Hi Involver Blog Readers,

We’ve moved our blog location to the Oracle Social Spotlight: https://blogs.oracle.com/socialspotlight/.

Please update your bookmarks.

Thank you.

Thank you to our 3,400+ webinar registrants.  We had an overwhelming response of questions and amazing feedback on Twitter, Facebook and during the webinar Q&A.  Because of the incredible amount of questions we know many of you still have more – please post them on Twitter with the hashtag #InvolverWebinar or on our Facebook Fan Page.

Below is a briefing of what we covered during the webinar today. To gain exclusive access to the webinar recording simply click here.

Involver Webinar Series:

Facebook is betting their future on the Open Graph (OG) which captures the relationships between people, the content they share, and the applications they engage with. Brands can leverage the open graph to create the most innovative experiences on the platform while gaining insight into user’s behaviors and interests.

To show how to gain the most from this resource we offered a webinar this morning with social strategy to help you leverage Facebook’s Open Graph technology.  Missed the webinar?  No problem to learn how you can take your social marketing strategy to the next level with Open Graph, gain access to the webinar recording here.

In this webinar recording you’ll learn:

• Why leveraging the Open Graph is the biggest opportunity in social
• Why custom actions are the new “like”
• How to get started building an OG application for your brand

Roland Smart, VP of Marketing at Involver, and Rehan Iftikhar, Product Manager for Involver’s Social Markup Language, share a framework for developing OG applications, and will get you inspired with sample campaigns.

Questions Answered during the Webinar Q&A Session:

Q: Abby R. – How do your applications ensure that users are still giving permissions if they know that they are going to have actions published to their timeline automatically?

Q: Jason C. – Are there tools available to make it easy for the average user to build a Facebook Open Graph App?

Q: Reece R. – Can actions change in regards to a live event such as before, during and after?

Q: Luis C.O. – How can custom actions can be used through the Facebook Javascript API?

Q: Juan F. – Can Open Graph be useful to achieve sales objectives, not only branding or engagement objectives?

Q: Cagri G. – If you are using default objects like Watch and Like, do you not need to ask the user to accept the application?

Q: Stephen M. – How do you think the rise of mobile access of Facebook will affect things like the ticker?

Q: Jessica B. – How can open graph increase the results from Facebook Ads?

Q: Jason L. – Would you recommend using Involver with our CMS platform?

Q: Joshua S. – In the future, will marketers be able to target users who have performed a certain action against a certain object?

Q: Elle M. – Can custom actions be published from a website instead of from Facebook?

Q: Ermolay R.  – You promised to tell us about the future of social marketing. We’ve heard about a shift to more agile, iterative approaches not only to your app development but to marketing and strategy. But that’s current state, now. What is the future?

Q: Maha E. – How would you suggest a company use Open Graph if they offer services – the product isn’t tangible?

Q: Yeh D. – When I see a FB permission gate, how can we overcome bounces and get people to accept the permission?

Didn’t see your question answered above?  Please reach out to us via Twitter with the hastag #InvolverWebinar or post on the Involver Facebook Fan Page.  Thank you again to our participants, fans and followers for another successful webinar.

PivotCon 2012 will cover numerous topics for those lucky folks with tickets. The conference theme centers around the growing primacy of “the Social Construct,” – the overarching framework of how we live, work and absorb information and how Social is changing it all.

The upcoming conference is not a place to go for hour-long keynote speeches. You won’t find panels talking at you. Attendees won’t deal with on-stage commercials highlighting specific products. Instead, the conference is focused on suggestive experiences, advice and insights.

Attendees will have the opportunity to meet leaders in Social and hear their tips, tricks and success stories. Involverites and Oracleans alike are excited to educate attendees on the topic of the Open Graph as a presenting sponsor. See the full sponsors list here.

As a sponsor we are able to give our followers a special 30% discount (higher than the VIP discount!).   Since the Pivot team was so pleased with how Involver’s Visual SML helped them to create customized, branded tabs on Facebook without any coding; they gave us a code to show their love.  At checkout, use code “VSML2012” to receive the special discount.

