Recently I’ve noticed an influx into the market of web-based Facebook builder apps: services which allow non-techies to create custom Facebook pages or Facebook apps without needing to understand code or hire a developer. Having tried some first-hand, I thought I’d do a quick list of some of these tools to help you choose which might be right for you. As most of my clients are small biz and/or non-profit, I’m not including any of the big fancy ‘platform manager’ things which cost a lot: these are all available for free or a low fee (usually monthly pay-as-you-go).

Pagemodo

Best for: easy Welcome pages

Pagemodo is designed to be easy-peasy, and you really can create a nice looking custom landing page (Welcome tab) in just a few minutes. It’s free if you don’t mind Pagemodo branding, and if you pay as little as $6.25 per month, you can have up to 3 pages: either 3 different types of ‘tabs’ (eg. Twitter feed, Welcome tab & map page) – OR – if you manage 3 different brands on Facebook, you could have 1 custom ‘tab’ on each. You can also add a gateway which forces people to Like your page in order to have access to content (use sparingly!). Be warned though, the tool is a bit buggy and clunky, and the templates are a bit rigid design-wise.

Involver

Best for: integrating other social feeds & content

On Involver‘s free plan, you can use up to 2 of the Basic level apps, most of which are designed to pull content from other social sites into Facebook: Flickr photos, YouTube videos, Twitter feed, or RSS (eg your blog posts). There’s also a coupon app, as well as the ability to embed docs via Scribd (PDF, etc), and an iFrame maker which will allow you to embed any web page into a Facebook tab… but use this last one with caution as Facebook’s area is not as wide as most web pages, so you’ll ideally need a designer to make it look nice. If you need more than 2 apps or if you want their Pro apps (Polls, Signup forms, etc), then the price jumps up a lot to a whopping $99 per month (ouch!). I’d love to see them offering some middle ground in terms of pricing in future.

North Social

Best for: all-u-can-eat apps

North Social is the ‘buffet’ option: all the apps you want for 1 price. The price varies depending on how many Fans you have, starting at $20 per month for less than 1,000 Fans. The choice of apps is quite extensive, ranging from a few types of special offers and integrated shops useful for commercial businesses, to volunteering and donation useful for charities or garnering support for good causes, to the usual practical ones such as maps, photo galleries, embedded video, welcome pages and integrated Twitter or RSS feeds. North Social gives you many options to help build your fan base, but if you already have thousands of fans, it may not be the cheapest option: more than 5,000 fans and you’re looking at $50+ per month.

Wildfire

Best for: competitions & short-term campaigns

Wildfire‘s approach is a bit different from the others, as they price on a per-campaign basis. The fee starts from $5 + $0.99 per day for a basic campaign, but you’ll want to spend $25 + $2.99 per day if you want custom branding options. Wildfire has a range of different types of competitions, quizzes and contests, including contests where you can allow your fans to choose the winner. You could also use their ‘flash deal’ coupon option to create Groupon-style promotions. The downside to Wildfire is that they include other people’s campaigns in the confirmation email that gets sent to your fans who enter your own contest, which may not be the kind of thing you want to push on your fanbase.

Booshaka

Best for: Top Fans leaderboard

If you’d like to drive a little healthy competitive spirit among your Fans, you might want to look at Booshaka, as that’s their core offering: creating a hierarchical list of your fans based on their activity. Hitting right at the gamification sweet spot, the goal here is to increase interactions by employing game psychology, aiming at our basal human need to one-up each other in public On the paying plan, you can even add Foursquare-style badges to the mix, but sadly I can’t see their pricing and I must admit there’s a real shoestring start-up vibe on their site as some of their own site links don’t work or take you to ‘coming soon’ pages. Time to grow up guys.

This isn’t an extensive list, but these are just some of the tools I’ve tried and/or know about. If you have any similar tools that you have experience with, please do leave a comment as I am always interested to find other ways of helping people encourage engagement through social media.

