A Facebook Fan Page is a simple addition to your company’s online portfolio. Within a few minutes you can have the basic Page which lets you post images, video, or just communicate with your customers via the wall; however, with a little bit more effort, your Page can reflect the online branding that your company has spent time and effort on with your own website.

The easiest way to add your own personal look to your Page is through the Static FBML application. FBML (Facebook Markup Language) is an extension of HTML, so you can quickly bring static sections of your website into your Facebook profile. Though the instructions below may seem daunting, follow closely (or call us) and it will all become clear.

The first step to adding a new Static FBML tab is to simply add the application to your Page. Go to the application page, and click on the “Add to my Page” link.

From here, you’ll be presented with a pop-up asking which Page to add the application. (Note: if you only have 1 Page, you may not be prompted for this.)

The application is now added to your Page, but to actually do anything with it, you’ll need to go back and edit.

Scroll down to your list of applications and look for the FBML app. Click “edit”  one more time, and you’ll be presented with the actual FBML tab code page.

Here’s where we give our tab a name. In my case I’m moving our team page, so I’ll name the tab “Team,” and then paste in the HTML content from our website that I want on our tab. As you can see, I’ve also linked to the stylesheet from our main site. I’ve also made a special copy and added “-fb” to the name just in case I want to make Facebook-specific tweaks to the styling without mucking around in the master.

Once we’re done, we can scroll to the bottom of the page and click the save button. If we wanted to add more tabs we’d click the link below and more copies of the FBML app would show up in our application list. Clicking the “Application Settings” link brings up a pretty simple dialog box. Here we want to make sure that the “tab” is added, and the “box” is removed.

Navigate back to our Fan Page, and now we just have to find our new tab and drag it to where we want it in our navigation. Since our team is what makes Catchfire Media great, we want to bring this tab close to the beginning of our nav strip. Drag and drop it where we want it, and we’re done.

That’s it; now we have a nice part of our website inside our Facebook presence. See the results below, or on the <a href=”http://www.facebook.com/catchfiremedia?v=app_6009294086“>facebook tab itself</a>.

Here are a couple of closing tips that will save you some headaches while building your first few tabs.

1. Facebook caches your offsite CSS and images, so if you makes a change to either you need to force facebook to grab the new copies. You do this with a little trick called “cache busting.” In your src or href parameter, add a version number and increment it when you have a new version. So, <link href=”css/style-fb.css” rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css” /> becomes <link href=”css/style-fb.css?v=1″ rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css” />. The next time you make a change to your stylesheet simply change “v=1” to “v=2” and save your tab. This will force Facebook will fetch your new copy.
2. Facebook has long threatened to change the width of tabs to 520 pixels so that they can add the left sidebar that currently only exists on the wall tab to all the tabs. I personally don’t foresee this happening anytime soon, because many companies have time and money invested in their Facebook presences (this would force them to rewrite a lot of content). It’s probably safest to either code your tabs so that they’re 520 pixels wide, or scale down to that width without trouble.

There you have it, a simple way to bring your brand to your customers within Facebook without expending too much time or effort. If you’d like help with this sort of branding effort, Catchfire Media would be glad to help you out.

Do you maintain a Facebook Fan Page? Are you currently mirroring content from your own website in FBML tabs within Facebook? What do you think of this low-barrier method for jumping into Facebook?

Unless you have been lying on a beach for the last month or comatose on your couch watching the World Cup, you’ve at least heard rumblings of Foursquare’s phenomenal success.  Foursquare is a geolocation game screaming across the U.S., which most access on their smartphones.

At Catchfire Media, we prefer to look at Foursquare through the lens of a business application. What may have started off as a game only has legs if it is able to convert its fan base into revenue. Venture capital firms understand this social media platform’s pull, or they would not be dumping 20M bucks into the company.

We have been taking a hard look at how to extend Foursquare as a business application to our clients’ customer base. The potential beyond the current basic coupon offerings to location “mayors” is incredible (although, believe me I love those coupons; I am still desperately trying to become the mayor of my local Starbucks!)