If you want more information, check out the PivotCon Facebook page here. Pivotcon’s Facebook Fan Page features tabs created using Involver’s SML and Visual SML. Above and below are two of the pages designed using Involver’s Visual SML. Each of the pages features several Visual SML widgets including, images, contest widgets, Tweets to Pages, among others.

Will you be attending PivotCon this year?

To show how to gain the most from this resource we’re offering a webinar with social strategy to help you leverage Facebook’s Open Graph technology.  Join us Thursday, August 9th at 10:00am PST to learn how you can take your social marketing strategy to the next level with Open Graph.

In this webinar you’ll learn:

• Why leveraging the Open Graph is the biggest opportunity in social
• Why custom actions are the new “like”
• How to get started building an OG application for your brand

Roland Smart, VP of Marketing at Involver, and Rehan Iftikhar, Product Manager for Involver’s Social Markup Language, will share a framework for developing OG applications, and will get you inspired with sample campaigns.

Registration is limited – so hurry and reserve your spot here.

Pinterest is the new place to be. The site is built for free brand advertising. Users love the image-oriented layout and are constantly repinning and liking images, pushing your content into their friends’ newsfeeds on Facebook.

If you’re not sure how to get started, or maybe you’re just not sure what you would even “pin”, then keep reading for six tips and tricks for Pinterest beginners.

1. Create a “Behind the Scenes” Pinboard.

Perhaps your brand is already on Pinterest, but you’re looking for a way to reach out to your customers on a more personal level; think about creating a pin board revealing activities that take place behind the scenes at your company.

Employees tend to have a similar sense of flair as the companies they work for, so their personalities can be shared via your company’s Pinterest account.

This board could also contain staff bios and images of those people who are routine contributors. By creating a “behind the scenes” board, customers get the chance to see the personality behind your brand, leading to stronger brand loyalty.

2. Share Information through “Events” Pin Boards

If your business runs or participates in events monthly or even bi-monthly, you could create an Events board. This is a fantastic way to consolidate a lot of user-generated content into one location for even further distribution.

Attendees of your event will re-pin and share your photos, their photos, even random photos! In turn, this sharing promotes your event, your content, and creates a strong user base.

Red Frog Events does a great job with its Pinboards highlighting the different events throughout the year including the Warrior Dash and Great Urban Race featured below.

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3. Combine Facebook and Pinterest using the Visual SML™ Pinterest Widget.

One of the best new widgets for Involver’s visual authoring solution, Visual SML™, is the Pinterest Widget. Using this tool, you can display your Pinterest feed right on your Facebook Fan Page. The integration of the two social networks will greatly increase your Pinterest following as Pins flow directly into the newsfeed. The Pinterest widget is extremely simple to configure with your pin boards, as the entire Visual SML™ platform requires no coding knowledge.

4. Take Advantage of Visually Stimulating Infographics

People do not have time during the day to read long blog articles full of facts and figures, regardless of how interesting and important we believe they are. But if you can share those numbers with some vibrantly colored pictures and bold headers, customers will be drawn in like flies to honey.

When sharing images that are relevant to your consumer base, you drive significant traffic to the source of those images. Humans are visual beings. Give it to them, their way.

Jeff Bullas does a great job integrating his social networks, including Blogging and Infographics Pinboards.

5. Share the Visuals from your Blog Posts

If your brand has a live blog, consider sharing the images from the latest post, which can serve multiple purposes. For one thing, you create a two-way bridge to introduce Pinterest customers to your blog and vice-versa. Compelling and catchy photos will drive customers to the blog from your pin boards because of Pinterest’s easy click through format. Then those customers will repin and/or like the pin, displaying the activity in their newsfeeds, linking friends back to your pin board as well as your blog. Voila!

6. Integrating Social Networks

Finally, as a last piece of advice, your brand MUST integrate each of the social networks with each other. Every time that you post a blog, Pin your featured pictures, Tweet a blurb, and post appropriate URLs on Facebook and LinkedIn. If your brand can make a habit out of sharing content onto all of the social networks, your consumer base will grow. Period. You just need to increase the chance of being discovered, and Pinterest is a great new place to catch attention.

Visual SML™ is the easiest way for brands to create a social app in a drag-and-drop environment with no coding required. Now, you can add even more functionality into your social app.