With more and more companies using social media for business, it’s increasingly important for businesses to have a set of guidelines or rules of engagement which can ensure that employees know what to do when interacting online. It’s equally important for managers and superiors to have these guidelines in place, as they may not be accustomed to the style of communication that social media requires. Too often companies jump on board with Twitter or Facebook, using these channels purely to send out marketing messages and press releases. And then they are surprised when the results aren’t there. I ask: “Would you tune into a TV channel that was 100% commercials?” I think not. So it’s no surprise that people are tuning out these constant sales messages.

Here’s my take on the rules of engagement for staff whose job it is to interact with people through social media and online communities. It may be their sole job, or part of their job. My version below is made up in large part from a great O’Reilly article in Forbes and AMP3 PR, who have done a great job in creating a working policy for their own employees – a big shout out to them!

Guidelines for Social Media in the Workplace

We expect everyone who participates in online commentary / social media to understand and to follow these simple but important guidelines. These guidelines cover all social media and online community platforms including but not limited to:

• Social networking (such as Facebook, Foursquare, LinkedIn)
• Micro-blogging sites (such as Twitter)
• Blogs (including company and external blogs, as well as comments)
• Video/photo sharing sites (such as Flickr, YouTube, Vimeo)
• Online communities (forums, discussion boards)
• Collaborative documents / wikis (such as Wikipedia)
• Review sites (such as Qype, WeLoveLocal)

Social Web Guidelines for Employees

Pick & mix.
Spend some time researching and reading up on various sites before deciding where it makes sense for you to spend the majority of your time online. You can’t be everywhere, so pick sites which rank well and are well-visited by the company’s target audience and/or connected to our core business. Then, feel free to mix in a smaller portion of less-popular sites or blogs when comments or topics warrant it.

Look before you leap.
Read, read and read some more. Learn the landscape and individual style of conversations on that particular site – every site has its own (usually unwritten) rules and quirks. The quickest way to make a fool of yourself or get banned from a site is to dive in without first understanding the lay of the land.

Listen before you talk.
Before entering any conversation, understand the context. Whom are you speaking to? Is this a forum for “trolls and griefers?” Is there a good reason for you to join the conversation? If your answer is yes, then follow these practices when engaging online:

Say who you are.
Always be transparent about who you are and who you represent. Use your real name, identify who you work for and what your role is. You can disclose this on your About page or bio, and please also indicate that your opinions do not represent official positions of the company. If possible, include a link to the company website in this page and/or your signature – but only if this is allowed on that particular site. Use your best judgment to determine when this might be appropriate.

Show your personality.
You weren’t hired to be an automaton. Be conversational while remaining professional. Bring your own personal flavour and experiences to your postings: be YOU first and foremost, and an employee of the company secondly. Part of the whole point in having you communicate online in a work capacity is to provide a real, human face to the business.

Add value, not noise.
Social media is about conversations, personal advice, recommendations and building relationships. It is not a sales channel or means for distributing press releases. Remember the 80/20 rule of thumb: 80% of your conversations should be about general topics relevant to the business and/or your own experiences, only 20% should be about the company’s products or services.

Build a following.
Promote yourself by finding and sharing information that will be interesting to your friends and followers and useful for them to share. Become a trusted part of the online community – not only by creating your own content, but sharing others’. Establish relationships online with other people you respect and trust.

Be responsive.
If someone responds to something you’ve said, be responsive and follow-up quickly. If you say something in error, don’t delete it, simply go back and update it with the correct information.

Know you’re always “On”.
You represent the company at all times and you must assume that your social media usage is visible to customers, managers and prospects. Be careful what and with whom you are sharing. Keep in mind that while we all have the occasional work frustration, Facebook and Twitter are not the best venues in which to air them as those comments are available to your customers and coworkers.

Be respectful.
Respond to ideas, not personalities. Don’t question motives, use profanity or demeaning language, or make remarks that are off topic or offensive. Always demonstrate respect for others’ points of view, even when they’re not offering the same in return. Take the high road: never pick fights and don’t say anything you wouldn’t say to someone’s face and in the presence of others. If you are sharing a negative experience or commenting on a brand or individual, please try to do so in a constructive way.

