Filed under: jobs — kevin @ June 28, 2008

Work with the world’s premier brands to build their presence on major social networks as head of Context’s sales organization. Marketing is changing, and Context needs people who understand how. We’re looking for proven ability to sell innovative, social-media focused marketing campaigns to pioneering agencies and brands.

Context Optional is the premier social marketing agency, providing social marketing technologies and services to the world’s leading brands and advertising agencies. Context’s Social Application Server™, the leading platform for viral marketing campaigns on social networks such as Facebook and MySpace, is used by Electronic Arts, Microsoft, Samsung, CBSSports, Ford, Paramount Pictures, and many more well-known brands. As a leading developer of compelling, fun, clever, snarky, unique, and engaging campaigns for social networks, Context is changing the way companies advertise.

As our Director / VP Sales and Business Development, your job is to work with agencies and brands to formulate and sell an effective social media strategy. In this role, you’ll utilize your relationships with top marketing decision makers at Fortune 1000 companies and major agencies and your deep understanding of how brands are best positioned on sites such as MySpace, Facebook, and LinkedIn to pitch innovative, engaging campaigns. More than a “smile and dial” sales role, we’re looking for creativity and strategic thinking to ensure that our clients receive the best social marketing recommendations for their brands. If you are the savvy, polished interactive marketing and sales guru with a proven track record of success driving revenue through strategic relationships, structuring and managing complex negotiations to successful closure, and a passion and interest in the way social networks are changing the online landscape, then Context Optional has an amazing growth opportunity for you.

When you join Context Optional, you will enjoy company benefits that include stock options, health/vision/dental insurance, Fidelity 401(k), pre-tax commuter deductions, casual office environment, weekly office tiki happy hours, and Xbox with Rock Band in the office. This position is located either in Context’s headquarters in downtown San Francisco, near Union Square at Market and 3rd Street and convenient to the Montgomery BART stop, or in New York City.

Apply via email to jobs [at] contextoptional [dot] com

Filed under: press — kevin @ June 21, 2008

The Oregonian recently covered Nike’s most recent Facebook application Ballers Network, which connects people for pick-up basketball games in their area.

The article also mentions Context and some of the Facebook applications and marketing we’ve done for clients:

Microsoft, Samsung, McDonald’s and Ford have Facebook applications recently built by a San Francisco-area developer, Context Optional Inc., company co-founder Kevin Barenblat said.

Filed under: marketing — kevin @

Ogilvy, one of our clients, recently shot this interesting interview with Vinton Cerf, widely called the “Father of the Internet” and now Google’s Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist, talking about how social media platforms such as OpenSocial can help brands find the right customers for their products.

Filed under: apps, facebook — klep @ June 18, 2008

As you’ve probably heard, Facebook is making several changes to the Platform next month. The new user profile has won most of the attention, but the changes reach a lot further than that. Facebook is continuing their campaign to reduce app spamminess and app fatigue by making low-level changes that alter the way that users interact with and spread applications. We’ve looked at these changes in depth and are sharing our point of view with our clients and readers.

User Profile Functionality

The most visually noticeable upcoming change is the new user profile. Profiles are becoming more action-focused. A user’s current profile is largely made up of application profile boxes. We used to pitch profile boxes as one of the main reasons for building a Facebook app — Your brand can have a visual presence right on a user’s profile. We’ve discovered over time that despite this appeal, profile boxes are one of less importance than one would think. Facebook users are less likely to view their own profile as they are to view a friend’s. Our statistics and reporting engine has told us, with almost every app we’ve built, that the profile box itself draws far less new user interaction than feed items and user to user communication channels.

It’s a good thing that profiles aren’t the main driving force behind app usage, because they’re about to get much less prominent. Most apps currently focus their efforts on the “wide” area of a user’s profile (who wouldn’t want more space to use?). In the new profile design, the main profile page doesn’t have a wide area for applications — there is only a narrow column that is now limited in height. Only a handful of apps are displayed there; the rest are placed on a separate overflow “Boxes” tab. The upshot is that apps should focus more on their narrow appearance and be prepared to be relegated to the less-traffic’d Boxes section.

