Today was Facebook Marketing Conference in New York. An incredible collection of marketers from brands, agencies, developers and platforms filled the American Museum of Natural History to share inspiring stories of success on Facebook, and hear the latest updates- a stirring set of new offerings and features that they hope will make “Marketing on Facebook feel like the right of Facebook,” in the words of Mike Hoefflinger, Facebook Director of Global Business Marketing. (He also called Timeline a “big fat storytelling canvas” and showed some tremendous examples, from Starbucks and Walmart to Red Bull and Kia.)

It was awesome. It was inspiring. It was a tremendous reminder that Facebook continues to serve as the most comprehensive social destination for brand and audience interaction- and that Timeline is the new “Mission Control for your Company.”

But what does it mean for you?

Above all, it means that Branding and Promotions are alive and well on Facebook. There are new features to adapt to, and new offerings to help you reach more people. But the fundamentals- Facebook as a channel for engaging directly with your customers, giving them offers, gathering their impressions of your brand through user-generated content- haven’t changed.

Please join us for Votigo’s Facebook Marketing Update Webinar, Monday, March 5, at 1pm EST. Sign-up here.

Summary:You can still engage your audience on Facebook by creating and running promotions. All Votigo-powered promotions will work as you designed them. New features make it even easier to direct your audience to promotions and apps. And Like-Gating is still an effective, available feature for engaging audiences who visit your timeline page.

What Changed: Facebook announced that in 30 days, all brand Pages will be transitioned to the new Timeline, or as Facebook calls it, “Mission Control for your Business.” You can begin setting up your Timeline immediately.

It may seem like a no-brainer to connect your social media promotion to an event. That’s because events have, built-in, some of the most important components of a successful, audience-building, awareness-generating social media promotion:

1) The definitive, time-sensitive attention of an audience
2) An easy-to-integrate theme
3) And often a logical prize that goes perfectly with the occasion (tickets, access, a timely discount or gift)

Sporting events…concerts…product launches…conferences and conventions…even social media milestones (”Our 1,000,000th Follower!”)…these are all great events that savvy marketers effectively tie their promotions to.

Holidays- and the frenzied weeks that precede them- may be the single best sort of event to serve as a promotional anchor.

This week we read that Americans will spend close to $7B on Halloween by October 31- or 18% more than we did last year. Not surprisingly, recent use of our newly-launched self-service platform reflects a HUGE emphasis on Halloween promotion. Seemingly every other sweepstakes launched over the past week is Halloween-themed, from ticket giveaways for haunted houses to best dog costume photo contests. Some of these contests have engaged hundreds of entries almost immediately. And some great ones have come out of our full-services, like this costume contest from The Children’s Place.

So as a social media marketer, what do you turn your attention to once the Halloween rush subsides on Tuesday?

Holiday retail. While the holiday bonanza official kicks off in the wee hours of Black Friday, Nov. 25, when throngs of Early Bird shoppers line up for morning-after-Thanksgiving specials to OFFICIALLY launch the retail spree that runs through Christmas Eve and, really, New Year’s, the reality is that holiday commerce is already underway.

Votigo clients are well on their way to an impressive variety of contests, sweepstakes, mobile promotions (including check-in and coupon-based giveaways) and much more. Some are keeping it simple: a Facebook photo contest asking fans to submit a snapshot of them demonstrating their need for / favorite use of / funny drawing of a newly launched product or holiday favorite gift item.

Others will get more sophisticated with a cross-platform campaign that first captures audience attention on Facebook OR Twitter and a branded microsite, then drives them to a store for a chance at a mobile instant win or a coupon offer, and finally invites users to spread the word for additional votes (for a photo contest) or sweepstakes entries. These strategies work especially well for retailers, from mom-and-pop shops to national chains.

So even though it’s nearly All Hallow’s Eve- and that means Black Friday is a mere month away- there is still time to create your own promotion in our self-service tool or call our full-service team to get started on a premium promotion.

Reposted from CMO.com today:

When a new marketing medium grabs an audience, it’s always fascinating to see who emerges as the channel’s thought leaders. For television, it was the Mad Men-esque agencies of Madison Avenue. For pay-per-click, it was a cottage industry of certified AdWords professionals. For grassroots marketing, it was a legion of energetic phone-pole posting, street-corner sign-spinning college kids.

You might know people who still think of social media marketing as the Next New Thing. But the digital world already has a lot of branding experience in the social realm. So who is leading the way? Big brands. From Ford to Starbucks, MTV to JetBlue, HP to Coca-Cola, and well beyond, blue-chip brands and Fortune 500 companies have laid claim to the leadership role.