Don’t expect perfection.
Do expect to make newbie mistakes, and don’t expect everyone to love you. No matter how nice, calm or inoffensive you are, and no matter how much research you do, there will be times when you will trip up and say something unpopular. It’s OK – shake it off and just remember that how you handle this is more important than the misstep itself.

Have full disclosure.
If you are writing an advertorial or other sponsored content – or if you are contracting others to post on the company’s social properties in exchange for money – make sure there’s a clear distinction between the normal / free content and any paid content. Today’s web users are savvy people, and hiding paid activities are a quick way to a bad online reputation.

Know your facts and always give proper credit.
It’s OK to quote others, but never attempt to pass off someone else’s language, photography, or other information as your own. Always give proper attribution (by linkbacks, public mentions, re-tweets and so on). All copyright, privacy, and other laws that apply offline apply online as well. Be sure to credit your sources when posting a link or information gathered from another source.

Think ahead.
Everything you say can (and likely will) be used in the court of public opinion–forever.  Be smart about protecting yourself, your privacy, and the company’s confidential information. What you publish is widely accessible and will be around for a long time so consider the content carefully. Google has a long memory.

Be in it for the long haul.
Don’t expect instant fame, audiences or popularity: building a trusted online presence takes time.

If you respond to a problem, you own it.
If you become the point of contact for a customer or employee complaint, stay with it until it is resolved.

Play nice.
We encourage you to connect with other employees and affiliates online. In doing so, we ask you to remember that sharing personal information about co-workers may affect them inside as well as outside of the office. All standard HR policies apply to interactions between colleagues across the social web.

__________________________

If the above policy is not quite what your own company needs, have a look at this list of social media policies from a huge range of types of organisation, from non-profits through to large corporates. Or indeed check the online database of social media policies.

Twitter users who have custom messages in their Twitter backgrounds are suddenly seeing their messages chopped off or no longer visible at all, thanks to the wider width of the page on the new Twitter layout. The old width of the Twitter page had been static pretty much since day 1, and millions of people customised their page backgrounds accordingly, using the extra space on the sides of the floating content panel to display marketing messages, web addresses, email addresses and more. The new Twitter design being gradually rolled out right now is much wider, meaning many messages and images that were previously visible are no more.

Variable width = 20-67% less visible background messages

To complicate matters further, the width of the new Twitter content panel is now variable depending on what resolution your monitor is set to. Users who have a monitor resolution of 1024 pixels wide (aprox 23% of the population*), can now only see a small 48pixel margin outside the main content panel, meaning any messages are pretty much hidden entirely. Previously, these users could see nearly 3times more of the background image (130 pixels).

A small majority of the population (28%) have their monitors set to 1280 pixel resolution. This is the width that most designers used when creating Twitter background images. They banked on the fact that users would see around 180 – 250 pixels worth of the background, depending on which browser they use, and how it’s set up. The bad news is that Twitter’s new content panel expands to a whopping 1040pixels wide if your monitor is set to 1280 resolution or above. This means that users can now only see a measly 120 pixels of the background image: a reduction of more than half on some browsers. And of course that’s just on one side: while most backgrounds were designed to show messages on the left side only, some clever designers used the right side border to show things, too.

Why did they do that?

I can understand why Twitter have made this move: resolutions are getting higher and higher, and 27% of the population have their monitors set at resolutions higher than 1280 wide. Twitter are designing for the future, when most of us will have high resolutions. But the annoying truth is that today, more than half of the people who view Twitter pages will see a lot less of your pretty custom background than they did before.

So how can I fix my Twitter background image?

What can you do if you are one of the millions who have a custom background that’s no longer being seen by half of your audience? The easiest way to fix (part of) the problem is to simply reduce the scale of your background until your important messages fit within a 120 pixel space on the left. This will mean that the 28% of people who use 1280 as their resolution can see it. Sadly, this doesn’t help the 23% who use 1024 resolution. It’s pretty unlikely that your font size will be visible if you scale down far enough for things to fit within the 48 pixels that 1024 users can see, so the only way to get around that issue is to make a new background image.