There is, however, a new feature available to applications that wish to manifest themselves on profiles. An app can optionally be capable of having its own full tab. Apps with tabs have much more functionality available than profile boxes provide. Profile boxes are a cached, static view of an application. A full tab has more interactive possibilities. The downside is that users must explicitly create a tab for an application, and there is likely to be a limit on how many they can create. The decision for a brand creating a Facebook app is whether the relatively small number of users who will grant your app a full tab is worth the added cost of a developing a full tab view. Our recommendation is to wait until we get a sense of how users are interacting with this new feature.

Feeds

Feed items are also being re-evaluated, with completely new APIs for developers to use. Optimizing the design and utility of a feed item has always given us an opportunity to make an app viral by knowing what works. The new functionality further recognizes the importance of building feed items that are relevant, flexible, and have appropriate calls to action. Users will be able to choose a one-line or short version of a news feed. In a trend that is seen in other new features as well, an app will be able to request special user permission for a more flexible full feed item.

Sessions

Apps are often judged by how their number of installs (or often by “downloads”, which is a misnomer). Facebook shied away from this measure early on. When the Platform first launched, they revealed the total number of users as a public statistic, but soon changed it to “Daily Active Users”, a measure of engagement instead of reach. App developers didn’t exactly follow suit — an install was still the holy grail of user interaction. Once a user installed an app, a large number of permissions were automatically granted, including accessing profile data, sending notifications, and emailing users directly.

Facebook has encouraged developers to allow users to get a taste of an application before requiring them to install. Public app pages appear in search results and feed items are more likely to show up in news feeds if they point to public pages. Despite these two big incentives, most developers still decided to require users to install their app even to do basic interaction. Now Facebook is forcing the issue — an app will not be able to require installation initially. Instead, it will require a much ligher app login, which will grant some permissions but not the full set of permissions granted by an install. Apps must then decide at which point in the user flow they should offer to promote the user to a full install.

Our take is that this is good for the platform, so it’s largely good for brands as well. Users will be less likely to worry about what an app will do on their behalf if they have this simple no-obligation way of interacting with the app. It does, however, change some of the long term decisions for the app. Many brands are looking at apps as a way to conduct a campaign that eventually turns into an email list. Instead, it’s to their advantage to continue to engage those users on Facebook by introducing new content or campaigns. Ultimately, it will be easier to get a larger number of brand impressions, but more difficult to get long-term users. That’s why we’ll make sure that every app is compelling enough that users will want to go to the full install.

Other Upcoming Changes

There are less-discussed or less-defined changes coming. Apps will be able to post new items to a user’s personal information section (with the user’s permission). For example, a branded app for a soft drink might ask users which flavor is their favorite. Their profile would be edited so that in addition to their favorite quotes and favorite movies, it would display their favorite flavor. There are also visual design changes that give apps some new functionality with a lot more room to display their content.

Existing Apps

Apps that are built on top of Context Optional’s Social Application Server will continue to function, unmodified, with the new features. Since permissions are changing, some individual application features may change in behavior (for example, apps that email users would have to be modified to ask permission). We are actively testing our apps with the new features and we’re also encouraging our clients to talk to us about how they can leverage the new features to their benefit.

Filed under: marketing — kevin @ June 15, 2008

Interestingly enough, BusinessWeek wrote a prescient article a few years ago called “Blogs Will Change Your Business.” They recently decided to revisit the topic, as even though it’s been just a few years, much has changed. For example, Friendster is no longer the top social network.

The newly updated article from earlier this month (now rightly retitled “Social Media Will Change Your Business” states:

“But blogs, it turns out, are just one of the do-it-yourself tools to emerge on the Internet. Vast social networks such as Facebook and MySpace offer people new ways to meet and exchange information. Sites like LinkedIn help millions forge important work relationships and alliances. New applications pop up every week. While only a small slice of the population wants to blog, a far larger swath of humanity is eager to make friends and contacts, to exchange pictures and music, to share activities and ideas.

