First off, let me share a short demo video that provides a good overview of what the API makes possible.

Democratizing Optimization

Optimizing ads based on post-click engagement has gained prominence over the last several years as competitive pressure has forced ad platforms to demonstrate the value of their added services (e.g. optimization, targeting, reporting, etc.). As social has gained more prominence in this same time period ad platforms have been looking for ways to optimize ads that drive to Facebook in the same way they optimize for the open web. The limited solutions that are on the market today lock advertisers into a combined ad and page management solution.

This kind of arrangement is typical of an early market, but is not advantageous for the advertising buyer. By creating a public API we’ve made it possible for our customers use whatever ad platform they’d like. We’ve launched the API with a handful of partners, but that’s just the start. Ad platforms like the offering because it allows them to deliver the value of optimization to their customers more agnostically.

Public API Drive Innovation

Another reason why an open API is a good thing is that we’re now integrated with several partners who give us feedback on how we can improve our offering. Multiple partners means more input, more iteration, and more innovation.

In short, making our API broadly accessible leverages market forces to drive more innovation. We believe this is the most sustainable approach to development and it reflects the approach we’ve taken with our entire platform. We participate in a rapidly evolving eco-system with many competitive offerings that our customers will continue to integrate as they optimize their businesses. For this reason, we design API to make our backend accessible just as we tap into many APIs for the most popular social applications across the social web.

Going Beyond Display

Another thing to consider is that our Engagement Optimization API is not just for use optimizing ad buys, it can be used to optimize any source of referring traffic. So, if you’re not spending much on ads but rely more on email this functionality can help you optimize that channel as well.

Talking API’s

If you’re interested in learning more about APIs join me tomorrow night for an event put on by the Social Marketing Club at the Mashery in San Francisco.

In this experience the user was presented with information about which of their friends engaged with each commercial after they authorized the application to access their profile. As you consider how you’ll ask users to authorize your experiences considering these guidelines:

1. Free Samples - Give user’s a taste of the experience that they’ll have once permissions are granted. For example, this can be done with transparent views of content (or sample content) that will be revealed.
2. Show & Tell - Make sure to not only show users what they’ll get in exchange for authorization but also tell them about it with a clear call to action.
3. Don’t Block – Always give users a non-authorized experience that will keep them engaged and drive authorization over time.
4. Ask Nicely - Do not ask for permissions before you’ve proven some value. There are two approaches to asking users to authorize your application that work well:
   1. Persistent Ask

   - In this scenario the call to action stays in view and is accessible if/when the user decides to authorize the application. Typically, the placement is unobtrusive and proximal to an area where authorization will affect the user experience. This approach is best for shorter-term campaign based applications.

   2. Intermittent Ask – In this scenario the call to action is removed if the user does not opt-in within a set time period. The action can then be re-surfaced after the user has engaged further. This provides a more flexible framework and tends to be a better fit for more complex evergreen applications because it provides a greater sense of urgency when the ask is revealed.
5. Group Requests – Do not ask for ALL permissions at once. Instead, ask for only the permissions you need to reveal the intended experience. That said, permissions should be grouped so that you can deliver an entire experience based on a single ask. ]
6. Say Thanks – When users authorize your application thank them for doing so in an appropriate manner.

We hope you find these helpful and we’d be thrilled to hear from you if you have other guidelines that you’d like to share with the community.

We’ve had our share of firsts at Involver, but this one is unique because we’re launching our Engagement Optimization API with a group of industry leading partners.  We are excited to be partnering with Marin Software, Unified, and SocialCode for this launch. Why are so many partners coming together to leverage this API? In short, because it will allow them to optimize their ad spend on social in the same way they’ve been doing across the web for a long time.

Facebook’s walled garden does not support the cookies that advertisers traditionally use to track engagement. And, there are tight restrictions on how advertisers can use data collected on Facebook. Some advertisers have already adopted engagement optimization through exclusive partnerships or custom integrations that have validated the demand for this functionality. With our announcement, advertisers now have a broad market solution to optimize on a granular engagement level from their Facebook Pages.

With the massive growth of advertising on Facebook we see this as a huge opportunity for brands to obtain more value from their spend and to get deeper insights into consumer behavior on social networks. But let’s make it a bit more tangible for those of you who are not deeply familiar with the kind of tracking Facebook offers natively. Today ads that drive users to a contest on Facebook could be optimized based on “likes” and “shares”, but not on what matters most. In this case, contest entries or coupon downloads post-entry are really the goal of your experience and the KPIs to optimize against it.