My top tips for backgrounds that work with the new Twitter design:

• Type your most important message vertically, within a 48 x 500 pixel space (measuring from the top left). Almost everyone will be able to see this. Your brand name, logo or URL should go here if you want the maximum number of people to be able to see it.
• Use the space up to 120 x 700 pixels to place secondary messages such as email address, blog address, cross promotions or anything else you want to convey.
• Make use of Twitter’s new translucent sidebar area on the right: remember that whatever is in the background will show through this transparent area (on non-IE browsers). This is a great place for large, impactful simple shapes such as emblems or logos. Don’t put text or anything small or fiddly on the right because it will look cluttered.
• Remember your high-res users by making a really wide image. You don’t need to put anything aside from simple colours on the far right, but make sure it ends gracefully (with a fade out or something). Also remember that high-res users will also see a lot more of the page vertically, too – ensure your coloured background stretches far enough vertically and doesn’t just end abruptly. NOTE: At present, it seems Twitter doesn’t like images larger that 2600 pixels wide, so it’s scaling things down when they are larger than that.
• Don’t put anything important in the far right or far bottom, but you can use this space for a bit of fun to give your high-res viewers a treat. If your monitor is set to a high resolution, have a look at my Twitter page to see what I mean.

With thanks to Stephen Fry and Pete Cashmore / Mashable… hope you don’t mind me using you as examples

*Monitor resolution statistics from W3Counter.

Updated 28 September following Hugh’s comment: removed scrolling background mention.

An Interview with Helen Keegan

Mobile marketer Helen Keegan aka Technokitten has been blogging since the days of yore, and has been working in marketing and retail for even longer. It seems a natural fit that she’s now combining her passion for social media with her passion for fashion by doing some rather interesting online projects with Bicester Village, a chic outlet shopping village near Oxford.

I had the opportunity to visit Bicester Village a while ago as part of a bloggers’ day, in which Helen used word of mouth and tools like Twitter to invite a wide range of bloggers to come along and check out the place, with the hopes of getting a bit of blog coverage. While there, I thought I’d ask Helen about this and her other work with Bicester Village.

So tell me a little about today (bloggers’ day)…

This is the first one, an experiment, to see what bloggers think of Bicester Village and to see what kind of coverage might come out. We’ve invited some people because they have fashion & lifestyle blogs, but we also wanted to reach out to bloggers whose audience was ‘normal people’, because ‘normal people’ go shopping, and we wanted to reach people that other blogs or media might not reach. This is a small experiment; if it works we want to do larger events next year.

Were you inspired by the Stormhoek campaign or other similar ideas?

I took part in the Stormhoek campaign as a blogger, I got my bottle of wine and everything… it’s certainly been interesting to follow the results, but ultimately we want to reach beyond the blogosphere, beyond the influencers, to reach real people. I don’t know how far the Stormhoek campaign reached Joe Bloggs as opposed to Joe Blogger.

Have you been involved in other projects similar to this blogger’s day, aside from Bicester Village?

When working on a mobile launch last year, we persuaded the client to steer away from the traditional press launch and more into a blogger’s outreach event. Instead of a fancy press junket, we hired a room in a central London hotel for the day, and bloggers could drop in for tea & cakes and a chat. It was that relaxed, there were no 1-1 interviews, you could just come and have a chat with the CEO or the tech team. That worked brilliantly well for them, as the people who came were actually enthusiasts, rather than journalists who just turn up because they have to, because it’s their job and they have to tick the box saying they went. Sometimes for these journos to write something meaningful about it, it’s a step to far, but if you’ve got a blogger who’s enthusiastic about that particular interest, and who’s flattered and excited to have been invited at all, to have been recognised for their enthusiasm, I think you get much more careful copy out of it. The result was that the coverage was very different from the usual regurgitated press release, you had people analysing it and covering it in different ways. With apologies to the really good journalists out there, and there are some really good ones, there are also a lot of people who just rewrite the press release, and there’s not a lot of value-add there. I think where bloggers are more interesting, is that they want to add some value, they want to do something a bit different and have their personal take on it.

