Facebook, Team Management, Speed Comparisons, SEO, and More!
A large mushroom pie and an equally large Hawaiian tantalized our taste buds while the scintillating conversation barraged our brains. Check out the topics talked about at this week’s Resource Friday!
Say ‘Goodbye’ to FBML
Mike Newswanger, Lead Programmer
Facebook is making some slight changes to their developer platform scheduled for implementation by the end of the year. A few changes include dropping a few rarely-used FBML tags, not allowing FBML to edit pages directly, and removing a few uncommon REST API function calls. The biggest change here would be the change for not allowing FBML on Pages, which means that any content published on your Facebook page will have to be hosted outside Facebook and pulled in through an iframe. Hopefully this will pull some server load off Facebook’s servers to allow for faster page loads.
Quick hits on social media
Daniel Klotz, Social Media Strategist
The launch of Facebook Places is the big news in the social media realm this week. With Places, Facebook is stepping into the territory pioneered by FourSquare, BrightKite, Gowalla, Loopt, and others. As currently implemented, Places causes a new rash of privacy concerns–by default, our “friends” are free to check you in anywhere and everywhere, even if you’re not actually there with them.
On the other end of the spectrum, a dead-simple service launched this week called OhLife. OhLife is essentially a Web 2.0 diary, where you’re e-mailed with a prompt (“How did your day go?”) each evening and can journal by simply hitting “reply.” There are no privacy settings, because it’s one hundred percent private.
Finally today, we discussed how the trifecta of owned, earned, and paid media has been joined by a category called shared media. An example of shared media would be when a customer uploads a photo to your Facebook page. The photo is theirs, yet the page is yours, so the media is shared. The rise of shared media as a fourth category leads to all sorts of changes in the marketing and PR world.
Jack Welch on team management
Steve Wolgemuth, Principal
Jack Welch is said to be one of the most studied CEO’s of the 20th Century with his 41 year track record with GE. Today, I brought some of Jack’s key leadership insights to the YDOP team. The first point is that whatever company has the best players wins the game. That’s true in sports and in business. I reminded the team that I believe that YDOP is fortunate to have an amazing team – each one of YDOP’s players. They’re all talented, innovative and positive people. I’m thrilled to have each of my irreplaceable members serving our clients at YDOP. Every day I go home, proud as can be of the amazing work I see coming out of our agency. I’m not just saying that – I really mean it.
Welch describes top people and the personality traits found in them. They have generous spirits, not envious or negative, and filled with energy. They love to see other people grow and participate in that as possible. Welch’s description made me think of our group around the meeting table doing just that: helping each other become more knowledgeable and inspired. That’s what we do for one another on resource Friday. Another key take-away from Welch is his emphasis on candor. Unless a company is brutally honest with itself, it won’t differentiate (the word that makes Jack’s approach controversial) between it’s top 20% employees, it’s necessary 70%, and the 10% which need to be fired or reassigned internally.
Waving the checkered flag
Astrid Salim, Creative Director
Today I showed the team a website called “Which Loads Faster?” This website compares the load speed of any two websites you want. When you arrive on this website, you can choose to compare some of the big-brand websites (like Google vs. Bing) or you can enter your choice of two websites. Whichloadsfaster.com then will show you the load speed of each website. Furthermore, if you click “more”, you can analyze each page in details. Whichloadsfaster.com can be very helpful to show you what it is that makes your page load slowly or what you can improve. The website itself is very user-friendly and very easy to use. So check it out!
SEO vs PPC: Apples and … slightly different apples
Jeff Burkholder, Engineer/Analyst
I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with infographics. I love how they can more easily illustrate a complex bit of statistical math and reasoning…but I hate the way that they throw out a lot of the subtlety of those original metrics in favor of being puffed-up and flashy. I believe there’s a relationship between the rise in their use throughout popular culture and the fall of good journalism; but, I digress. Reason I brought that up is because I shared an infographic with the team today, one that shows the relative strength and usefulness of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) versus Pay-Per-Click Advertising (PPC). Among the more interesting statistics it pulls out are:
- When someone is searching for something (as opposed to buying), they are most likely (42%) to click on the top-ranked organic result. Compare that with 23% clicking on a PPC link, or 8% clicking on the second-ranked SEO result.
- 62% of searchers click on a result on the first page. 23% click on a result on one of the following pages. 15% try a different search or search engine.
- According to Nielsen.com, there were 10.5 billion searches in July 2009 from people in the United States alone. This is up by about 106% from where things were in December 2005 (5.1 billion).
Overall, it shows that SEO usually has more of an impact and a better ROI than PPC, but with the increased prominence of PPC results in search engine results, one must not ignore them.