Weekly digest 18th May

Is Facebook a fad? And do you trust it?

According to a recent poll, half of Americans think that Facebook is nothing more than a passing fad.

An Associated Press-CNBC poll conducted between 3rd and 7th May this year found that half of all Americans considered Facebook to be nothing more than a passing fad.  In addition, 50% of those polled thought that the likely asking price for shares in the upcoming IPO was too high.

Take a look at the infographic at the bottom of this page for a response to this. If you think Facebook isn’t worth its $100billion valuation, it might make you think otherwise.

Respondents were split (43% in favour, 46% against) when considering whether Facebook would have long-term success.

59% of all those surveyed did not trust Facebook to keep their information private; just 13% showed significant trust in the company.

And 83% of people claim to hardly ever or never click on an advertisement on the site, along with 54% who don't feel at all safe buying goods or services from Facebook-hosted links.

DO YOU TRUST FACEBOOK TO KEEP YOUR INFORMATION PRIVATE? Take part in my online poll here:

http://poll.fm/3pk9e

Shazam gets off to a good start with ITV

Last Saturday saw the launch of Shazam-enabled advertising on ITV in the UK. It has been hailed a great success by the “media discovery provider”, with around 50,000 viewers using the Shazam app to tag adverts during special commercial breaks in the Britain’s Got Talent final.

Viewers who had the Shazam app on their smartphone were invited to enter contests to win tickets to summer festivals from Pepsi MAX and an Olympic Ceremony package from chocolate manufacturer Cadbury by tagging adverts.

Here’s a quote from Simon Daglish, Group Commercial Sales Director at ITV: “We’re thrilled that the first UK Shazam-enabled ads achieved this level of interaction in Saturday’s amazing Britain’s Got Talent final - proving there is a real appetite from consumers to go deeper with quality content including spot advertising. We’re very excited about talking to all our advertisers about this exclusive new opportunity to drive real-time engagement with their brands.”

This needs to be put in some perspective though. While 50,000 sounds like a good figure, the BGT final averaged an audience of 11.9 million. So actually, the engagement rate with the Shazam ads hovered around the 0.4% mark. When you scale that down to normal schedule ratings, the figures start to look pretty small. When you then transpose that to the far smaller New Zealand market, they become smaller still.

Mediaworks have been running a similar project with local suppliers Pluk. They have so far had around 50,000 downloads of the app, however engagement rates have remained extremely low.

My feeling is that these second screen advertising extensions will only work in the context of value-added second screen engagement around our own shows. Globally, second screen solutions already exist that allow viewers to engage with shows while they’re live on the air and then serve up advertising extensions timed to coincide with the linear advertising on the television screen. This makes much more sense as a consumer proposition and is a huge motivator for broadcasters to get some control over the second screen.

Background…

I’ve realised that not everyone will know of Shazam so I thought I should explain. It is basically the audio equivalent of a barcode reader. As a smartphone application, it is able to recognise the unique audio patterns of millions of audio tracks, from songs to pre-programmed tv shows and adverts – in fact, anything with a unique soundtrack that has pre-programmed into the Shazam database - and then serve up content specific to that pattern.

Everything you ever wanted to know about mobile use in New Zealand…

I had to share this site with you…

http://www.ourmobileplanet.com/en/graph/?wave=wave2&age=all&gender=all&active=country

CBS launches “CBS Connect”

Social TV continues to mature and become the main web strategy for major TV networks. CBS.com has just launched CBS Connect, “a new social hub connecting fans with each other and CBS stars.”

The site will be a single destination where they will aggregate content from Twitter and Facebook across all of CBS’ programming. The new platform is aimed to allow fans of CBS shows to connect even further with the stars of the shows. This is CBS taking their social TV offerings to the next level and they’ll be using Skype, one of their launch partners, to hold live chat events.

This is yet another example of a global broadcaster reimagining the way their viewers interact with their programming. I was involved in a similar project with ITV, aggregating social conversations around key shows into a system we launched as ITV Live. The idea was to use social media as a conduit between ITV and the viewer, strengthening the relationship and closing the gap between the two. The stronger the bond, the more brand loyalty and advocacy, and ultimately the higher the ratings.

I’m currently working with Tom Cotter on putting together a proposal for something similar here. TVNZ has utilised a social stream aggregator in the past with Grandstand (around the Rugby World Cup) and while that wasn’t perfect, a catch-all solution that covers conversations across all our programmes may have more traction. I’ll keep you updated.

In the meantime take a look at CBS Connect here.

Facebook add apps and negative sentiment feedback to their Insights tool
Earlier this week, Facebook introduced app ratings and negative feedback metrics to their in-built insights tool. The idea is to give developers and brands a better understanding of how users respond applications within Facebook.

Interestingly, Facebook already use these metrics to decide what apps will appear in users’ newsfeeds and also what will be promoted in their recently announced App Center. Having transparency of these metrics will empower brands to tweak and improve their apps to gain more reach within the Facebook platform.

The new app ratings dashboard in app insights will show how users have rated an app on a scale of one to five stars. Admins can view ratings as absolute numbers or relative percentages across different demographics, including age and gender, country and locale.

So for the first time, we’ll be able to produce applications like “Shortland Street Lookalikes” and “The Revenge Game” and know exactly what different demographics thought of it. I’m all for being able to learn as we go along, so this can only be good news for us.

While we’re talking Facebook apps, Method Studios are currently putting the finishing touches on our new Facebook competition entry form. This will allow us to run a competition entry application within any of our brand pages to capture names, email addresses and (if required) even photos and videos. It should be a fun and rewarding way of engaging our viewers. If anyone wants any further details, feel free to give me a shout.

New Zealand are ahead of the game… again
Once again we appear to be Facebook’s testing ground. Following the rollout of Timeline, which happened in New Zealand a month before the rest of the world, we are now privy to another Facebook development that can’t be accessed anywhere else.

Controversially, NZers now have the ability to pay to highlight your own personal post. In the same way as page’s sponsored stories, users will now have the ability to pay a small amount (likely to be $0.80) to ensure that their post makes it into all their friends’ newsfeeds.

It calls into doubt Facebook’s long-term promise never to charge users for using their platform. Opening up a pay option means that users may soon be competing with each other to spread their news among their social circles. And that may make the platform untenable for users unwilling to part with their petty cash.

My hunch on this (purely subjective) is that this will never see the light of day in other territories. Facebook recently drew up a document entitled “35 things that could destroy our company”. Spreading updates to newsfeeds based on how much a user spends on it could well be one of these things. I do wonder if Facebook are on the brink of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

The below infographic seems to be a far more sensible approach for Facebook to take to justify its IPO valuation…

Interesting picture of the week