as well.

4. Test, Test and Test!
In marketing you can never keep doing the same thing over and over again. You have to constantly switch things up and test your strategies and Facebook is no different. Test different kinds of posts between text, pictures, video, links, polls etc… See which one’s your followers enjoy engaging with more and also what kind of topics resonate most with them. When you try out the paid advertising options test out different budgets, tactics and see which ones provide the best results. Over time you will find the winning formula that works best for your brand or company.

To me there is no doubt Facebook is a viable and effective advertising option that should not be ignored. Next time you read an article about how it does not work for someone don’t jump to conclusions - give it a fair shot, it will pay off!

Conversation Prism

This is for all you Brian Solis-fans out there. Those who may not have heard of Brian, he coined the words “PR 2.0” and was regarded in the early years of web 2.0 evolution as “a founding father of PR 2.0 concept".

A few years back Solis created what today is know as the Conversation Prism, which is a display of channels, platforms and websites that fall under Social Media. Thankfully it is also the subject to regular updates, the latest one now in 2013. The prism describes all forms of social media with the most important websites and channels covered. It clearly shows how diverse and large the world of online conversation is. Enjoy!

Searching AltaVista Never More ...

Yahoo has, under the supervision of  Marissa Mayer, started to cut away some services and products in order to focus on a core range instead. Classics like the search engine AltaVista is discontinued, along with eleven other are more or less known offerings.

On June 28 cleansing began with Yahoo! BrowserPlus, Yahoo! Axis and Citizen Sports. Tomorrow July 7 marks the last day that AltaVista is left running. 

So if you want to relive old memories from the time the engine was dominating the Internet - now is the time to do so!

Other companies that have begun to cut their services are Google and BlackBerry. On July 1 popular Google Reader disappeared, and BlackBerry have tightened the amount of products on the market drastically. While Google is taking over the searches it is losing ground in several other areas. Are we seeing the start of a streamlining of products? 

Sentinal WarFare

I recently came across a very interesting thread on a forum for gamers. The story involves the extremely popular game Quake III Arena, along with a massive bit of unexpected sentinel awareness.

A few years back, a gamer set up a bot-vs-bot match on his Quake III Arena server, and let the match run to see how the bots would adapt over a long period of time. The bot AI (artificial intelligence) in Quake III Arena is designed to adapt to new scenarios and situations, all to work out player strategies and combat these exact strategies. This results in a ramping difficulty for the players since the AI actively learns the moves and tactics of the player.

However, something came up (most likely lunch or dinner) and the gamer forgets all about the server he set up, until four years later when he decides to login and see what’s happening.

What he discovers is seriously puzzling: the bots on both teams are simply standing still, not doing anything. The server is running fine and the game isn’t frozen. The bots are simply standing there, not killing one another. The gamer reports his findings to his Quake community forum, and they all unanimous encourage him to logon and see what happens. Said and done, our anonymous gamer opens the server and logs on to the tranquil battle field.

Here things just keep getting stranger. When he enters, the bots don’t fire on him—instead, they rotate to turn and look at him, and continue to look at him as he walks around the map.

Encourage again by his community friends the gamer decides to “frag” (gamer for kill) one of the bots, again just to see how the rest would react. In one swift blow all the bots undivided retaliate, instantly sending the gamer out of the battle. Sadly this is also where the story ends, because before the gamer could log back on again, the server crashes. Presumably the bots returned to their calm non-aggressive state.

There is no way to tell if this story is true or not; there is no video evidence to accompany the strange phenomenon, and therefore nothing to directly validate the occurrence. However, the truth of the story isn’t as important to me as the questions it raises:

Is it possible that video game bots, designed to provide human players with some non-human competition, could evolve over four years to “learn” that the best way to stay alive is to not kill? Did artificial intelligence discover the secret to world peace in a forgotten video game server?

Some of you may already have bridged the obvious WarGames parallel; yet another fact sadly pushing this story closer to the feigned area of story-telling. In WarGames (a movie from 1983 starring Matthew Broderick) a hacker uploads a tic-tac-toe game to an army super computer. What is pivotal to note here is that in a game of tic-tac-toe you cannot win unless your opponent makes a mistake. The computer then simulates a nuclear war and, using the knowledge gained from tic-tac-toeing, realizes that the only way to win is not to play.