If you’re like Involver then you see a future in which social advertising platforms, listening platforms, and social management platforms that inter-operate with each other will outperform other platforms that try to roll everything in to their own interface. This is why we’re so excited about our ad platform partners; because they represent a diverse approach to the space that serves a broad range of customer needs. In fact, the long-term value of this API extends even beyond ad platforms. In reality, our API can be used to optimize any referring content that drives users to Facebook including email campaigns and even page posts.

We’re very thrilled to release this functionality into the market. But even more excited to see how our customers leverage the engagement optimization API, so we gain can insight into how we can make it even more powerful.  Feel free to read our press release.

If you’d like to learn more please CLICK HERE.

Every year, the San Francisco Business Times chooses a small selection of companies across 14 award categories that are positively impacting technology on all aspects; everything from energy efficiency to social media.  This year we are thrilled to announce that Involver is one of the Tech & Innovation Awards 2012’s finalists.  The San Francisco publication and its award’s judges chose us based upon our significant role in fueling the regional economy, attracting growth capital and VC funding, as well as creating new job opportunities in the San Francisco Bay Area.

The San Francisco Business Times, will honor the most enterprising technology companies in the Bay Area (Involver included) on the evening of May 9, 2012, at the awards reception to be held at the Four Seasons Hotel in San Francisco.  We are proud to have been chosen and among the company of these talented and exciting companies.

2012 Tech & Innovation Award Finalists: AdRoll, Adura Technologies, Alphabet Energy, Aurora Algae, Badgeville, Castlight Health, Clairmail, Clean Power Finance, CloudFlare, Funzio, Involver, Joyent, Lending Club, MarkLogic Corporation, One Kings Lane, Recurrent Energy, Rocket Fuel, Sifteo, Siluria Technologies, Smule, Sonim Technologies, Storm8, Ticketfly, Workday,  Yammer.

To find out how Involver is positively impacting the social media tech space, click here.

Article, Big Data and Social Media Analytics, first published on 4thWeb.

Big Data, in case you’re unfamiliar, refers to data sets that are so large that they’re awkward to work with. Forget megabytes or gigabytes. With Big Data we’re currently working with terabytes, petabytes, exabytes and zettabytes of data (over 2.5 quintillion bytes daily and growing). Social Media (as a social instrument of communication) is greatly impacting the growth of Big Data (as an industry); and Big Data is providing established and aspiring social enterprises and organizations with the data to help them understand how to better function, grow and manage as a social business.

Highlights of the daily Big Data stream

• 1 Billion plus Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and Pinterest visitors generating many Billions of messages, statuses, comments, posts, content uploads, etc.
• 2 Million plus Blog posts
• 300 Billion plus emails
• 22 Million hours of TV Shows and Movies watched on Netflix
• 2 Billion plus videos watched on YouTube
• 900,00 plus hours of video uploaded to YouTube
• 19 Million plus hours of music streamed on Pandora
• 1 Petabyte plus of game content processed by Zynga

The above list only represents some Big Data data types that we’re most familiar with. There are also financial transactions, imaging data, and much more information that flows into the Big Data stream. To help understand just how big Big Data is, consider this: more data has been created in the past two years than in the entire history of the world before that. Yes, rewind and play if you haven’t heard this statistic before.

Big Data is being used in many ways and in many fields and industries

Big Data is used in Medical research, personalized medicine, computer sciences and business, to name a few. In a Social Business, we rely on Big Data daily and could not operate very well without it. We use Big Data to help manage strategic business functions including: marketing, customer support, sales, and much more. And, Big Data is also starting to help us understand how much of our Social activities contribute to Business ROI, mainly in the marketing area (i.e., we can’t yet effectively measure other business silos as well as marketing). Today, it’s important for all enterprises and organizations to know what their return on investment is relative to what they’re spending on Social. Those numbers are generally looking very good for those social enterprises and organizations that are doing social right and have been doing it for a while.

Think of how far marketing data has traveled from the days of “mention this ad to save 20%”, to today’s robust social analytics software that mines Big Data and helps us analyze what people are thinking, sharing, saying and doing in real-time. With Big Data, in the Social realm we’re able to identify important trends, gauge sentiment for brands and products, and so much more. Essentially, Big Data helps us control the conversation and respond (quickly) to what people really want to talk about; and, introduce content (quickly) that people are really interested in. No doubt, Big Data will help grow many established and aspiring social enterprises and organizations to great heights in the next 2-to-4 years.

