1. Brandbook.sm –
social feedback distilled
Executive summary.
Brandbook was not born out of a powerful intuition or a
disruptive business idea.
It was born opportunistically in 2010 out of a business relation
with Ferrero, that had twelve million fans across sixty
spontaneous Facebook pages and was wondering what these fans
were saying.
“Wondering what the fans are saying”, however, is not a business need on which you can build a
viable service. Knowledge captured from the analysis of Facebook comments must be distillable
into actionable insights that bring concrete benefits to brands.
Helping brands identify negative comments is not a good enough answer either.
“Defensive” social media monitoring services enjoyed considerable popularity at the start of the
social media revolution when brands were scared of dipping their feet into social networks and
believed that reading every single comment and tweet was a necessary and effective way of
identifying so-called social media storms ahead of time.
To the great disappointment of the reputation management cottage industry, it is becoming
increasingly obvious that Warren Buffet’s “it takes 20 years to build a reputation and five
minutes to ruin it” quote has nothing to do with social media and does not point to a special
fragility of brands to negative content posted on social media.
With or without social media, a huge 5 minute mishap will ruin your brand.
With or without social media, pointless negative comments will die out.
Yes, you should respond to grounded negative tweets and comments, as you responded to
grounded complaints received via the post.
No, you should not worry that negative comments will spread like wild fire through the
blogosphere.
Very early on Brandbook morphed from a defensive “let’s see how
many fans do not like nutella” (answer: very few ) to a more
offensive “let’s see how our fans are reacting to the repositioning
of nutella as a breakfast complement” communicated through
nutella’s fan page.
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2. Brandbook has pivoted many times since, following Ferrero’s requirements, in search of the
magic mix that will make Brandbook a concrete solution to a concrete and lasting pain of brands
and agencies.
The “pain” is now clearly identified – help brands maximize the impact of their Facebook pages.
The “how to” address this pain is getting clearer.
As a side note, Brandbook is only concerned with Facebook and
with Facebook pages in particular.
No business is forever, but the only direction Facebook seems to
be heading is up. Facebook’s upcoming IPO values the company
at 100 Billion dollars. Myspace was acquired for 500 Million
dollars in 2005. The market sees little risk of history repeating
itself in the near future.
Brandbook does not follow Google+ or Twitter brand pages, even
though it would be relatively simple to tweak the code to work
with Google+ or Twitter’s API.
The adoption of the “fan page” concept by Google+ and Twitter
is a proof that fan pages are a good idea, but it will take a time for
Google+ or Twitter fan pages to gain anywhere near the number
of views that large Facebook fan pages enjoy.
Brandbook also does not follow Facebook brand mentions on
public posts “outside” fan pages.
Adding this functionality would require limited additional work. However, while capturing
what Facebook users write on their walls about nutella as “public” posts would certainly satisfy a
legitimate curiosity, it is unclear what concrete and actionable benefit this would bring to
Ferrero, and how this feature this would strengthen Brandbook’s value for its present and future
customers.
The reason I believe Brandbook has a chance is that both the role and the importance of fan
pages are still being worked out.
For a brand it is important to have a Facebook fan page pretty
much because Facebook is important. What are the “best practices”
to manage a fan page is still unclear. What kind of performance a
brand should expect from its Facebook page is still unclear.
Facebook pages routinely get a lot more views than the brands’
“.com” websites. This said, is it normal that Coca-Cola, the world’s
best known and most valuable brand, has “only” 40 million fans, 5
Facebook users out of 100? Is it normal that Nestle’, that sells 1.2
Billion products per day, has 12 million fans across all its brands?
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3. What is the “right” size of a brand’s Facebook page?
Some of the “competitors” of Brandbook (in quotes - Brandbook is so small that none of the
players in this space, Buddymedia, Wildfire, Socialbakers, Vitrue, Edgerankchecker, have even
heard of Brandbook) have defined proprietary metrics to judge the performances of Facebook
pages.
The fact that these metrics are proprietary (ie work like black boxes from the viewpoint of the
customer) is an indication of the absence of clear “best practices”. Using “black box” metrics in
fuzzy contexts is dangerous because when they misinterpret data (by for instance, considering a
page that is not doing so well as “good”) this casts a shadow on the effectiveness of the whole
service.
Brandbook positions itself differently. It is a “pure” analytical tool that helps better manage
Facebook pages by delivering insights, not prepackaged conclusions, to brands.
Another opportunity is that while the number of fans is going up, the growth rate of the number
of fans and of the number of impressions of an average page is going down. And this while the
effort required to increase the page’s exposure is increasing substantially.
Causes: (i) there are more and more brands on Facebook (over nine
million businesses have their Facebook page), (ii) there is more
competition since the average quality of page posts is going up (more
and more pages are managed professionally), (iii) the algorithm that
Facebook uses to “decide” which posts to show on the fans’ wall is
getting progressively “meaner”.
A related issue is that on Facebook impressions are not all alike
(contrary to impressions on traditional media).
Since Facebook’s Edgerank algorithm “rewards” engagement, page
administrators have a strong incentive to post content that is
engaging, even if it has little to do with the brand. While “engaging
only” content still helps create a good karma between fans and the
brand, it makes it difficult to determine the ROI of the page.
Facebook’s “insights” (metrics provided for free by Facebook to
page admins) do not provide this kind of information, and do not
help page admins assess how their page is doing relative to competition.
Brandbook doesn’t have a direct answer to these questions, but it has data that, cleverly mined,
can provide answers.
Brandbook does not rely on a “proprietary” technology/algorithm, but on a very solid use of
Facebook’s API and of state-of-the-art data management and visualization tools. Brandbook
has a small footprint (it has been developed by a single, if extremely talented, Pakistani coder)
and can be easily pivoted towards wherever the answer happens to lie.
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