Here are some of the lessons they have taught us about social-media promotions.

When You Get Traction, Keep The Audience Engaged

Big brands that embrace the two-way dialogue with customers that social channels enable, and do the work of cultivating an audience across various social channels, reach a point where they ask, “We have 500/5,000/5 million followers. . .now what?” Often, they engage their audiences with promotions. Sweepstakes. Contests. Polls. Games. Testimonials. Focused campaigns that include a call-to-action and typically a reward that also asks a little something of the potential customer while reinforcing a brand message.

Big brands are masters at designing promotions to launch a new product, plug an event, activate purchasers, or reinforce a brand message. For giving an audience a reason to visit a Web site, follow a Twitter account, and spread the word–and then keeping them–there is nothing like a promotion.

Be Real

You can’t fake authenticity. This is true for the voice you use to speak with customers, which varies for every social channel, just as it varies from radio ads to a trade show booth to a sales call. Authenticity is equally critical to a great promotion. Giving away an iPad might be a sexy, short-term driver for sweepstakes entrants. But what story does it tell about your brand?

Being authentic doesn’t mean talking only about your brand’s stuff, all the time. There is plenty of room in a social conversation to talk about industry news or to go off-topic. But when it comes to promotions, stay on target. If you request photos or videos for a topic, then their themes should be related to your brand. So should the prize, design, and every other element of the promotion.

Go Cross-Channel

Marketers love to see a campaign executed consistently across media channels–like an ad campaign that spans billboards, radio, and in-store promotions. Just the same, a social media promotion should extend to all of the social channels where potential users might encounter it. Facebook is far and away the leading channel. But the savvier big brands know that to reach an audience they should also include:

>> Category-leading platforms: Is video the center of the campaign? You can’t beat YouTube, the top eyeball monger for moving pictures. Are short, punchy, viral messages the key to your campaign? Twitter is king. Keep an eye on Pandora or Spotify for anything with a musical component. Consider Posterus and Tumblr for short-form content bundled with media-sharing. Whatever the core content of the promotion, there’s a network for it.

>> Mobile: This is the emerging channel of choice for big brands, especially retailers, restaurateurs, travel, and automotive brands, and other consumer businesses where users engage, research, and make purchasing decisions out-of-home. At a minimum, a social promotion should have a mobile-optimized landing page. And at its best, the mobile channel allows for clever executions involving check-ins, QR codes, instant-win games, or real-time deals and offers to consumers who are already near the cash register.

>> Microsites: A staple of digital marketing since before “social media” was ubiquitous, functional, focused, splashy landing pages still serve as an ideal centerpiece to a multichannel campaign. Standalone microsites are flexible, accessible, and free from the clutter of corporate sites and the constraints of social networks.

Don’t Skimp On Security

Operating a sweepstakes in multiple legal jurisdictions. Enabling multimedia submissions across social networks and mobile formats. Collecting coveted private user information. Distributing promotional codes or prizes. Hosting user-generated content. Executing a promotion can be complex, ripe with pitfalls. Facebook increasingly puts the onus on its brand users to self-police, and other platforms tend to follow that lead. Promotions are not the time to cut corners on data security or promotions management.

Big brands know that and, despite having in-house talent and resources, typically entrust third parties to navigate their social-media promotions. Going with one of several established and respected third-party promotions platforms will more than pay for itself in a well-executed campaign.

Great social-media promotions raise the bar for everyone. They actually enhance the user experience for the audience. And they repay brands with feedback, content, and the potential to earn a lifetime customer. As social media continues to emerge at a furious pace–no longer the Next New Thing, but rather a proven way to authentically interact with customers–big brands lead the way.

What sort of conversations did this week’s f8 Facebook Developer Conference inspire in your office?

While part of the Votigo crew was in attendance, most of the rest of us in Lafayette, Boulder and Hyderabad watched the livecast on Thursday, and have since been abuzz by the new features Facebook unveiled and riveted about the impact  for users and for marketers. Here are a few quick thoughts to recap the week that was:

Timeline: The Story of Me

Timeline is a captivating new feature (obviously), and there was plenty of internal chatter at Votigo about back-filling personal chronologies to tell a more complete story of our lives, and wondering how our grandkids may one day consume the life stories we represent on Facebook.