Return to top: Big Data and Social Media Analytics

Related Posts in Big Data, Business ROI and Social Business ROI:

The Road Less Travelled: Social Business ROI
Google Analytics Social Reports Ties Social Channels to Business ROI
Social Business and the Growth of Shared Value
Social Business ROI: Myths and Successes

On the evening of April 26th, Involver’s Rahim Fazal will be one of the round table leaders at the Influencer Series held at one the exclusive offices on Sand Hill Road, Menlo Park, California.

The Influencer Series are invite-only gatherings of about 60 good energy entrepreneurs, executives, academics and advisors, all leaders in their fields. The evenings are meant to provide a venue for stimulating conversations in a relaxed, off-the-record atmosphere between peers who know, or should know, of each other. Previous attendees include David Kelley, IDEO Founder; Ellen Pao, Kleiner Perkins Partner; Rob Coneybeer, Shasta Ventures Partner; Marissa Mayer, Google VP Local and Location; Oren Jacob, former Pixar CTO and August Capital EIR.

Rahim will be leading a discussion on the evening’s theme of “Social = Commerce?”, exploring business models and innovations at the intersection of social and commerce.

We here at Involver believe social commerce represents a powerful opportunity to engage new and existing customers, and our Social Catalog app is just the beginning for all things related to social and commerce.

Today’s Creatives Talk Live theme is “How Social Spurs Creativity.” Involver does this by enabling marketing developers, and we’re sharing our story at Facebook Studio at 11am PST (2pm EST, 6pm GST).

New Roles

Now you may be asking, “what is a marketing developer?” This new role was created from the changes in team structure brought on by the advent of the social/mobile web. Marketing developers assess the feasibility of a marketing strategy and choose the best technology available that will put the team on the right path to achieving its goals. They also use this chosen solution to build technology that allows the rest of the marketing team to function effectively. Marketing developers make it a point to know what’s coming next, and they use their knowledge when choosing and building the technologies that will persist through the dynamic social space.

At Involver, we are not technically marketing developers though we do take on this role when we release new features and functionality. That said, marketing developers are one of our most important our customers. They are in agencies. They are in brands. No matter where they work though, they all have the same needs. And that’s what our focus is on: empowering marketing developers to deliver cutting-edge social experiences without the headaches of APIs or hosting.

The Big Shift

Nigel Morris, CEO of Aegis Media Americas, acknowledged at this year’s Facebook Marketing Conference in NYC, that teams needed restructuring in order to truly deliver on “social by design”. Social has created demands once unheard of, and teams are changing to address these demands. A call for change in solutions sets stems from this shift as well, since effective supporting solutions reflect the team structures they serve.

Change is nothing new. When traditional web was born, it also brought about the creation of new roles and teams, and new connections between teams. Today, with the social/mobile web, change and the creation of new things are happening again. The new roles that have sprouted are that of the community manager, the social strategist, and of course, the social marketing developer.

The Future: A Prediction

That guy from Aegis, he speaks the truth about this change, yet there remains a gap when it comes to social platforms that allow marketers, designers and developers to collaborate in the same place, the way they do in Global CMSs and email marketing platforms. At Involver, we recognize this. That’s why we’ve designed SML for the marketing developer. Mark our words: any enterprise-level social marketing platform that continues to ignore marketing developers will not be around a year from now.

Has your team structure changed because of social? Tell us how.

Involver’s Chairman and Co-Founder, Rahim Fazal, will be one of the speakers at this year’s TiECon, the world’s largest professional conference for entrepreneurs. The Silicon Valley event, set for May 18th and 19th, 2012 at the Santa Clara Convention Center, will bring together over 3,000 thought leaders, venture capitalists, industry leaders, and of course, entrepreneurs.

TiECon is the flagship event of TiE (The Indus Entrepreneurs), a not-for-profit organization that, this year, is celebrating 20 years of fostering entrepreneurship in more than 57 chapters in 14 countries. TiE has come to stand for Talent, Ideas and Enterprise, as the organization continues “…to cultivate and nurture the ecosystem of entrepreneurship and free-market economy everywhere.”

Rahim, who was recently at the White House when President Barack Obama signed the JOBS Act, will be speaking during the Cloud Panel, in a session called the Consumerization in the Enterprise – Why It Is Important to Win the User Before the CIO.

For more information on TiECon, click here.

Even if the average American spends a quarter of his or her time online on social networks, there are just so many brands all vying for customers’ attention that bringing out something flashy will only get you so far—it may get them looking, but then they will have moved on before you actually get your message across. The aim of every brand and marketer is to get customers interested enough that they stop, stay a while, and get talking and sharing; in short, engaged.

Here are 5 ways to communicate with your customers, not at them. You need to forge real connections and foster true conversations.

