Archive for August, 2009

What’s the buzz about Viral Marketing?

Thursday, August 27th, 2009

What’s the buzz about Viral Marketing?

Viral Marketing refers to a marketing tactic which is aimed to spread like a virus creating loops of awareness and interactivity about an event or a product. You guessed it right! Like a virus spreads and takes on epidemic proportions, an idea/message by word-of-mouth or a social network reaches out to scores of people creating tremendous buzz and hype at no cost.
The term is considered to be first employed by Harvard B-school guys Jeffrey Rayport and Tim Draper. Credit, however, of using it first on the web goes to Douglas Rushkoff who wrote at length about it in his book Media Virus in 1994. Some of the early instances of Viral Marketing can be found in now oh-so-common Pyramid Schemes of investment and Multi-level Marketing endeavors.

Today as Viral Marketing evolves in to a full-blown marketing and social phenomena, it is widely believed to be a no-cost, sustainable way to communicate with a community of like-minded users and in the process get converts and potential customers. Major social networks or Web 2.0 icons like Twitter, Facebook, Bebo, and MySpace have today turned into household names.

A recent BBC survey targeting users in the 16-35 age groups announced “A third of young people regularly access Facebook and Twitter via their mobile”. There are other studies too which indicate Facebook leads the pack and is far more in vogue than MySpace, Twitter and Bebo combined. It’s not uncommon to find such flippant polls on the web as the following on Hip Rank site:

As Viral Marketing gets epic popularity, its use for driving traffic to a website or as a product evangelist has increased. No matter if you use Bebo, Facebook, Twitter, or MySpace, the key is to keep your message real short in about 200 characters. Avoiding advertising terms like “Sale”, “Free”, “Buy” or “limited time” is highly recommended as nobody wants to walk on a sales pitch. Social networks are your best bet when you share an article, tip, or some rare bit of useful information with one and all. Not only would you get “followed”, “tweeted”, “beboed” and “facebooked”, you might even land that much coveted book deal or an MSNBC face-off.

Go seed your own viral marketing campaign today!

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New Opportunities for Inbox and Notification Integration on Facebook

Sunday, August 23rd, 2009

Facebook recently announced that they are continuously looking for ways to open core Facebook experiences to developers for innovation. Today we set our focus on two communication channels: notifications and the Facebook Inbox. We’re excited to release two new APIs that will let your applications access your users’ inboxes and notifications in a structured manner. In addition, you can make your stream applications available as attachments for Facebook messages so that users can more easily share application content with friends.

Inbox API

Last week we announced an update to the Open Stream API to allow integration of Page streams with applications. Today we are releasing the Inbox API so you can provide users with even more opportunities to interact with rich Facebook features within your applications. For example, a desktop application geared toward small business owners could enable users to check their company’s Page stream, as well as read messages and receive notifications, all from their desktop.

The Inbox API allows you to access your users’ messages, once they grant your application the new read_mailbox extended permission. This lets your applications provide an interface for users to view their messages. For example, your application could pop up an alert when the user receives a new message.

To access information about a user’s Inbox, you’ll query any of three new FQL tables:

  • mailbox_folder: This table gives you information about a user’s folders; currently all users have three folders: Messages (inbox), Sent (outbox), and Updates.
  • thread: This table gives you information about specific threads. For example, you can get information about recipients of a thread, whether a group or event sent the thread, when it was last updated, the subject, whether it is currently unread, and more.
  • message: This table allows you to get information about each message in a thread. You can get information about who wrote the message, the content of the message and also information about the attachment to the message, if it exists, in the same format as attachments are returned in the stream.

While we currently don’t allow applications to send messages through this API, we’re always thinking about new functionality to offer through Facebook Platform.

To get started, as a developer you can access the Inbox APIs via the read_mailbox permission in order to develop and test your application. To launch your application to all users, please apply to the Inbox API whitelist here.

Application Attachments for Facebook Messages

We’ve simplified the way you can create application attachments that users can share with their friends through Facebook messages. This feature works only with the new Inbox, which a number of users have been testing. The updated Inbox will launch to all users in the coming weeks.

The new Inbox incorporates the same Publisher used to publish to the streams on the home page and profiles. We’ve enhanced the Publisher so it no longer requires you to create template bundles — you can now use the simplified attachment model that stream.publish uses. As we roll out the new Inbox over the next few weeks, we’ll deprecate the old message attachment process.

To integrate your applications into the new Inbox:

  1. Create a Publisher endpoint and enter its URL as the Attachment v2 Callback URL you specify on the Advanced tab in your application settings.
  2. In your Publisher integration, specify “attachment” for the content parameter, instead of “feed”.
  3. Test your attachments today with your test accounts on www.beta.facebook.com.

We’re still supporting existing Publisher integrations that use the “feed” content type, but you should find the flexibility of stream attachments easier to use, as they’re more universal throughout Facebook.

Notifications API

The notifications API lets your applications retrieve your users’ notifications to use within your application. We’ve created a notification FQL table and two new API methods, notifications.getList and notifications.markRead, that let you retrieve structured information about notifications and mark them as read.

The new FQL table contains the same information used to generate the instant notifications you see on the Facebook website. We’ve opened up that data so now you can create better experiences for your users. For example, you can now create new desktop experiences integrating notifications, letting your users stay in touch with their friends and other connections. For example, Facebook for Adobe AIR now uses the notifications API and Inbox API to display notifications and new message alerts alongside the application window.

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