Marketing Impact: Tough to speculate since Timeline is a user-driven development at its purest. But brand Pages have evolved to more closely mirror personal profiles, so it’s easy to project that brands will need to be even more committed to maintaining a multimedia story on their brand Pages, and that users will Subscribe to the ones that are most engaging to them.

For More: AdAge’s Kunar Patel on how brand pages may evolve to be like personal timelines; Adam Mazmanian at SmartBrief on how Timelines, plus Subscriptions, could create powerful, targeted, measurable mailing lists for marketers.

Passive sharing and a Open Graph apps: “You Don’t Have To Like (It)”

Passive sharing is all about empowering users “to express an order of magnitude more things than they could before,”  as CEO Mark Zuckerberg said, without bombarding their friends’ streams.  In other words, you don’t have to just like something; you can read it, watch it, eat it, order it, run it, recommend it, listen to it, try it on…Users may more willingly share their tastes, since there will be more options beyond the “Like” and since sharing will be less intrusive. This evolution creates a goldmine of insight as to how users really interact with brands and products.

Passive sharing will be largely driven  by a universe of third-party apps integrated into the Timeline.  Content and commerce providers- from the oft-mentioned Spotify to other music, video and content apps, to games, to commerce and beyond- tap into Timeline’s “frictionless” environment by asking users to define what they want to share on Facebook.

Marketing Impact: Potentially enormous.  The ease with which users can access apps from within Facebook cements the network’s sheer influence as a driver of  media, products and services. Seeing your friend’s Netflix recommendation, what your family is reading on CNN, that your colleague just turned in an 8 mile run via Nike+, or your significant other’s Amazon wishlist updates will drive far more interaction with outside brands than Facebook already does.

The Open Graph- what users experience once they visit the third-party app or site- could be even more powerful. Marketers must be extremely thoughtful about design for Facebook users, from the verbs they choose for passive sharing within Timeline to the level of influence they show when a user visits them. Does a retailer like Levi’s show you which of your friends visited the page, or who actually bought something? How does CNN define who read a story or watched a video?

For more: LA Times Technology blog on this “new class of apps;” the NY Times Somini Sengupta and Ben Sisario on Facebook and Influence.

For marketers, what hasn’t changed at all is that brands have a tremendous opportunity to tap into the time consumers spend  and the increasing depth of information and influence they exchange on Facebook. Regardless of what users share, how rich the media looks, and how ingrained branded apps are in the experience, for brands there is no substitute for  authentic, meaningful content offerings to engage the Facebook audience.

It’s the end of a busy mini-roadshow week of previewing our self-service social media promotions platform at  DEMO and BoulderBeta. Here’s a quick recap:

DEMO was a high-energy two-day event centered on great pitches from a huge group start-ups. They ran the gamut from web and mobile apps for consumers to new ecommerce and search technologies to robotics. Votigo was a proud sponsor of the event.

Some of our favorite pitchers: OLogic, LUMOback, Gust , Aurasma, and Unrabble, and for solo presentation dynamics, GumHoo. Other highlights included Aaron Levie, Box.net founder, on stage with a typically high energy level on day 2.

You can read the Twitter stream of the show here. Here are TheNextWeb’s @Chikodi’s 10 Favorite Startups From DEMO. And of course, a ton of VentureBeat coverage (DemoBeat) by Matt Marshall, Jolie O’Dell and the crew that hosted the event.

Also check out the Startup America HD Social Lounge video of Votigo co-CEO Jim Risner talking about Votigo’s full-service business and our newly-launched platform for self-service users.

If you want to request an invitation to the private beta of our self-service promotions platform- where you can launch promotions apps for Facebook for exactly $.02 through mid-October- please click here.

Back in Boulder last night, part of the Votigo team previewed the Votigo Platform at the latest Boulder Beta.  It was our 2nd year attending, first time showing off a beta offering.  A very high energy crowd was highlighted by 8 great start-ups, including our neighbors on the Beta floor, mobile commerce provider MShopper and the very recently launched community-powered news platform CrowdSpoke.

The start-up energy was contagious and we were able to gather some feedback for the Votigo Platform beta. A huge thanks to Tim Falls from Sendgrid, and Christian Perry, the maestros behind the Beta series, whose next stop is the Boston Beta Launch on Oct. 25 in Beantown.

In the hustle of a shortened holiday Memorial Day week, it can be hard enough to find Inbox Zero, let alone think strategically about maximizing your social media presence for the rest of the year. And given that it’s nearly 90 degrees on an early June day in Boulder, it may seem an unnatural time to think ahead to the holidays. But today we encourage you to do just that.

