This week we saw the passing of one of the brightest and innovative minds of our time. Thank you Steve Jobs for inspiring us to think differently. You have no doubt left your mark on the world.
As for Monday’s Social Mashup, this is what we’ve got in store for you: Facebook’s new Insights Tool and ad unit, Samsung’s USOC Genome Project, Rdio’s free music streaming service and Samsung’s Olympics phone.
Facebook New Insights Tool and Ad Unit
We’ve all heard that Facebook is making major changes to your profile, but it’s also making major changes to help Page owners advertise and measure engagement. The new premium ad unit has rolled out to Page managers and the Insights tool will remain opt-in only for a while, but is available for preview.
A new ad unit is available that is a hybrid of a sponsored story and a branded piece of content. Facebook is looking to target bigger brands who look to increase their increase their social activity with the new offering. The ad appears slightly larger than previous premium ads because of the additional content and will be the only ad featured on the right side of a user’s home page. Here’s an example of what you will start seeing:
Facebook advertisers have been looking for better ways to measure success of a campaign for a while now and Facebook has worked to come up with an answer to that. The new Insights tool will allow administrators to see the total audience they are reaching beyond the actual impressions and “likes.” The new measurements will include:
- Total Likes: previously appeared
- Friends of Fans: shows the maximum social reach of the page’s content
- People Talking About This: number of users who have engaged with content within the past week
- Weekly Total Reach: total number of users who have viewed paid media and shared content
Along with the number of likes, any user can see the numbers for “People Talking About” on a page. Insights will dig deeper in to a page’s past 500 posts showing the total audience under “Reach,” number of Facebook users who engaged with content by clicking a link, viewing photos or videos under “Engaged Users,” number of users who liked, commented or shared content under “Talking About This,” and the “Virality” which divides “Talking About This” by “Reach.”
The new tools will truly enable marketers to measure engagement past the number of “likes” on their page. According to Kevin Barenblat, CEO of Context Optional a social marketing software comapany,
I think there’s a shift taking place inside Facebook where marketers will not only look to connect with their fans, but look to influence the friends of their fans. Enabling word-of-mouth marketing at scale is a huge opportunity for marketers and for Facebook.
Samsung’s U.S. Olympic Genome Project Connects Fans to Athletes
The London 2012 Olympics and Paralympic Games are less than a year away and sponsors are looking for ways to build around the athletes and Games to create a unique experience for fans through social media. Samsung announced last week that it has built a Facebook app to show how users are connected to Olympic athletes. Much like the six degrees of separation, the app will draw information like a user’s hometown information or college and show common threads between the user and athlete to raise awareness and create new connections with both current and past U.S. Olympic athletes.
The app will be unveiled next year with promotions at the U.S. Olympic trials and other U.S. Olympic Committee events. The driving question behind the application to get engagement is: How Olympic are you?
Keep an eye out the first quarter of 2012 at Samsung.com/USOlympicGenome to check it out yourself. The app is currently in development and will be the core marketing plan for Samsung in the U.S. during the summer Games.
Just two weeks ago Samsung and the USOC went to Colorado to speak with athlete agents and national governing bodies to promote the project and get athletes to participate to make it a greater success. Samsung and USOC are pushing athletes to become involved in hopes to create a strong connection among fans who will come looking to find a link between themselves and an Olympian.
Senior VP and CMO for Samsung Electronics America said the Genome Project is digital to its core and
…is a transformational idea because it uses the power of discovery – a sense of curiosity about how you’re connected to athletes – to weave together a community that’s passionate about the Olympic Games.
Rdio Opens Up On-Demand Music Streaming without Ads
Rdio is trying to keep its head afloat and distinguish itself from the lengthy list of online music streaming services by offering on-demand music and eliminating ads. Users can now join the service and listen to any of Rdio’s 12 million songs. Before, only paid users had access to the full catalog of music.
Don’t get too excited though. Rdio isn’t completely going away from paid subscriptions. The service now has three plans. Unlimited Web streaming is $4.99, unlimited mobile and Web streaming is $9.99 and the Rdio Family Plan will set you back $17.99 a month.
As a non-subscriber, you will receive a limited amount of free streaming a month. Rdio explains that the amount of music a person will get is dynamic based on the amount of music consumed. Users will be able to see this on a meter on their profile. Heavier users will get more music, but probably not all that they want, while the lighter user will have more streaming than they could possibly want. These users will also be able to see how much more free music they will have for the rest of the month with a green bar at the top of the screen that decreases with usage.
To listen to Rdio you can go to the website or download either the Mac or Windows PC app. Facebook users will also be able to share their songs via the new integration with Facebook’s Open Graph. The overall hope of the new offering is to draw in users and get them to sign up for one the paid services.
Samsung and Visa Team Up for NFC-Equipped “Olympics Phone”
In another move by Samsung to activate its sponsorship around the London 2012 Olympics, the mobile phone maker has partnered with Visa to create a “Olympics Phone” with an NFC chip.
According to the head of innovation and product development for Visa Europe, Sandra Alzetta, the phone is going to be chock full of Olympics content and will be available around the world before, during and after the Games.
The phone will work at the nearly 160,000 terminals in Europe which include 70,000 shops, bars and restaurants in the UK. Word has it that there will be NFC-equipped microSD cards available in the near future that can turn just about any phone into an NFC-capable device. This is still just talk. It’s unsure whether these cards will be produced before next summer or further down the road.