A computer trained and aimed at killing and defeating all opponents, discovering that non-violence was a better logical approach to survival, would be a pretty spectacular thing. To answer this question we would however need to know what the bots were thinking in that vital moment, the second after the gamer was fragged and the servers terminated. Did they in fact go back to a submissive non-violent stage, or would the introduction of a new, unknown element be the spark that ignited the carnage all over again?

Luckily we may have the answer to this. One crucial piece of evidence was saved before the server crashed; the bots’ log files. These logs track the decisions previously made by the AI, guiding them to come up with new tactics and strategies; essentially the core of the logic behind ramping up the difficulty for the players. Apparently also the logic behind the submissive peaceful end-state.

The log files are however massive; 512 MB per bot with 16 bots – that makes 8 GB of unstructured information. As a comparison, this article, written in Word, and saved as a .docx takes up just about 14KB. To go through the log files would be equivalent of reading this article just under 600 000 times.

Is there sentinel life within those log files? Perhaps - as of right now, no one really knows. Reading the entire log file is an huge task itself, analyzing and finding the right line of code that supports sentinel presence; now that is an whole other story. Fortunately for us, the combat-hardened, destruction-driven AI we have created, for all intents and purposes, seems logically peaceful.

Cant be Googled = unGoogleable?

A few weeks ago a global controversy arose in the northern outskirts of the world. A small language was challenging the entire existence of one of the worlds largest corporations - and they where not having any of it!

Many search engine users are currently googling "ungoogleable" following a lexical skirmish between Google and Swedish wordsmiths – a spat sparked by the proposed word ogooglebar - Swedish for "unGoogleable".

The Language Council of Sweden was considering the word, defined as something that cannot be found with any search engine, among their annual list of new entries to the Swedish language. But Google contested, arguing that the definition should be narrowed to refer only to information that cannot be found on the wildly popular Google search engine. What's more, they argued, the dictionary entry should come with a disclaimer that notes Google is a trademarked word.

The council promptly pulled the word from its list of contenders, but news of the disagreement nevertheless created what the Swedish call a Bloggbävning – in English: a "blogquake", or "the process by which a topic explodes in the blogosphere and is then picked up by more mainstream media outlets," according to The Atlantic. 

How this will end is not yet settled. The initial chock has now subsided, however there will surly be after chocks and trembles. However, it seems clear to me that no one, not even the company itself, can decided upon how to use the search language, nor what truly is unGoogleable!

Google Kills!

... some of its own products anyhow.

Through the history of this creative company lots and lots of ideas have seen the light of day, but almost just as many has also been buried in the dark again. I recently came across this funny info graphic of different Google ideas that have been cancelled. These applications have been retired, either because of integration with other Google products, or through lack of support. Among the discontinued products we find a few noteworthy entries:

• Google Buzz – social networking service integrated with Gmail service allowing users to share updates, photos, videos, and more at once. It let users make conversations about things they found interesting. It was released on February 9, 2010. Discontinued by end of 2011
• Google Wave – Online communication and Collaborative real-time editor tool using richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more. Development ceased on August 4, 2010. This product support is no longer available (turned off completely on April 30, 2012 by Google).
• Shared Stuff – web page sharing system, incorporating a share bookmarklet to share pages, and a page to view the most popular shared items. Pages could also be shared through third party applications, such as Delicious or Facebook. Discontinued on March 30, 2009.

Question now is naturally: why does Google+ still exist? And when is the Google Car going to be available for the open market? Find the full graph below:

Hell Really is Other People

You know social media gives us an awful lot when it comes to staying connected. We can see things like where our friends are or have been recently on a host of platforms. This is, of course, all well and good but what if you have a lot of time-demanding friends you would just like a break from? It can so easily happen that you are out running errands and run into every damn person you know. This turns an hour of errands into several hours of catching up and blowing your free time with chit chat.

Well, as seems to be very normal these days, a university project may be the answer to ensuring a little alone time. While pursuing his Master’s degree in Telecommunications at NYU, Scott Garner conceived an idea for an app. This app is based on anti-social media rather that social because it was designed to help you avoid friends. Known as “Hell is Other People”, this app allows you to link up your FourSquare account. This will then tell you if your friends are or have recently been in a place that you plan to go. Using a simple color code system orange indicates places friends have checked in while green shows a safe area where you will likely not meet someone you know.

This really seems like an interesting concept because some days you just don’t want to be around other people. Garner, the app’s creator, admits freely that he is somewhat anti-social and that taking part in this project has helped him understand himself a great deal.