Building an audience of passionate, loyal, active customers on Facebook, Twitter and other social media channels, as you know, is an evolving effort that takes an investment of time. Gone are the days of hastily throwing together a Facebook page and expecting users to find you; of waiting for the end of the year to scrum for leftover/experimental ad budget to spend on last minute ads; of being confident that merely reposting your latest products/services on Facebook is the best you can do.

It takes time to launch an effective social media promotional campaign - a contest or sweepstakes, for example, that expands your audience, brings followers closer to your brand and finds new customers, too.  Crafting creative that delivers a high-impact brand message. Customizing the design to fit your brand and all platforms. Adhering to the regulations of the social media channels and various locales you’ll launch in. Integrating a well-designed campaign across media- social and traditional.

Yes, it can be done incredibly fast, especially in partnership with a savvy partner. But why leave it to the last minute to do something spectacular?

This year we propose taking an Upfront Mentality to your social media promotions. Think of planning your social media marketing like TV ad buyers think of their budgets: They look at the calendar, see what program pillars are going to drive eyeballs to the hottest new shoes, and allocate their investments accordingly. They even have big fancy preview events to celebrate the practice. And they invest heavily in upfronts.

Especially if you’re a retailer,  consumer goods or services brand, think about tethering your social media promotions to the signature consumer events of the year.  Here are 3 ideas for Upfront-style events that, like next season’s TV schedule to a broadcast planner, can be the pillars of your Social Media Upfronts calendar.

1. Father’s Day: While it’s all but too late to get in on the paternal celebration- which doubles as the unofficial start of America’s grilling/camping/boating/outdoor fun season- Dad’s Day is a great illustrator of an event that generates a targeted, promotions-oriented audience. (Mother’s Day is no slouch as a retail bonanza, either. Next year!) Brands like Nautica get the appeal of this special mid-June date and tailor their promotions accordingly. Nautica’s Faces of Father’s Day Contest - submissions are due Friday- is just one example.
2. Back to School: Don’t tell the kids, who are just now singing School’s Out for Summer, but retailers are deep into planning for the 2nd biggest commerce season of the year, the magical window of July and  August that long ago transcended paper and pencils and became a $21B+ family shopping spree. Given that consumers have more options than ever, and that the lead time to plan a killer Back-To-School promotion is an ideal 6-8 weeks as of today, why not lock in this annual rite as the first big pillar of your Social Media Upfronts schedule?
3. Black Friday and Cyber Monday: The traditional red-letter date on the annual retail calendar- and its relatively modern digital cousin- continue their reign as the focal point of the retail promotions year.  Allow your brand the next few months to do it right in 2011: figure out what you’re going to promote, design the quintessentially engaging social media campaign, and participate in a shoppers holiday worth nearly $11B on the Friday after Thanksgiving alone.

Scary as it is, the holidays will be here before we know it.  As social media auteur Brian Solis is known to say, “the reality is that you get out of social media what you invest in it.” Even in the dynamic, rapid-consumption environments of the social web, it is worth investing the time to design an incredible social media promotion.

Whether you’re readying for your first foray into social media promotions or you’re a veteran of engaging directly with your customers through these digital channels, you may find yourself wondering, “Where do I launch my next branded social media campaign?”


Here are 4 ideas to get you into the arena.


1) Facebook: It may seem obvious at this point, but the World’s Most Widely Used Social Media Network is a great place to start. Boasting 600M users and counting, Facebook is where users “Like” brands 50M times per day, according to @LeenaRao via @TechCrunch. Facebook treads the impossible balance of centering on genuine, person-to-person interaction, while also still being a widely-accepted forum for brands to interact with users in authentic, unobtrusive ways. Your Facebook page is a familiar, recognizable place for users to encounter your brand, and a contest or sweepstakes is a proven way to expand the audience. And Facebook features such as Like-Gating, Connect, news feed notifications and other branded sharing functions make it very accessible for users, and easy to inspire a viral effect. UK Style By French Connection launched an easy-to-enter sweepstakes via Facebook to promote the brand at Sears. Users enter the sweepstakes to win the UK Style Tour Car, and can share photos of their own personal UK Style.