Can you talk a little bit about the handbag project, which is another strand of what you’re doing with Bicester Village?

Yes, we’re really excited about this one, it’s thrilling. Basically, we wanted to promote the 30 new stores that have just been built here at Bicester Village, and to get pre-December traffic. We wanted to offer people a 10% discount for registering their interest on a website. We started thinking about what we wanted the website to be, and eventually came up with the idea of ‘what’s in my bag’ or what’s in my handbag. It turns out one of the management team does handbag therapy, where she analyses people’s handbags, so there’s a real element of psychoanalysis going on.

We have been working with people at Tuttle Club in London to seed the campaign, and got people to empty out their bags and take pictures of them, and get them onto the website, to help people understand what was expected. And last week Debbie Percy who analyses the handbags, did some live video analysis of handbags at Tuttle and on the street. The reason for the video is so people understand what the handbag analysis involves, so they wouldn’t feel too scared or shy to have it done. Now every week, Debbie chooses a few of the photos that have been uploaded to the website to analyse. Everyone who registers on the site to either upload photos or vote on handbag photos gets a 10% discount, and we’ve already had fantastic success with it. The results so far are already way above any promotion I’ve ever done before, in terms of actual redemptions of the vouchers. Not just people registering and downloading them, but actually turning up and using them.

How have you gone about setting targets and success measures for the campaigns?

For the handbags, it’s about number of registrations, numbers of photos, and ultimately, about numbers of vouchers redeemed – and we’re definitely on target there. For the blogger’s day, “I don’t know” is the honest answer, because I don’t know what kinds of content or coverage we may get out of it. It’s only after we know what kinds of coverage we might get, through Facebook, blogs or other, that I can start to think about how we might gauge that in terms of success criteria.

How has your client felt about going into this kind of uncharted territory without having ideas of measures in advance?

We know we want to have measurements, and this is an experiment to see what kinds of things we should measure in this area for the future. It’s quite easy to measure something like the handbag promotion, because there are hard figures. But with blogging, it’s more esoteric. It’s more about media coverage, but what we haven’t yet worked out is how to weight those different types of coverage and different audiences. I don’t think anybody’s really cracked it. If someone says ‘I went to Bicester Village’ and it’s seen by 1000 people, it’s worth more than if someone writes a really in-depth article that’s only seen by 10. So it’s quite difficult to do that weighting. And moving forward, I’m hoping to work on some blogs for all the different villages, so that will be part & parcel of working out what the actual community criteria are. But the client has been really brilliant about wanting to experiment, and they are committed to getting some learning out of it.

How does this kind of marketing compare with Bicester Village’s other more traditional marketing?

We’ll be comparing registrations from the handbag site to registrations from their email marketing, but we’re using email to promote the handbag site as well, because not all of their audience are Web 2.0 clued up. Email marketing may seem a little old fashioned, but to people who aren’t accustomed to getting 150 emails in their inbox every day, it’s really nice to get an email newsletter, so we have to be careful not to alienate people by using different media for different audiences.

Which leads to my next question: do you think the people who are using the handbag site really represent the average Bicester Village customer, or do you think they are more the usual (Web 2.0) suspects?

Well, at first I thought they might have been ‘the usual suspects’ but so many of them have come to redeem their voucher. At Bicester Village, there are more than 120 shops, ranging from high end designers to high street, so it’s very difficult to say who the core customer is. Also there’s this myth that people who are interested in designer fashion and luxury items don’t do digital. Well, that’s just not true. But there is that myth in the luxury goods world that digital isn’t for them, so we’re trying to dispell those myths and challenge some of those perceptions.