One idea the Catchfire Media team dreamed up is a marketing campaign tied directly to Foursquare and Iowa’s 2010 gubernatorial race. What? That’s right, we have come up with a concept suited for our retail clients that integrates Foursquare into a state-wide competition for “mayor,” or in our case “governor.”

How it works

From the 10,000 foot view, our concept is a Foursquare competition based on the number of check-ins at retail chain locations. Implementing this campaign on behalf of clients with a large number of stores is key, as we want to ensure the state is represented as much as possible to ensure a “fair” election. Our idea includes a primary season during early fall, followed by the final race ending on election day. The primaries weed down the field by county, region, or city based on our clients’ geographic footprint and individual marketing plan. From the primaries we take the top mayors and pit them against each other for the governor’s race.

With the help of Clint Harvey, our lead developer, Catchfire is already working on customized mobile and web applications to manage the entire campaign for clients. We are encouraging  clients to combine this social media plan with their traditional marketing efforts to highlight and profile their mayors during the campaign. One of the best things about this campaign? There is no reason this it cannot be expanded to other states. In this economy, you can still count on elections happening every two to four years, and each has their own cycle.

As you can imagine, this idea has already created some serious interest by major regional retailers. If we’ve also captured your attention with the ideas behind this campaign and you think it is something that might drive value for your business or clients, give us a call. We are happy to help.

Your website should be the cornerstone of your online presence; however, the whole life cycle of a website can be frustrating and expensive. The life cycle of a site typically goes something like: design -> implementation -> launch -> content maintenance. A good content management system (CMS) can simplify these steps. Now that WordPress 3 has gone to release candidate status, it is getting very close to being an option for that CMS.

Design

WordPress sites are built around themes. These themes give your designer a sandbox to play in and create the unique look of your site from near scratch (or even from scratch if your designer knows how to build them). If your business is just getting started and you don’t have the means to hire a designer, you can simply roll with a a full-featured theme. If you prefer to have your designer deliver mock-ups to someone else that creates the website, then WordPress can help you too; it reinforces best practices of separating various page sections.

Implementation

Once you’ve defined a basic theme, WordPress helps you add the functionality that a modern, socially-aware, site needs. Want to pull in your recent tweets? Want to show fans of your Facebook Page? Want to show info about who’s checked in to your physical store on Foursquare? WordPress and its plugin architecture make it simple to do all of these things in just a few clicks. The development community around WordPress and its plug-ins is extremely active, so even the most niche community or brand new social tool probably has a WordPress plug-in that makes integration a simple process.

Launch

This can be done one of two ways: developing your site at its permanent location and blocking access, or running a separate instance of WordPress and its back end. WordPress is portable, so it’s easy to move from the development to production stage with each site revision. If you’re just wanting to play with some style sheets to tweak your site once it’s live, there are plug-ins that allow a logged-in user see a theme different than the general public.

Content Maintenance

The real benefits to using a CMS is the ease with which you can update site content without having to know how the rest of the site works. Your designer and developer can truly hand over the keys, and your site won’t just become a static page on the web. Adding new information is as simple as composing an email. The best part about WordPress is the ease of use for non-technical users.

Highlights of 3.0

WordPress turned seven years old last week—years during which its community has been making suggestions and developing plug-ins. As it has matured, many features that were once offered in plug-ins, or at least the general idea of them, have been absorbed into the main product.

Custom post types is one feature that’s improved in 3.0,which allows you to set up different content streams within the blog functionality and easily segregate each post type to its respective section. For example, say you have dynamic product content on its own page, but you don’t want new product posts to leak into your front page. Setting up a “product” post type addresses is now made simple; whereas, before you were limited to category-based filtering.

With 3.0 and WordPress MU merged, it’s quite simple to set up multiple sites within your single WordPress install. If sales.mysite.com wants a completely different site than service.mysite.com, you just add in a line of code and walk through the setup process. After that you can manage both sites from one dashboard. In addition you can set up users from each department, and let them manage their own content without being able to touch the main site’s, or each other’s, content.

