In the long-term Facebook can’t be where brands ‘live’ online. Making Facebook the centre of gravity for FMCG brands opens up a number of risks for brand owners. We need to put our thinking caps on and consider a new future for brand websites in the marketing mix.

Brands which are too reliant on social media for digital marketing are giving away data and relationships in a way they may later regret.  But social platforms do offer a new set of tools which allow consumer brands to revisit the old problem of how to create value out of digital. FMCG brands need to consider that the real value of digital is as an ‘ask’ rather than ‘tell’ medium. Success rests on the two disciplines of research and marketing learning from each other, and evolving their practices.

Read the full post published on the econsultancy website: What should FMCG brands do with their websites?

Original post by former Foolproofer Dan Sorvik.

So, I jumped on board the Google+ train. I filled out my profile, added some people to circles but now what? What can Google+ (G+) offer that other networks (namely Facebook) don’t?

Here’s my interpretation of where G+ currently compares to other social networks in some key categories:

It’s been a fascinating week for us looking at the response to our Peer Index list: UX500. The list has so far attracted over 9,000 visits – and plenty of lively comment out in the Twittersphere.

Today we launch the ‘UX Power 500 Index’, a list of user experience opinion leaders from around the world, ranked by their social influence.

We hope it will be a useful resource. It should give you a view about who’s who in the field. It might also give you ideas about people to follow, befriend and spark up a conversation with.

I arrived back to the UK after attending the UPA 2011 conference in Atlanta last week, where Dan Sorvik and I gave a talk about using social networks for research and design. As part of our presentation, we shared the results of the UX Social Quiz that we ran on Facebook last month.

Social media has the potential to be a hugely useful resource for the user experience (UX) community but so far it has been largely untapped for research and design purposes. It’s time we used it as a tool to engage users in meaningful, collaborative conversations.

The purchase of Tweetdeck by Twitter is not really a surprise. While there’s any number of Twitter clients out there vacuuming up the Twitter API, only a couple of them are likely to stick around any longer than a floating whale – and one of those will be Tweetdeck.

The news that Aviva are to trial a ‘positive comments only’ feedback filtering service that links into social media raises some interesting debate about ‘authenticity’ and the responsibility that Brands need to demonstrate if they want to participate in our social networks.

With the launch of Facebook Deals, the social networking giant is about to make Advertising managers of all of us (and potentially at the same time transform the marketing industry for ever).

Author: Graham Gannon

A report recently released from technology research and advisory company Gartner predicts that by 2015, ten percent of our online friends will be robots. Sadly they won’t be the clumsy 1960’s sci-fi robots we were promised growing up. Instead, we will be friends with software ‘bots’ that interact “with communities of users in a manner personalized to each individual.”