Can you briefly describe, for those listening to the podcast, your role and your responsibilities at Facebook?

Transcription

1 The Audience Measurement Event Speaker s Spotlight Series Featured Speaker: Fred Leach, Facebook Interviewer: Joel Rubinson, President, Rubinson Partners Can you briefly describe, for those listening to the podcast, your role and your responsibilities at Facebook? Fred: Thanks for having me. Nice to meet your virtually, as well. I lead the Partner Measurement Group here at Facebook. What we are is a group that is focused on working with top clients that Facebook has and really helping them capture and measure all of the value that they are creating with their marketing through Facebook. Obviously, the growth of Facebook has really been incredible. But, there might be someone who might be as familiar with the importance of Facebook as they should be. Could you share a few stats on how large Facebook has become that would really grab any marketer s attention? Fred: We just released an update on our global monthly active users. We are now just over 900 million people monthly active on Facebook. Last fall at our F8 Developer s Conference we announced a pretty interesting stat. For the first time we had 500 million people on the site on a single day. Pretty exciting to have half a billion people using our service on a single day. Those are incredible stats. Just to play back some pushback that you ll occasionally read in the press, some marketers who may be are naysayers will say that people are not so willing to welcome brands into their world in Facebook. What would your response be to that? Fred: We have lots of evidence that shows that people really want brands in their lives and they use brands to describe themselves. So, 1 The Audience Measurement Event Speaker Spotlight Series

2 we see people connecting to lots and lots of pages on Facebook every single day. It s about 100 million people connecting to a page on a given day. I think the other thing here is that a lot of brands are on Facebook. We ve got just over 2.5 million websites that are integrating with Facebook. So, users are really connecting with lots of different things and they really want a rich social world. Brands are part of that rich social world. Did you say that brands are integrating their own media presence with their Facebook page? Fred: Yes. We have various social plug ins, various things that marketers can integrate on their own websites. We ve got more than 2.5 million sites that have integrated with Facebook. Oh, I see. That suggests that, over time, marketers are getting more and more sophisticated at leveraging all the ways in which they can connect their marketing efforts and goals to their Facebook presence. Can you describe briefly how you d paint the timeline of how marketers have evolved in their use of Facebook? Fred: Definitely. I think initially marketers really thought just to build up their fan bases on Facebook and so they were focused on building lots of connections. Lots of people liking their brands and they are really evolving more into engaging their fans and influencing them to think about new things about their brand to represent their brands in a new way. A lot of them have really focused on the changing way in which they have to communicate with social media, which is to say that where there used to be a standard one-to-many messaging strategy, now brands are having conversations with people who really like them and they learning from those conversations. So, they are doing things differently based on those conversations and taking marketing in a different direction or creating a new product based on input from fans. So, we are really seeing --- whereas it used to be that it was just about counting likes and getting people connected, 2 The Audience Measurement Event Speaker Spotlight Series

3 marketers are really evolving into having more of that two-way dialogue with their customers. What would be the one telltale sign that you would point to if you were analyzing two marketers, one who is still in the old model and one who has evolved in this more progressive way? What would be the one thing that they are doing on Facebook that would be a signal to you that those guys really get it? Fred: I think one of the things that really sets the great marketers apart is that they are not just talking about their brand. They are finding a voice for their brand. So, they are talking about things on which their brand has what you might call standing --- on which their brand is credible. So, they are really engaging in a more authentic conversation. They are not just promoting their brand. They are really finding that voice that is adding real legitimate social value out in the world and, in particular, with those people that they are having conversations with. I see. That really helps us to differentiate. Can you give us the title of what you are going to be talking about at the IIR Conference and is that part of the theme that you are going to be touching on? What will you be emphasizing when you speak at the IIR Audience Measurement Event? Fred: The title of my presentation is: Measuring Paid, Earned and Social from Reach to ROI. I ll be talking about some of the basic things that we think are really important to measure on Facebook, starting with reach and then driving down into talking about how we are actually trying to measure ROI. When I say ROI, we are talking about not just the return online or what people are doing in the online space, but how what marketers are doing online is actually affecting behavior offline and tying all of that together. So, when you talk about reach, in the traditional media world (of course, like with TV) you have GRPs and you can measure 3 The Audience Measurement Event Speaker Spotlight Series