There’s no reason not to use a CMS anymore. Choosing the right one can really make creating and maintaining a living, breathing, website that draws traffic and grows with your business painlessly. There are many options out there for good CMSes, but WordPress is one of the best in many cases, and with 3.0, the list of cases where it’s not the best is getting smaller.

Are you a WordPress user or developer? What are your thoughts on 3.0 or WordPress as a CMS in general?

Imagine sitting in the stands at a baseball game holding a device that allows you to predict the next play. Will the batter hit a home run? Will he ground into a 6-4-3 double play? You can earn points based on your accuracy and can compare your stats with others in the stadium playing along.

Before smart phones and their associated apps, this idea would have sounded pretty far-fetched. Rewind 17 years or so and there was such a device—rentable at the Oakland Coliseum during A’s games for $20 plus a deposit (if my memory serves me right). Unfortunately I can’t recall the name of this device, nor could I find anything on Google. If you remember anything about the device, let us know in the comments section, or even just your thoughts about this concept.

Is this social media? Well, not quite. Scores were the only information being shared. I’m sure someone could develop an iPhone app similar to the original, with the added bonus of social features, and make a killing off this today. If you are so inspired, please give me a cut of the proceeds. In both cases, we are dealing with back channel communications.

On the final day of South by Southwest Interactive, Abby and I attended a panel discussion called Sports Media Distribution: Beyond the TV, where the discussion about back channel communications caught my attention. Current examples of back channel communications in sports include: conversations on Twitter, chat rooms or hashtags affiliated with a specific game, and apps with mid-game instant replay capabilities and live stats.

Panelists included John Zehr, general manager of ESPN Mobile, who prophesied that the 2010 World Cup will be a watershed event in distributing mobile content, especially live mobile content.

“We’re going to use the World Cup to really educate people and let them know they can view online,” said Zehr.

I’m not sure how I feel about the World Cup being a watershed event—this is reminiscent of the predictions that soccer would become America’s pastime after the 1994 World Cup. Sharing mobile content seems to be happening on its own, and if any major sporting event had the opportunity to be the “watershed event,” it would have been the Vancouver Games. Do you think we are about to enter into the era of mobile video sharing for sports?

Zehr also brought up the recent contract Verizon signed to be the NFL’s exclusive mobile content provider. I consider myself to be an average NFL fan, so I don’t see myself switching contracts from AT&T just to have access. A few people tweeted during the panel discussion to the same effect. Do you think super fans on other networks will switch just for this access, or is there enough other data out there on other networks to support their needs?

ESPN’s Zehr made an outstanding point regarding which sports stand to gain the most from mobile—those that tend to be highlight-driven. Baseball fits this mold perfectly, and I could definitely see myself pulling up a customized reel of last night’s video highlights while chowing down on my lunch. To make this really cool, and to give it a social edge, I want the opportunity to share the best clips with participants in my fantasy baseball league. How would you implement social media with sports and video content?

We obviously live in a world inundated with technology—phones, video, chat, text messaging, net books, and more. My takeaway from the sports distribution panel is that we are just starting to figure out what useful things we can do when you integrate consumer electronics, mobile technology, social platforms, and people. Just like the early adopters renting the stat predictor game at the Oakland Coliseum, you have the opportunity to share information in new ways. What will you do with it?

In addition to experiencing the nation-wide beard trend, our two days at the South by Southwest Interactive conference allowed us to see the latest in social web innovation and gave us the opportunity to hear from some major thought leaders in the space. We sat through presentations from such luminaries as Twitter CEO Evan Williams and social media wine celebrity Gary Vaynerchuk. More importantly, we met potential future stars developing exciting social platforms and technologies. What follows is a list of key takeaways, many of which we, Senior Analyst Jarad Bernstein and Analyst Abby Harvey, will be expanding upon in future posts.

Every guy is growing a beard these days
From interesting mustaches to completely-covered faces, there was no shortage of facial hair at SXSW Interactive. What does this say about the direction we are heading? We’ll leave that to a later post, but regardless we think you should be aware of this trend.

