Facebook

Facebook: Convert your Static FMBL to iFrame – It’s not as painful as you think!

February 21, 2011 by Jessica Ziegler

Facebook recently put into action the long anticipated change from Static FBML to iFrames, requiring all new custom content on Facebook Fan pages to be built as a Facebook iFrame application.

This new update will be forced though on March 11^th but you can (and should) get a jump on it now. This is actually a really good thing for Page owners and developers. It means that you can use standard html, css and javascript becuase your content will be calling a page directly from your site. You will still need to plan and build for the limitations of 520×720, the depth/height limitation is new, but you can figure ways to work with it).

The previous Tabs we are all used to will be gone, but you could create your own tabs within your 520×720 framework, if you want a more multi-page feel (check out Trailsherpa’s facebook page here to see how I solved for that). Again, this is a great thing because you will have full control over the length, appearance and style of those tabs.

Alright so how do we do this thing?

I create and implement your new iFrame app you’ll need to do 3 things:

1) Create a Facebook iFrame application and associate it with your Fan Page

2) Create a PHP page on your website that you will call from your iFrame application

3) Upload that PHP page and its related assets

Step 1: Create a Facebook iFrame application and associate it with your Fan Page:

1) Login to Facebook and go to http://www.facebook.com/developers/createapp.php to create your new app

a. Give your application a name (this name will not appear on your Fan Page) and agree to terms

2) Add an icon and or logo, contact email and privacy policy links (if you don’t have those policies, just link to the main page of your site). Add an icon, it will show up next to your app in the left nav of your Fan page. The logo is more for if you intent to share this app with others (think Farmville). Save changes.

3) On the Website Tab, add your site url (not actually neccesary).

4) Go to the Facebook Integration tab. This is where things get mildly complicated.

a. For Canvas Page select a folder that makes sense as the base url for your application. This will need to be DIFFERENT for each application you create and can only contain lowercase letters, dashes, and underscores.

b. Canvas URL: this is going to be the FOLDER on your site where you create your PHP page and its related assets. MUST HAVE TRAILING SLASH (i.e. be a folder).

c. Select iFrame and autoresize (not that it will resize) or show scrollbar if you have a page deeper than 720. They are pretty unpleasant looking, avoid them if you can.

5) Scroll down to Page tabs at the bottom.

a. Create a page name, limited to 16 characters. This is the name that will appear on your fan page as a link on the left and at the top of the iFrame “page” .

b. Tab url: this is the actual page that you will be calling for the iFrame content. Where is says CANVAS_URL, once you save that will change to the name of the folder you designated above. This page can be called whatever you want, as long as it’s .php (.html will not work). So in effect, based on my current inputs, my new iframe content will be pulled from: http://www.vestorlogic.com/my_awesome_app_folder/index.php.

c. Save changes. Your app is set up!

6) You are now on your applications main edit page. Associate your new application with a Fan Page

a. Click the “Application Profile Page” link on the right.

b. Now you are on your apps public page, click “Add to My Page” from the left nav. This will bring up all the pages you admin. Select the correct one and add it.

That’s it for the Facebook integration!

STEP 2: Create a PHP page on your website that you will call from your iFrame application

1) This is where things get a lot more standard. You’ll want to create a page on your site in the folder that you designated in your app. In mine it was: http://www.vestorlogic.com/my_awesome_app_folder/index.php.

2) If you already have a Static FBML tab, you can go to that tab, copy the code and paste that into a new .php file, save and upload. In the above example my file would need to be called index.php and it would need to live in the “my_awesome_app_folder” folder.

STEP 3: Don’t forget to upload this page and its related assets!

Now you will see your new app listed as a link on the left nav of the fan page you related it to. You can see ours here.

See that little Welcome link on the left with the icon? Awesome!

Special shout out to Paul Kortman’s great post that helped me figure it out.

Filed Under: Facebook, Featured, Social Media Tagged With: create a facebook iFrame app, facebook fan page, Facebook iFrame application, facebook tab, iframe app, iFrames, static fbml, static fbml to iframe

The Santa Experiment (Facebook communities, donations and Wepay.com)

December 15, 2010 by Jessica Ziegler

I have a friend from High School (pictured in action on the left) who, although he’s only 39, makes an exceptional Santa. So much so that each Christmas he is paid to be a Santa for various stores and parties. This year he decided to go big time and make a road trip from Ct to Tupelo, MS to take a Santa Thanksgiving-to-Christmas gig at a giant mall.

Unfortunately, the trip has not been good. He’s gone through contract drama, he’s had items stolen from his car, and he’s endured crime scene-esque living quarters. He’s been posting his frustrations on Facebook for the past few weeks, since the trip began right before Thanksgiving.

Now this is a good guy, a really good guy. He’s a firefighter, a Mason, he’s involved in several charities, and even has plans to start a non-profit of his own. He still lives in the town where we grew up and is practically the unofficial mayor. Suffice it to say, friends of this guy were not too happy to hear about the treatment he’d been receiving.