2) Microsites: Prior to the broad adoption of Facebook and long before anyone had uttered “Twitter,” there were microsites. Concise, user-friendly websites with highly visual designs, linked to but separate from a company’s main website, dedicated to a specific product or service, launch, event or other singular purpose. Even with the proliferation of new social media channels, having a branded microsite to serve as the primary destination, the campaign home to which all traffic for a contest or sweepstakes can be driven, remains incredibly useful.  Control the microsite’s design, it’s functionality, and how users interact with it- including generous linking to Facebook, Twitter, and other sharing services. Destinations like NovaSure’s Get Back To Life Video Contest and The Follett Challenge: Recognizing Innovation, are thoughtful extensions of the parent brand, but more importantly, completely dedicated to their standalone video contest campaigns: For NovaSure, sharing stories of how their procedure improves womens’ health and lifestyles. And for Follett, tales from schools who have used technology innovation in their libraries to improve student engagement and information literacy. Both incredibly important missions for highly respected brands, and both executed on the foundation of a microsite.


3) foursquare: When Starwood Hotels and Resorts launched a new Resorts web destination to promote the loyalty program Starwood Preferred Guest and its 200 luxury resort destinations, SPG not only orchestrated the SPG Pack Your Bags Giveaway and gave away 10 resort stays to lucky winners from 20 nations, it then extended the brand message to foursquare, the wildly popular mobile check-in platform. SPG invites users to connect their SPG and foursquare accounts, earn Starpoints for check-ins via foursquare, and get more chances to win Free Resort Night Awards. Tremendous cross-platform branding, from corporate sites to microsites to one of the hottest emerging social platforms.


4) All of the above: It’s a marketer’s dream: design the perfect brand promotion and extend it across multiple social channels where users congregate and interact. Launch a promotion to a receptive audience with a Facebook contest application.  Extend it to users on the go with a custom mobile app. Add in a foursquare check-in component.  Offer the same call-to-action via Twitter. And tie it all back to the a custom microsite, with a sortable gallery of user-generated photo submissions, voting and commenting, and sharing tools for email, Facebook, Twitter and beyond. Find your customers where they are, and make it easy for them to participate, regardless of their favorite social venue.

Team Detroit is no stranger to accolades for its Ford Motor Company work, so it isn’t merely to sing praises that we highlight The Global Ford Ranger Challenge. The latest Ford social media promotion also illustrates some important mobile functionality and user experience queues- not to mention that it’s visually striking with great alignment of brand and call-to-action, and powered by Votigo.


The just-launched Global Ranger Challenge asks users to submit photos, videos or essays of how they would put Ranger’s Dynamic Stability Control to the test, in competition for a chance to attempt and film their challenges and ultimately win a new Ranger. One entrant promised to relive a long-ago family road trip; another would head straight to Ayers Rock for some off-roadin’ in the Outback. A quick browse of the Challenges already submitted is enough to inspire a dream holiday to the home of Uluru.


Viewers can see featured entries and share them via Facebook, Twitter or email, but must register and log-in to submit, comment or vote. Sharing drives traffic back to the microsite-FordRangerChallenge.com.au- which then links to the Australian home page for the truck.


To accommodate the campaign’s incredible geographic reach- it launched first in Australia as homage to the truck’s design and engineering heritage but will ultimately extend to 11 countries, from South Africa to Thailand- entries can be submitted from any mobile device, including smart phones but also feature phones and basic handsets. A must for any brand launching an international promotion with a critical mobile component is to extend access to the broadest range of devices possible, not to mention to get expert guidance on the local regulations in every jurisdiction where the contest or sweeps is open.

As we often say, there’s no better forum than Facebook for interacting with customers to expand a brand’s audience, drive sales and collect great feedback.  Promotions- like contests or sweepstakes with a viral call-to-action to a huge crowd of potential customers- are one of the most effective ways to expand that audience.


Earlier this week, Facebook released its latest revised Promotions Guidelines. The consensus among the Votigo team is that they are simplified and great for business. Relaxing restrictions on categories like alcohol and dairy, or how minors may be address with promotions, only expands the possibilities of what brands can already do to authentically engage Facebook users.


But the revisions also give brands added responsibility in following Facebook’s Ad Guidelines and other policies, plus the regulations of any state, country or locale where a promotion is open. In other words,  more than ever, building buzz on the world’s most interactive social media site is best not navigated by a novice.


The stakes: all the followers and brand equity you’ve already built on your page. And the upside is all the potential that lies ahead, to be built on that foundation.  A Facebook Preferred Developer Consultant like Votigo is not only equipped to help businesses stay within the Promotions Guidelines.  We’re also still in the best position to show you the fundamentals and customize Facebook video and photo contest apps, sweepstakes and other solutions that have the greatest impact.