You can easily incorporate Pinterest, Instagram, and Photo Contests, Video Contests, Custom Navigation, and Google Analytics into your Facebook Fan Page. Visual SML™ just got a whole lot better.

• Pinterst: Integrate your Pinterest boards and pins on your Facebook fan page. Your fans will now be able to “pin” your images on their boards – making your images more viral and sharable.

• Instagram: Connect your Instagram account to your Facebook fan page. Now, all the pictures that you snap and share on Instagram will be automatically posted to your Facebook fan page. Or search for hashtags of pictures you want displayed on your page. Get pictures up fast and share them with your fans.
• Photo Contest Widget: Create photo contests to get fans to engage with your brand. Fans upload photos of themselves and also vote on their favorite fan photos. Photo contests create great user-generated-content (UGC) for your brand.
• Custom Navigation: Create tabs within tabs on your Facebook fan page. Consolidate app experiences. Provide multiple app experiences in one tab. Make a sleek looking Facebook fan page with Custom Navigation.
• Google Analytics: Integrate your Google Analytics account into your Facebook fan page. Get views, click, and essential analytics data from either Involver’s built-in analytics, Facebook insights, or Google Analytics.

Visual SML™ is the easiest way to create a custom, branded Facebook Fan Page, incorporate multiple features and functionality into one tab, and make your Facebook presence more engaging and viral.

To learn more about Visual SML™, go here.

To see a demo of what Visual SML™ can do for your company, contact us today at involver.com/contact.

Here is an example of a Facebook tab created in Visual SML™ that incorporates Pinterest, Instagram, Photo Contest, and Custom Navigation. The tab was created in less than an hour using Visual SML™:

The combination of Involver with Oracle is expected to create the most advanced and comprehensive cloud-based social solution, across marketing, sales and service touch points. Our technology is expected to extend Oracle’s social platform to help customers more easily and cost-effectively collaborate and build engaging applications and social experiences across social networks and the Open Graph.

This acquisition is a combination of the best of both worlds; we will be combining our industry leading social marketing solutions with the comprehensive Oracle Cloud.  We are pleased to bring Oracle’s experience to our customers who will benefit from access to a suite of social offerings which include: social listening and monitoring capabilities acquired from Collective Intellect, social service capabilities from RightNow and additional publishing and analytics capabilities from Vitrue.  Involver customers will also benefit from Oracle’s comprehensive support and service through their global scale and reach.

Our management and employees are expecting to join Oracle, bringing domain and social expertise to the Oracle team.  We are extremely excited about the prospects of this combination and are continuing to work diligently on bringing innovative technology to market place.

I would like to extend a personal thank you, on behalf of our co-founders, Noah Horton, Rahim Fazal and myself; to the Involverites for your unwavering commitment to providing comprehensive, innovative and creative solutions for the social marketing industry.  Your expertise and willingness to always go the extra mile has brought us to this incredible turning point, not only for Involver, but for the world of social technology solutions.

As a team, we are committed to keeping our customers and followers informed; and will provide updates as more news becomes available.

For more information on this announcement, please visit oracle.com/involver.

With such phenomenal success, other social networks are even more determined to carve out a niche in the market place. With fierce competition for your profile page, viral and covert marketing methods may no longer be enough. These companies, unlike Facebook, are stepping out from behind the screen and into the physical world of advertising.

Two social networks in the realms of social gaming and dating have made 1,000 people’s profile a little more prominent.

Zynga,  founded in 2007  is the company behind the popular Facebook games such as Farmville, Cityville and Hidden Chronicles and with a user base of over 250 million users a month is a major player in the world of social media.

Badoo is a dating focused social discovery website that was founded in 2006 and now boasts over 150 million members and is growing at over 150,000 users every day. It is now the 59th most visited website in the world.

Zynga’s “I Love to Play” Campaign

In the run up to Christmas 2011, Zynga (gaming social network) users could upload their photos into a billboard game which were then displayed on digital screens in Times Square, New York.  Zynga commented that ‘I Heart Zynga’ was simply a ‘game’ to ‘celebrate’ their players but it also cleverly captured the essence of their brand; a gaming platform with people who ‘Love to Play’

It gave a personal touch to their advertising and graphics of the most popular games were also displayed, giving the general public a true sense of their network.