So being the internet-y social media chick that I am, I decided to do a little something about this, albeit remotely. I started a Facebook community called Save This Santa and added a donation component on Wepay.com. I began imploring our former classmates and friends on Facebook to turn this into his “Best Christmas Ever” to help replace some of the items that were stolen, and generally restore his faith in humanity and his Christmas spirit.

Was he embarrassed? Yes. He felt extremely undeserving of this attention and outpouring of donations. I suggested he could always donate the overflow to charity, or put it towards some crazy Santa-related caper like showing up at a hospital with a bag full of new toys.

This process allowed me to really dig into creating and promoting a Facebook community as well as the chance to thoroughly explore Wepay.com, which is establishing itself as a competitor to Paypal. It allows you to accept donations, request payments and sell tickets. The fees are passed directly to the buyer, as opposed to the payee covering the fees as with Paypal, which is ideal for a donation.

Another cool element to Wepay.com is that it is a group based payment system, you can create groups and hit up those people directly for one-time or recurring payments. I can see a lot of personal scenarios where this could come in handy: splitting a vacation rental, collecting funds for a group gift, a school fundraiser, club dues or fees. It also ties seamlessly into Facebook and Twitter to make sharing painless.

So far, the Santa Experiment has been a big success. We’ve raised quite a bit of money, and definitely changed our Santa’s outlook this season. This may also help our Santa launch the non-profit that he has in the works. Gotta feel pretty good about that.

Update:

I have a writer friend in Chicago who became aware of Save This Santa via my Facebook updates. She decided to write up the story and pitch it to some newspapers and magazines. She also published it here.

Check out the facebook group here: Save This Santa

Filed Under: Facebook, Featured, Social Media Tagged With: best christmas ever, save this santa, social media campaigns, the santa experiment

Facebook and Bing: It’s just the beginning of social search

October 13, 2010 by Tim Miner

It’s been a long time coming, a truly social search experience. The announcement today of the partnership between Facebook and Bing is just the beginning. This version of social search is a good start but the promise for something greater is still out there.

My team has been speculating, like many other social media practitioners, about what a social search engine in the wild might look like. Today, we got our answer or at least a glimpse at the first real iteration of a social search engine.

The partnership between Facebook and Bing will likely fuel a new debate on what needs to be improved, what works and what doesn’t, and where to go next. But it does offer a very useful social context to searches NOW. Every search will show, if possible, a sample of content your friends have created or liked that is relevant to your search term and will even rank that information in with the other traditional search results. The integration of this Facebook “module” in Bing search results will also be seen in the web results on a Facebook search.

The integration taps into some of the information that is provided by the your social graph including likes, profile information, user photos, and even profiles. This new integration will provide a deeper level of social relevance when searching for things that represents a common interest to you and your friends and it will even make the search for new friends easier. Bing will now be able to provide a more myopic set of filtered results when you search for someone by name. It will reference your connections as well as the connections of your friends in an attempt to find the most targeted matches to your name search. This will make searching for people on Facebook that you have just met offline a little bit easier. You can read more about the details on the integration here from Danny Sullivan.

Though our team is excited for this new integration to come online, we still think the best is yet to come. Facebook and Bing have other integrations on the roadmap for both the near and long term. It will be interesting to see how the service matures over time and even more interesting to see how Google responds.

What are your predictions? What comes next? What will Google do to answer this news?

Filed Under: Facebook, Featured, Social Media Tagged With: facebook and bing, facebook profile search, social search tools

Micromanaging at a Social Level

September 16, 2010 by Jessica Ziegler

Yesterday Valerie Bauerlein at the WSJ.com posted this article about Gatorade’s social media listening and engagement efforts. According to the article, Gatorade is attempting to regain market share it has lost in recent years to products such as Coca-Cola Co’s Powerade. One way they are attempting to gain a foothold with their customers is in the social landscape, utilizing Twitter and Facebook as well as other social media platforms.

Interestingly, Gatorade is owned by Pepsi Co. who gained tons of press and social media credibility with their Pepsi Refresh Project which launched during the 2010 Super Bowl. Clearly Pepsi Co. learned some important lessons about the value and reach of social media, so much so that they are willing to fund a social media team whose sole purpose is to support a single product within their family of products. They see the importance of individual brands, and the importance of treating them differently. They even go so far as to state that this approach may act as a model for other brands within the Pepsi Co. family.

It makes perfect sense. Different marketing for different products; therefore, different social strategies for different products. Think of it this way; there is a reason that Johnson & Johnson doesn’t try to feature Tylenol, Splenda and Visine in one TV spot.

How does this relate to your business? Do you have different brands that should perhaps be monitored and promoted as single entities as opposed to pieces of a whole? Would it be easier for you? Better question: Would it be easier for your customers? If it’s easier for your customers, doesn’t that automatically make it better for your business?

Update: This year Pepsi will be back during the Super Bowl sponsoring a user-generated advertising contest featuring Doritis and Pepsi Max. The the top finalists’ spots will run during the Super Bowl.