Customer service rules the world
Gary Vaynerchuk couldn’t talk enough about the importance of caring for and about your customer. Customer service’s importance should be obvious to end users (which we all are), but why doesn’t every company get this? Simply put, everyone wants to be treated like a human being. In Gary’s words, “You can’t scale caring . . . you can’t scale authenticity.” Gary told the crowd that you need to start caring about your customers, or you will lose. Of course, he made this point more passionately—it wouldn’t be a true Gary Vaynerchuk show without a few hundred expletives sprinkled in. In Gary’s world caring is swearing, and Gary cares more than most.

Another main takeaway from Gary’s performance: utilizing social media and the web is a must, and do it now! “This platform [the internet] is a BABY!” he proclaimed. “You [SXSW Interactive attendees] have no idea how ahead of the rest of the world you are; there’s a massive amount of low-hanging fruit, and people are starting to eat the grapes.” Effectively incorporating a web presence hinges on every part of today’s business model—marketing, advertising, sales, and customer service.

Being CEO of Twitter doesn’t mean you are a good public speaker
The hype for Monday’s keynote presentation was palpable. Overflow rooms with giant projection screens filled up equally as fast as the cavernous main hall. We were all anticipating an announcement on the scale of Steve Jobs letting the world in on the next big thing; instead, we bore witness to a dull conversation with Twitter CEO Evan Williams about one of the most exciting technologies Twitter has developed to date—At Anywhere (@anywhere).

Geolocation is more than just Foursquare and similar services
We’ve come a long way from the original Magellan in-car navigation device—a topic expanded upon in two sessions we attended. Geolocation and Location-Based Services (LBS) are growing rapidly; in fact, we learned that global LBS-spending is forecasted to exceed $7 billion by 2013 (yes, that’s less than three years away!). In one session, speaker Jason Finkelstein of WaveMarket, Inc. talked about mobile geolocation developments and shared one of his favorite quotes from Google: “The future of mobile is local.” One interesting stat he shared with us, which we are still thinking about: 55 percent of all text messages ask some form of the question “where r u?” That’s 650 billion location-based texts in the U.S. last year alone. Look at your text message log in your cell phone and we think you’ll realize the truth in these numbers. What are WaveMarket and its competitors planning to do about this? Nothing earth-shattering was shared, but we certainly look forward to their innovations.

While in some cases geolocation rears its head as creepy, clearly causing negative sentiment, it’s hard to deny its importance. Geolocation takes the guesswork out of all those inquisitive, location-based text messages. The company that creates a solution that is both secure and useful will likely profit quite well.

Coming soon
Want to learn more about our takeaways? Our next few posts will focus on the future of open APIs, music sharing, digital magazines, social media in health care, and more. Every session had a hash tag assigned to it, and we have linked to the search results for those hashtags so you can learn from other attendees, as well. One final statistic for this post: registration was up substantially at SXSW Interactive compared to 2009. One rumor even has it that the interactive festival outdrew the music festival for the first time ever. With social media playing a central role in the festival and its growth, we know that social media is not done growing and changing the way we view communications.

It was only a matter of time: the world’s largest search engine, Google, announced its partnership Wednesday with the world’s largest social network, Facebook, to include Page updates in the search results. Now, the company that currently controls 90 percent of the search engine market will not only be able to pull in information related to 50 million tweets per day sent out on Twitter, they’ll also have semi-VIP access to the nearly three million fan Pages on Facebook.

Although Google first announced the Facebook-search inclusion in December—along with handful of other social networking platforms like Twitter, MySpace, FriendFeed, Jaiku, and Identi.ca—we have yet to see results related to the Pages.

Many may mouth the word “monopoly,” but consider this: Microsoft’s Bing.com search engine has exclusive access to pull in content from Facebook’s 400 million users. Simply put, Google gets Facebook Page update access; Bing gets Facebook User update access. Who really has it better?