Badoo’s Ultimate Profile Campaign

Badoo, the fast growing online dating site, uses a similar method of integrating user’s pictures into their adverts. Initially the ‘Badoo project’ photographed 1000 New Yorkers (who had to sign up to Badoo) and picked 26 winners ‘based on personality, energy and individuality’ for their billboard campaign that was launched in April 2012.  This campaign was displayed on billboards, taxi tops and underground trains.

The Badoo blog states that for these 26 users who will be plastered across New York.

‘it’s like starring in the ultimate profile picture.’

The number ‘150 Million’ is just as important as the photos. It gives Badoo ‘the world’s largest and fastest growing social network for meeting new people’ a sense of value.

It encourages others that there will be a perfect match for them in this large population. Building on this idea, they also have a counter on their home page, showcasing how many people are already using Badoo.

Of course this is a prime example of the network effect theory; in essence, the more people that use the service, the more valuable the service is to the user.

Building a Community

Both Zynga and Badoo are creating value and a sense of community by choosing ‘real’ users to represent them.  It’s especially interesting how Badoo invoked a sense of excitement amongst their audience through the potential of being picked for an advertising campaign. They’ve included their users at every step and this is vital – they have got their feedback, created a buzz and made their audience feel part of the campaign which translates into more log-ins and viral chat.

What can we Learn from These Campaigns?

Buying premium advertising space in New York might not be in your budget but how could you adapt these techniques to your own business?

• Just as Badoo highlights the size of its membership to create credibility don’t be afraid to display your credentials (such as number of followers, awards etc) to the world. Even simple elements such as share buttons that display the number of “retweets” and Facebook “likes” provide social proof that does get noticed.

• All businesses should have ‘followers/fans/friends’ via a Facebook page and blog, so why not test out some potential campaign ideas? People love to give their opinion and even more so when it’s taken on board.

• Could you pick a ‘follower’ of the month? Ask them some fun questions about themselves and dedicate a day to them. Give them a higher platform within your business. It gives your website a personal touch.

• You might not have 150 million people on your website but be proud of the number you do have, make your audience feel valued. Thank them! Remember 100,000 followers started with 100 of them.

• Hold a caption competition where clients could tell you what your brand means to them. Could you reward them with a discount or a gift?

Is there an interesting (and cost effective) way to present your brand and profile  to the world?

Think how Zynga used gaming, how could you be innovative with your business?

What About You?

Despite millions being spent on eye catching logos, platform design and compelling copy, both businesses and social networks need to grab the attention of a public who, having been inundated with data requests, aren’t now so easy to convince.

Could you unlock some refreshing marketing initiatives with techniques that involve your existing audience?

Look forward to hearing you ideas, stories and experiences.

Article originally posted on http://www.jeffbullas.com/2012/06/07/the-ultimate-social-media-profile/

In the most simplistic terms, SEO is aimed at robots and Social is aimed at humans.  SEO is fundamentally about organizing your site in a way that search engine spiders can easily parse the content and determine how relevant that content is to user’s search queries to help users find the content they need – hopefully your content.   Social on the other hand is all about leveraging the human desire to share things we like to get users to recommend content and products directly to their friends.

Of course, in practice the division isn’t nearly that cut and dry.  As I’ve written previously, search engines are doing their best to include social relevance in their results.  And when I say Social, I’m not just talking about Facebook and Google+. Stumbleupon has a plugin that assigns star ratings to search results in Google based on what people with interests similar to yours have said about the sites.  And for Business to Consumer (B2C) companies Yelp and Google business reviews play a direct role in what shows up in Google businesses searches and how credible merchants are perceived to be.