Filed Under: Case Studies, Facebook, Featured, Listening, Social Media, Twitter Tagged With: gatorade social media, social engagement, social media listening

Star Client: How Desert Perinatal is Doing Social Right

August 5, 2010 by Jessica Ziegler

Several months ago we had the pleasure to work with Tina Senter at Desert Perinatal Associates in Las Vegas, NV. Tina runs the marketing department for this practice specializing in high-risk pregnancies.

Vestor Logic was responsible for redesigning their existing website and implementing a WordPress install. We set up accounts and built a Facebook fan page and a Twitter background to maintain a consistent look across their various marketing initiatives. All of these are pretty foundational elements when starting a social media marketing initiative.

Often a client will have big ideas about all the ways that they could use social media to reach out to their existing clients, but fall short when it comes time to take the reins back from us to DO something with it all. Then again, sometimes we get a client like Tina who is ready to run with social media…

Here are some of the things that Tina is doing right:

Desert Perinatal runs a weekly contest looking for a super cute baby picture from their fans to use as their Facebook icon for the week.
Tina uses Facebook to engage fans by posting common questions that most moms can’t help but answer in a forum like Facebook, such as: What is your biggest frustration as a parent right now? Or, how did you transition from a crib to toddler bed?
She allows fans to post on the fan page wall. Parents will post pictures or questions of their own. She is allowing a community to form on her watch, without directly interfering or trying to guide that process.
Tina creates a monthly newsletter featuring classes, products, recipes, letters from the doctors and Q&A with the nurses, always promoting the Facebook page and Twitter feed to build awareness.
She also had Vestor Logic create a postcard-sized print version of the Facebook fan landing page as a take away at the front desk to build awareness.
She uses tools to automatically post Facebook page updates to the Twitter feed.
She runs a birthday cupcake promotion encouraging fans to post birthday baby pics and receive a cupcake certificate from a local bakery.

Most importantly, she is consistently DOING something in her social media space.

Tina certainly has some built-in advantages with her “product”, new moms are desperate to connect with other new moms and are frequently stuck at home for the first few weeks/months. Her population is all local to one city. She works within a field that people are passionate about: having babies. All those cute pictures don’t hurt, either.

BUT, she easily could have set up these accounts and wandered back to the textbook marketing approaches. She chose to move forward, stay engaged and experiment and it is truly paying off.

So. What can you do to create a community within your client base? How can you engage with your clients on a more meaningful level?

Update: We know, it’s not that easy for everyone. Maybe you don’t have the bandwidth, the staff, the understanding to make it happen for your organization. Soon we will be releasing a set of social media launch products: labs and engagement packages, to help get over that initial hump between set up and social stardom. Stay tuned…

Want to be notified by email of the new things that Vestor Logic has to offer? Join our email list to get those updates in your inbox! Subscribe to Vestor Logic by Email.

Filed Under: Case Studies, Facebook, Featured, Social Media, Web Design Tagged With: desert perinatal associates, doing social right, social media case studies

The New Facebook ‘Like’ button and the Open Graph Protocol

May 7, 2010 by Jessica Ziegler

Recently some of you may have noticed that Facebook changed it’s “Become a Fan” button to a “Like” button. The thinking behind this is that it is less of a commitment to “like” something or someone than it is to become a “fan”. Being a fan implies a certain level of engagement with a brand or person. You may be willing to tell the world that you are a “fan” of Whole Foods or U2, but you may only “like” M&Ms. Are you and M&Ms casual acquaintances or in a committed relationship? This move opens the doors for users to feel comfortable connecting with more brands.

Another reason behind this move is Facebook’s new integration with the Open Graph Protocol. According to the www.opengraphprotocol.org this: “enables any web page to become a rich object in a social graph. For instance, this is used on Facebook to enable any web page to have the same functionality as a Facebook Page”.

In essence, this means that by inserting a few simple <meta> tags into your page header and inserting a facebook “like” button on your website with one line of html you can turn your page into a “graph object” which can be found and tied to the social graph. There a also a few other social plug-ins you can utilize, such as an activity feed or recommendations (see more here http://developers.facebook.com/plugins).

What does this all mean? It means that users can establish connections to you and your brand across the entire web, and tie it back to their facebook profile. Facebook becomes a vast repository of everything you and your friends “like”. I find it hard not to think of it as the broadest marketing research experiment ever undertaken. And all users have to do is “like” stuff.

The negatives, as always with Facebook, relate back to privacy. Any user who is not on top of their privacy setting can cry foul. Yes, you are telling your friends that you like Bon Jovi, you may be telling BMG and Sony as well. I personally don’t have huge issues with the privacy issue, but I am in marketing so I may be biased.

Overall, I think it is an extremely intriguing move and I for one cannot wait to see what the adoption rate looks like. I “like” it.

What about you? Does this move make you nervous? Excited? Angry? Tell us.

Read More about the Like Button:
Why I Like the Like Button: Spreading Nonprofit Messages

Are Like Buttons Evil? The Open Web Reacts To Facebook’s Not-So-Open Graph

Filed Under: Facebook, Featured, Social Media Tagged With: Facebook, fan page, followers, open graph, Social Media, tools

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