Adapting to changing social media

Not much is needed to win a Nook eBook Reader from the Compton Union Building at WSU. The main requirements are simple enough: Log onto Facebook, add the CUB as one of your fanpages and leave a comment on it. Of course, only one of these digital book readers is to be awarded and the chances aren’t necessarily promising. But there still remains a draw for visitors of the page powerful enough to keep wall posts rolling in.

With new social media, advertisers are looking to develop new strategies of bringing attention to their product.

While the CUB may be doing just that, having a thriving base of commenting fans, many posts on the page’s wall feature content alluding to exclusive interest in winning prizes. From Monday, Apr. 19 to the evening of Wednesday, Apr. 21, 18 percent of the wallposts either mentioned an iPad or eNook, or were requesting to be chosen as the winner of the next competition.

These new strategies are not new–enticement to buy products, with the prospect of give-aways, has been common even to Internet Websites. Olive Garden’s Win a Culinary Tour of Italy, Travel Channel’s Trip a Month Sweepstakes, and T-Mobile’s El Llamado del Futbol Sweepstakes are all devout employers of this strategy. But now, this advertising method is being brought right into the social circles of the millions of Facebook members.

The future of Facebook

Facebook announced on Wednesday at the company’s annual F8 developer’s conference in San Francisco that changes to popular social networking site will incorporate a series of “social graphing” tools.

These tools are aimed at widening the sphere and reach of an individual’s content preferences. An example provided in the conference is creating more “Like” button tools on other site, like iMDB.com, which would, in the case of a user “liking” a piece of content such as a particular movie, automatically update the user’s Facebook favorite movies list. Individuals would be able to move their preferences, after accepting agreements to do so, between their preferred Websites they visit.

Phil McGuire, a network engineer for Seattle-based Spectrum Networks, said the move by Facebook is a step forward.

“It's very exciting to see the web being used in its intended form,” McGuire said. “Tim Berners Lee, often considered the Father of the Internet, has envisioned a linked open data web from day one. I think this would be a great step toward seeing that,” he said.

H&R Block strategy

Jason Falls, whose blog post on SocialMediaExplorer.com about H&R Block in 2008 refer to a similar theme, seemed to inadvertently forecast the current trend in social media advertising.

In Fall’s blog post, he noted the effective use of the tax company’s Twitter account to befriend him and engage in “human” dialogue. Falls continued, saying that:

“As it turns out, H&R Block not only gets the outreach portion of it, but has figured out a way to be 100-percent, totally marketing/advertising to people using social media tools and somehow pull it off. No, I wasn’t sure if it was possible, but I’ll be damned if I don’t like this campaign.”

Falls attributed the company’s ability to “pull it off” with using “honest/transparent, human, fun and engaging” strategy.

Criticism of CUB strategy

Some students believe the strategy used by the CUB’s fanpage admins is bringing in more visitors, but less valuable content.

“A lot of the comments mean nothing,” said Jared Johnson, a student employee of the CUB. “I don’t know if they’re getting the result they’re looking for,” Johnson said. “There is no guarantee that they [students] are looking at your content,” he added.

However, just like the H&R Block example, the admins of the Compton Union Building are also using a similar means of connecting with students outside of using the give-away method.

CUB strategy and the H&R Block method

Admins of the page frequently reply to the posts, even a few exclusively focused on winning the give-aways.

Replies are polite and “human,” ranging from answering questions about the Murrow Symposium that was hosted in the facility, to a simple “We had a good time too ;)” in reply to a comment that read “I had a good time chilling in you.”

Despite criticism, the CUB is building a base from which to gather more responses from students, both valuable and less so. In bigger terms, though, they are adapting to a time of constantly changing social networking.