Even aside from the direct and visible impacts of Social on search engine rankings, search engines have started placing increasing and increasingly heavy emphasis on off-site factors like inbound links in order to combat black-hat SEO farms.  The quantity, diversity, content, and (most importantly) quality of those inbound links are some of the biggest factors in establishing your Search Engine Rank Page (SERP) score.  Quality is key because it’s it’s weighted very heavily and because it’s determined by the relationships between the origin of the incoming link and the rest of the web.  10,000 incoming links from a link farm in Eastern Elbonia are not worth nearly as much as 1,000 likes from real humans sharing the content with other real humans.  In fact, once Google realizes that you have 10k incoming links from link farms you’re going to be very heavily penalized.  This is one area where social media absolutely excels – every person who shares content off your .com site on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, StumbleUpon, or any of a dozen other sites and services is creating a link back to your site.  Best of all, those links will self-propagate as your content spreads through their social graphs from one friend to another.  The trick is to create content that invites people to participate, add their own thoughts, and share with friends.

And that’s the most important take-away: make great content and make that content easy to find and easy to share.  In many ways Social is really reinforcing the best practices of White Hat SEO.  In Social SEO keyword density, clear document structure, and appropriate use of long-tail search phrases are still important.  So is writing clear, concise, and focused product descriptions and page content, both because that focus makes it easier for search engines to parse your pages and because it makes it easier for people to share those pages.  All the things that would encourage legitimate bloggers to backlink to your articles and reference them or encourage people to cite you as a source are the same things that will encourage people to share your content.

Be fun, be witty, be engaging, and – as Bill and Ted said so long ago – be excellent to each other (seriously some of the most important life advice I’ve ever seen in a film).  It’s really that simple.

She is beautiful, has curves in all the right places and we do almost everything together.

We hang out at coffee shops, travel to mystical foreign lands, watch movies together, laugh over funny photos and share  ideas about a whole range of topics.

She is happy to just hang around in the office or at home while I have meetings or go cycling for hours and she never complains…not once.

She is the perfect partner and her name is iPad 3.

The Rise of the “App”

As you know the age of mobile has seen the rise of the “app” and I have been downloading apps onto my iPad like a man drinks water after crossing a desert.

I have many apps on my phone and iPad but the one app that I have been spending a lot of time with is the Kindle “app”.

I have also discovered that I am an impulse buyer and with Amazon’s one click purchase, book titles are flying off the shelf and into my virtual library.

Who can’t resist books for less than $10 that are delivered in less than 30 seconds and no matter where you are in the world.

The Age of Social Reading

I discovered social media when I first joined Facebook. In 2012 I have stumbled onto social reading.

What is social reading?

I am in the middle of reading the book “On Writing” by Stephen King and in it he reveals his early years, his passion for writing and lessons on what makes for a good writer.

It is full of inspiration and insights and I do like to share them if someone is around but often I am reading in solitude….but I can share it.

I highlight the phrase I want to share with a simple finger touch.

Then I can send it to Twitter or Facebook with a description if  I believe it needs one. It provides a sharing feature that provides me with a range of benefits.

This is Social Reading

How does it look once I have shared it?

Here is how it looks on my Facebook timeline. It has a description, a link to the highlighted quote and a link to the page you can buy it from.

The benefits are not only in the sharing but it places it directly into your Facebook “timeline” that you can refer to later and for your friends and family to see.

It also puts a link to the book in the Amazon store that makes it easy for others to buy with a few clicks from the Facebook page.

Now if you are an author this is rather exciting as this optimizes your “visibility” and that is a good thing. If you have a tribe of followers on Facebook and Twitter then you have a network that will buy and read your book.

The Democratisation of Publishing

On Amazon it is becoming increasingly easy to create an eBook and upload it.

We are seeing the evolution of the democratisation of publishing that sits next to the publishing tools and social media networks to market your content whether that is an ebook or an online course.

This quiet but relentless revolution sits comfortably alongside the changes that are happening in the music industry.

Content is becoming increasingly digital and disruption is the norm.

The question is to be asked.. do you need a traditional publisher?

I can now see the future of books and the age of the mass market printed book is passing.

It won’t happen tomorrow or next year but it will happen. I don’t know if I like it,  but it does seem inevitable.

What About You?

Do you think printed books will disappear? Do you use your iPad for reading?

What is the potential for authors on a social web?

Will traditional publishers become extinct?

Look forward to hearing your opinions and comments.

Article originally posted on http://www.jeffbullas.com/2012/06/08/what-is-social-reading/