Do you really want every bit of content from Facebook’s 400 million users—borderline inappropriate photos, “LOLs,” and “♥s” included—pulled into your search engine? According to Facebook, “Pages are for organizations, businesses, celebrities, and bands to broadcast great information to fans in an official, public manner.” This is not to say every page maintains the described “official, professional” tone, but this is the standard.

Will Bing pull ahead in search engine market share with its unprecedented Facebook user access, or will this capability hurt them in the long run? Will Google’s search results seem inferior in comparison? You tell me. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

[Photo from luc on Flickr / CC BY 2.0]

We as humans use online search engines such as Google over 300 million times a day to gather information and to help answer some of life’s most mysterious questions. From questions about serious diseases and illnesses, to restaurant discussions, and even mental controversies you’ve always wanted resolved, thanks to Google, our answers are, many times, just a few clicks away.

Most of the facts and opinions we encounter when Google searching come from websites, blog posts, forum threads, or tweets written by people—people we don’t know, have never known, and will never come to know. The desirability behind anonymous opinions is apparent in that it encourages debate and discussion among users with varying backgrounds (thus, diversity), but it makes more sense to me why people would seek opinions from people they already know and respect. Especially when you consider significant life events, such as planning a wedding or parenting a child, it helps to be aware of the beliefs, morals, and personal preferences behind peoples’ posts before acting on or accepting the information as relevant to your life.

Google has good news for us socially-adept information hounds: it is adding new search functions by integrating relevant links from people you already know and connect with online. In other words, Google is incorporating content found on social media sites to help improve your search.

Watch the video for further explanation about Google’s Social Search

Now, if you search for, say, “John’s Pizzeria Reviews + New York City, NY,” (Yum, don’t get me started!) Google will not only pull up anonymous reviews and opinions about the restaurant; it will also pull in any of your friends’ Facebook or blog posts, tweets, Flickr photos, etc. related to John’s.

“There is a very fundamental shift going on from the information web to the social web,” said Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg.

There is one catch though; as of now, in order for your friends’ online activity to be included in the social search, they must have their Google Profile completed. Filling out the Profile is simple—contact information and links to social media profiles—it’s just a matter of getting people to do it.

Do you prefer to get your information and advice from friends or anonymous sources? How do you think this social search capability will make your life easier?

[Photo is a screenshot from Google's "Social Search" video on YouTube]

Online sales are surging this season, and retailers are using social media and innovative marketing to maintain the momentum. Video, especially, has become an effective way for online retailers to engage consumers, successfully integrating ecommerce, entertainment, and information into the online buying experience.

At the end of November, Zappos rolled out a set of interactive product videos done in conjunction with Overlay.tv and Nike.  The videos are clickable—if the viewer mouses over a shoe, it becomes highlighted to let them know that the item is capable of being clicked—and upon clicking, the viewer will see a detail page within the media player, as the video continues rolling. The detail page also includes a “Get It!” button, which allows the consumer to effortlessly move from the video to the shopping cart. The videos are also sharable, and viewers can post them to Facebook and Twitter while the clip continues to roll.

The interactive videos on Zappos.com change the traditional product landing page from static images, reviews, and product specs to an interactive, dynamic experience, and it has proven successful. The videos have a sales impact of 6 to 30%, and Zappos is looking to increase to 50,000 videos on the site in 2010 (they have about 8,000 currently).

Not surprisingly, many online retailers are following suit. In highlighting their Hot 100 Retail Websites of 2009, Internet Retailer shows that video is becoming an increasingly effective sales tool, with reports from merchants like Shoeline.com boosting conversion rates on products featured in videos by 40%, or PetsUnited, reporting a 50% increase in conversion on 1,200 products that they’ve featured in videos.

We all know that the act of buying online will never replace the social experience of the brick and mortar, where you can shop with friends, get advice from store associates, and physically examine and experience products. But video, done in the right way, can turn online shopping into a social, dynamic experience, where the consumer is able to truly visualize the product, see it in action, and share that experience with friends.

Have you shopped with an online retailer that includes product videos? Have product videos changed your online shopping experience?