I look forward to hearing more about the results of these social experiments, and will be following the developments so I can keep you posted. At the end of the interview, Helen & I had a nice chat about the current state of mobile marketing, web marketing and social media, so I’m thinking I might edit that down into a nice lil audio file for your aural pleasure

As Bebo is the UK & Ireland’s most popular social network, it’s no surprise there are many different ways that businesses and organisations can tap into Bebo as a means of engaging fans, spreading the word and just plain entertaining people. There are currently 40million user profiles on Bebo, and it has been the seeding ground for some groundbreaking developments in online communication, perhaps best known for onlilne drama series such as Kate Modern and Sofia’s Diary. The fact that Kate Modern won a BAFTA and one of the most popular episodes of Kate Modern received 1.5million views (when the Big Brother final TV episode that same year only received 900,000 views) is a testament to the success of the platform.

The most common and simplest way to market on Bebo is to create a profile page for your product or brand. Hundreds of these pages exist, but I wonder what percentage of them are ever actively in use. One of the biggest mistakes companies make is to hurriedly stick something up and then realise that they don’t have the resources to actually do anything with the page, explore Bebo and identify potential ‘friends’, or worse of all – respond to requests. Creating a page on Bebo is the easy part; managing the replies, requests, enquiries – and let’s face it – spam, is quite another. But by far, the most successful profile pages on Bebo actually offer something back to the community. Freebies, contests, fun games or useful widgets are sure to win you more brownie points than simply shoving a marketing message up on a profile page and expecting Bebo-ers to engage with it. No one wants to engage with an ad.

The Bebo guy* speaking at ad:tech  mentioned a good example of how to do it right: Fanta ran a contest on their profile page, in which every Friday at 5pm, they would choose someone from their community of ‘friends’ and get their profile pic on the main Bebo homepage for 15 minutes. Their profile pic would also appear on the big ‘neon’ at Picadilly Circus for 15 minutes at the same time. Naturally, the winners were more than thrilled to tell their friends to check out Bebo’s homepage or the lights at Picadilly Circus. The Bebo member gets to have their 15 minutes of fame, Fanta gets some free viral promotion, Bebo gets more clicks on their homepage (and thus more ad views): everyone’s a winner.

Another way to tap into social networks is to harness the energy of your existing fanatical fans. There are hundreds of unofficial fan pages on Bebo and other social networks, set up by regular people who just like whatever it is. It all started when Bebo added a module that allowed members to create fan pages for their favourite bands, but this soon evolved into fan pages for just about every product, service or brand out there. Can you believe that the unoffical Tesco fan club page on Bebo has over 62,000 members, and more than 10,000 members subscribe to the blog updates? Believe it or not, it’s true. And that’s just one of the dozens of unofficial Tesco fan clubs – on just one social network. And it’s not a conventionally exciting brand, either.

When Top Gear decided they wanted to get into Bebo, they noticed that they already had more than 90,000 fans on several Top Gear fan club pages. So rather than compete with these, they decided to involve the 3 guys from Wales who set up the first and largest Top Gear Appreciation Society on Bebo. They decided to give these guys all the photos, videos etc and just let them get on with it. To me, that’s the best way of marketing on Bebo: to let it stay in the community, and be run by the community. These 3 guys would have kept doing what they were doing anyway, so why not let them feel closer to the brand in this way. Furthermore, the folks over at Top Gear only need to be marginally involved rather than running the whole thing and moderating the page, so it’s a no-brainer, really.

Marketing on Bebo or any other social network isn’t for every company, and success rates will vary wildly. But there are definitely opportunities to be had, and I think it’s a much smarter move to tap into existing social networks than to try to build your own. People are far more likely to engage with your company or organisation from within a familiar framework than to sign up for yet another username & password on a community website based around a brand. Would YOU read and post on a toothpaste website’s forum? Don’t expect your customers to, either.

This post is Part I of Thoughts from this year’s ad:tech London conference. More to come as soon as I can type ‘em.

* Possibly Mark Charkin? Ordinarily I would have gladly referenced his name, but he was a replacement for the published speaker, and he’s not listed on the ad:tech site. Let me know if you know who this was.