These social connectors are changing the dynamics of companies around the world. Millions of us are now hanging out on the Internet with customers, befriending rivals, clicking through pictures of our boss at a barbecue, or seeing what she read at the beach. It’s as if the walls around our companies are vanishing and old org charts are lying on their sides.

This can be disturbing for top management, who are losing control, at least in the traditional sense. Workers can fritter away hours on YouTube. They can use social networks to pillory a colleague or leak secrets. That’s the downside, and companies that don’t adapt are sure to get lots of it.

But there’s an upside to the loss of control. Ambitious workers use these tools to land new deals and to assemble global teams for collaborative projects. The potential for both better and worse is huge, and it’s growing—and since 2005 the technologies involved extend far beyond blogs. So our first fix is to lose “blogs” from our headline. The revised title: “Social Media Will Change Your Business.”"

The article goes on to state that Dell’s service on Twitter has brought in half a million dollars of new orders in the last year.

Just one of the many ways companies could (and should) be using social networks for marketing and advertising.

Filed under: apps, marketing — kevin @

People often ask about the differences between widgets and applications. Widgets are typically stand-alone pieces of embeddable code. Widgets are great for viral marketing, as users can cut and paste code from a widget to embed on their own site or blog. Widgets were all the world had until May of 2007, when Facebook launched their Platform, and applications were born.

Applications tie into the social communication channels of the host social network, such as Facebook, MySpace, hi5, or Bebo. Typically applications can’t be cut and paste outside of the host social network, but within the network applications are very easy to share. Applications allow for more interactivity, as they operate as full websites within the host environment.

Some typical differences between widgets and applications-

WIDGETS	APPLICATIONS
Widgets are primary for self-expression	Applications are about being social and communicating
Widgets are stand-alone	Applications are integrated into social network platforms
Widgets live anywhere and work on any site	Applications are at their best when deeply integrated into the host site
Widgets are easy to grab and share via embed code	Applications are easy to share via communication channels inside the social network
Widgets leave brands exposed to user-generated content	Applications typically have control of the full-page where the application resides
Widgets are typically small bits of content that act as teasers to lead to other content	Applications are at their best engaging and all encompassing, not requiring a visit to another site for a full experience
Widgets spread when users grab code and post the widget on their own page	Applications spread through sharing within friend networks (typically 5-10x more viral than widgets)
Widgets are best when the focus is on photos, video, music	Applications are most successful when focused on friends, text, interactive games, and interesting content

Filed under: events — kevin @

At Graphing Social Patterns East I was also on a panel called Where Social Gets Down to Business: Advertising vs App-vertising along with Michael Lazerow of Buddy Media, Eddie Smith of SocialMedia Networks, Chris Cunningham of appssavvy, and moderated by Shiv Singh of Avenue A / Razorfish, who wrote a good summary of the panel.

Here’s a picture of the panel taken by James Duncan Davidson:

Filed under: events, marketing — kevin @

Dave McClure was kind enough to invite me to speak at Graphing Social Patterns East earlier in the week. The workshop I lead was Viral Marketing Advertising Strategies for Social Networks, which was quite fun to lead, since that’s what Context Optional does. I’ve inserted the presentation below–

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Btw, this Slideshare thing is very cool. I posted the presentation 5 days ago, and it’s already been viewed 1500 times!

Filed under: apps, facebook — klep @ June 12, 2008

We sent Kevin to Graphing Social Patterns East in DC mainly so that we could throw a tiki party in his absence. Imagine our surprise when he ended up giving a terrific presentation on Viral Marketing and Advertising Strategies for Social Networks that got a great audience response and was featured on the front page of slideshare.net!

Kevin’s presentation covers the background rationale behind bringing brands to social networks and explains the different strategies for successful social marketing campaigns. It’s even better with Kevin’s comical and engaging delivery, so contact us if you’re interested in bringing your brand to social networks.