Glossy photos, meticulous design, colorful language—all backed by months of research, days of shoots, and hours of interviews. Can you tell I’m a publishing industry transplant? My humble home has become a mini-library for just about every magazine, from Midwest Living, Cuisine at Home, and ReadyMade to Glamour, Elle, and InStyle. I’ll admit it, I even stash my boyfriend’s GQ and Men’s Health (hey, they have good recipes!) … and don’t get me started on throwing out my back issues of W.

I know the amount of work that goes into each magazine issue, and while they’re no books—years upon years of thought, time, research, emotion—magazines have, alas, become rather indispensable to me.

I love getting style, design, and baking ideas from old issues, but in truth, I cannot allow myself to become a hoarder. Who honestly wants to be buried in years-worth of monthly magazines, or worse yet, weekly New Yorker issues? It’s cluttering, and frankly, tiring. Books can stay (thus, my refusal to buy the Kindle); (most) magazines must go.

Much to my delight, there’s a new genius device for magazine lovers—the Tablet. Even more to my delight, Apple is (unofficially) the Tablet’s creator, which pretty much guarantees simple yet intelligent design principles and functions.

A recent Mashable article goes into detail about Time Inc.’s efforts to release a digital form of Sports Illustrated. To get the full “experience,” you really must watch this video, but I will give you a few of the best parts:

• You can “flip through” the entire magazine cover to cover (no paper cuts!)
• You can rearrange the issue to read it any way you want
• You can circle your favorite photos/information and share it on various social media outlets
• Advertising is interactive, re: demo videos
• The Swimsuit Issue has the ability to “come to life” before your eyes, think: video, not just pictures

With a release date of 2010, I can barely contain my excitement to see if this will actually pull though. This could be a revelation in the way publishers all over the world conduct business.

Would you be interested in magazine consumption via the Tablet? What are the best and worst issues you foresee in digital publishing?

[Photo from theseanster93 on Flickr / CC BY 2.0]

Colleges and universities indubitably benefit from utilizing social media tools, and in most departments, the reasons are obvious: broad exposure and information transfer for admissions, game promotion for athletics, and über-connectivity for alumni relations. Some institutions are also allowing social media to creep into the classroom—and for good reason.

“Social media tools, like Facebook, Twitter and blogs, are key to communicating with this generation of students,” stated Joyce Smith, CEO of the National Association for College Admission Counseling. “While still no substitute for face-to-face interaction, social media have opened lines of communication and inquiry for both students and institutions that were inconceivable only a decade ago.”

From YouTube and iTunes to Facebook and Twitter, social media has created a new attitude towards teaching and towards the learning experience in general.

YouTube, for example, recently expanded to allow colleges and universities to create their own “channels” on YouTube EDU. Faculty and staff use these personal pages to post lectures, guest speakers, events, etc. For many participating professors, speaking to an unseen audience on camera prompts them to strive for a more engaging, interesting lecture. On the same note, iTunes also has a brilliant new outlet for colleges and universities called iTunes U. It provides free lectures, audiobooks, etc. all downloadable to your Mp3 player, mobile phone, or computer, and over 70 academic institutions are already participating!

Another development in the audio/video world is a little gem called Livestream, which delivers live content in real-time to client computers. Universities are using this platform not only to satiate information-hungry alumni with live lectures and readings, but also as an option with which to base assignments.

Some colleges and universities are also utilizing Twitter and Facebook as a new way to communicate out of the classroom. One Illinois State University technology instructor even required his students to “friend him” on Facebook. While some feel that required “friending” crosses the line, it’s hard to deny its usefulness. Students can post questions on their professors’ walls; professors can post assignments on their own profiles, or even to their students’; and if online at the same time as the professor, students can chat live about assignments.

How would you feel about a professor contacting you via Facebook? Do you think that utilizing YouTube EDU, iTunes U, or Livestream for assignments, lectures, readings, etc. is a good idea?

[Photo from _dchris on Flickr / CC BY 2.0]