1) Jump On – Don’t build the bandwagon, grab onto one and catch a ride. Tap into the hot topics your customers are already interested in when first reaching out to them. Don’t start a conversation by talking about your brand, you can work that in a little further down the road once you’ve established rapport.

2) Go for the Visual – In the past week, not only did Pinterest become the third largest social network in the social space but Facebook bought Instagram for 1 billion dollars! That says something about how visual humans are. Appeal to an inherently human behavior and show them beautiful and engaging photos to look at.

3) Ask Questions and Actually Listen – People like to talk—about themselves, their opinions, and their experiences. It shouldn’t just be about your brand because social is a reflection of real life—talk about yourself too much and you’ll turn people off. Provide your customers with an avenue for conversing. Answer their questions and ask your own, but make sure they feel like what they’re saying counts so it doesn’t begin and end as a one-time deal. Create a continuous conversation flow.

4) You Want a Gate, Not a Wall – Fan gate your valuable content and promotions, but be open to sharing free content as well. You don’t want to come off as unapproachable, especially to new customers who are only starting to get to know your brand through a little exploring. A little mystery through fan gating can be a great hook; just don’t gate everything you’ve got. Along similar lines, make it easy for customers to share your content to others who have yet to be introduced to you. Facebook make the Share button; use it.

5) Build a Community They Can Be Proud to Belong To – Be a brand that’s present; you shouldn’t just aim to post regularly, your posts should hold value, be informative and useful in your customers’ everyday lives. Add a human factor to your brand’s social presence, so that you transform your brand into one that’s approachable, and your conversations become the kind your customers care about and share.

Article, Never Underestimate the Zuck (Facebook Instagram deal), first published on 4thWeb.

Facebook recently bought Instagram for one billion dollars. Instagram is the fast, beautiful, fun way to share photos with friends and family. Instagram enables you to snap a picture, choose a filter to transform and theoretically improve its look and feel, then post to Instagram’s website. And you can share to Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr too – it’s photo sharing, reinvented, and super easy to do. But, still, it’s reinvented; not exactly new or groundbreaking. So, why exactly did Facebook buy Instagram and why does that matter?

Facebook doesn’t need Instagram’s 30 million users.

It already has 850 million of its own. And Facebook’s ultra-simple built-in photo app is the most popular app on Facebook. So, why? Is Facebook predicting that its user acquisition rate will slow down? Don’t think so. They’ll likely hit a billion users sometime in the next year just on autopilot. Facebooks upcoming IPO guarantees that they’ll be spending most of their time and treasure on increasing revenues, not users. Of course, most of that is ad revenue. Instagram comes with users but no revenue and no obvious way to monetize their user base.

The Facebook Instagram deal looks like it’s a pure mobile play.

But, Facebook already has lots of mobile users. Well over 400 million users per month use Facebook on their mobile devices; and Facebook offers mobile apps on just about every platform. Problem is, Facebook is getting pennies on the dollar for mobile ad revenue compared to desktop ad revenue. In light of the upcoming IPO, Wall Street analysts are surely looking at this acquisition from the PoV of “how much revenue does the acquisition bring to the table v. the expense of keeping Instagram running and of course the one billion dollar price tag?”.

OK, this might be a bit of a stretch but maybe not. Facebook doesn’t own a piece of the image acquisition part of the mobile market. Instagram does. So, maybe Facebook is thinking that instead of Instagram users posting the images to Instagrams website, that users will start posting them to Facebooks timeline. That would result in more opportunities to serve ads to the desktop and of course that would increase revenues. I for one would like to see Facebooks spreadsheets on that one though since Facebook still has to recoup their one billion dollar investment and that will not be easy.

Maybe Facebook doesn’t have much of a choice?

Facebook wants a big piece of the mobile market and their current mobile offering may take too much time to develop into a revenue-generating service. Mobile image acquisition isn’t part of Facebook’s current mobile service but maybe that’s exactly what they need right now. The Instagram purchase, complete with business infrastructure and 30 million users, would instantly accelerate Facebook’s market share of the mobile market, and interface with Facebook in a way that increases Facebooks ad revenues on the desktop. Now this could be a Facebook mobile service that makes Wall Street happy. Right?

So, maybe the new Facebook Instagram service will enable users to quickly and easily take beautiful pictures, seamlessly share them to their Facebook timeline and friends, and Facebook gets to serve more ads to the desktop where they make their money. Maybe this is starting to sound like a match made in heaven. Never underestimate the Zuck.

Graphic created by: Online MBA Programs

Return to top: Why Facebook Bought Instagram and Why That Matters?

We’d like to hear your thoughts on our Facebook Instagram post. You can share them in the comments section below.