4 reach and frequency as a decomposition of GRPs. And then the other traditional medias have analogies like that. But how should a marketer measure the reach that they could achieve through Facebook? How should they be working with Facebook to maximize the reach of their brand? Fred: There are a couple of different ways. First, I ll focus on measuring paid media. We really believe that online needs to have the same measurement that other media have; that TV has and print. So, we ve actually worked with Nielsen to help them create a product called: Neilson OCR. OCR stands for Online Campaign Rating. It s able to measure GRPs just like TV for any advertising campaign across the Internet. So, the reports that you get show the GRPs that were achieved, it shows how accurate the impressions were in terms of what percentage of them reached the target audience and has that GRP calculation that you can directly compare to television. So, we think it is really important that marketers make sure that they are including this kind of measurement on all of their paid media, for sure. There is another way to measure reach on Facebook and that s using our Page Insights Tool. The Page Insights Tool splits reach up into three different components. On the one hand you have the paid component and then on the other hand you have what we call organic reach, as well as viral reach. Organic reach is the reach that a brand gets just through its page publishing; just through impressions going out into the newsfeed. Then the viral piece is when, based how users interact with that content and create new stories (something like: Fred commented on a post on a particular movie that my friends then see ), that s what we call viral reach. You can actually look at the viral reach and organic reach for every single post that you do on Facebook. Then we also calculate it out for you in that Page Insights product, the total reach that you are achieving. Those are the two ways that we think is really important to focus on reach. One is to make sure that you have that standard of measurement that you can compare to other media, but then focusing on some of these unique things about Facebook, as well. 4 The Audience Measurement Event Speaker Spotlight Series

5 So, those statistics that you referred to, those are available to the page administrators for a given brand, for example? Fred: Yes. That is correct. Ok, so it s not like if I have no relationship to Starbucks, I couldn t go to the Starbuck s page and see those numbers? Fred: That s correct. Only people who are administrators to the Starbucks page would have access to those specific numbers. I mentioned Starbucks because they are obviously one of the most successful brands on Facebook in terms of their presence and the various measures that we ve been talking about. So, the measures that you were just referring to, how would a marketer use them to monitor their progress and then somehow leverage that to do even better? Fred: I think on the paid side with OCR, all marketers have a target audience that they re trying to hit and when you get those GRP reports and see those GRPs, the reach that you re getting within those target groups; really optimizing and focusing on where you re actually getting the most accuracy for your dollar. So, I think that s one thing that the marketers can do that s fairly straightforward. I think the other thing that marketers can do is to test out different ideas, test out different messages through their Facebook page and see which of those messages is resonating the most, focusing on which one is getting the most viral reach. Viral reach is really dependent upon users having a positive evaluation of the content that you re putting out there. So, as you see certain posts go more viral than others, I would advise marketers to be optimizing for that piece because it s generating more value for them. 5 The Audience Measurement Event Speaker Spotlight Series

6 So, in a way, it s really a real-time messaging test market that is just a live, naturally occurring experiment and you can just keep doing better and better as you see what type of messages are more viral than others. Fred: Definitely. And you can even use some of the geo-targeting capabilities within the Page Publishing Platform to do some relatively clean experimentation to see what works and what doesn t. Are there any generalizations yet on what kinds of messages do work better? Or is it very particular brand-by-brand? Fred: It definitely does vary brand-by-brand. There are a couple of things that definitely work. One is really nice, rich photos to have the ability to display beautiful photos on Facebook. We see that users generally like cool photography or great images from brands. And they like videos, as well. The other thing is back to what I mentioned earlier about brands finding their voice and talking not just about themselves, but about topics in which they have credibility. We see that posts that are centered around things that a brand is credible on get more people to share them. They tend to have more of that viral reach. The last piece I would say that is related to that, brands that are talking about what is relevant right now, what s actually happening in the world today in a way that works for them or is consistent with their brands, that s another thing that people really like and it resonates. It s just a more natural and authentic way of communicating. That s really interesting. So, in a way a brand can almost test what it really stands for in the minds of consumers who pretty much like the brand already, but don t necessarily associate all cultural values with that brand because the brand could put out messages on a particular topic and the people who have liked the page just don t do much with it. 6 The Audience Measurement Event Speaker Spotlight Series

7 And yet another brand could put out messages on that same topic and those fans do share that. So, really, you can get to the essence of your brand by seeing what gets shared and what doesn t get shared. Am I reading that correctly? Fred: Yes, definitely. And I think marketers are pretty sophisticated in understanding or at least having a really strong idea of what their brand stands for. So, you might imagine a hybrid vehicle page might post about things about the environment and that their brand is standing for clean energy or something like that. Those are definitely the kinds of things that users expect from brands and it s a great way for brands to get a sense for how well they re doing. That s great. I just have one final question. Can you complete the following sentence for those listening to the podcast: Facebook can greatly improve your marketing ROI if you.. Fred: I would say if you put social at the core. What I mean by that is that Facebook is a great tool to connect to everything that you re doing to make sure that it s in line and consistent with all the great stuff you re doing on other mediums on TV, on the radio and in print advertising and on the other websites, as well. So, really putting that social piece in and thinking about how what else you re doing is going to work in the social environment. That s where we are really seeing marketers having successes, when they put social at the core. That s great. In the minute or two that we have left, are there any other pieces of advice you want listeners to hear? Fred: I think the big thing on Facebook is really thinking about how many people you re reaching and just the impression that you re having on them by putting out messages. What is the value of that impression because people are consuming a lot of content and we often see marketers just focus on engagement, how many people are clicking on this. The way that people consume Facebook is sort of like a newspaper. They are reading a lot of stuff. So, really focus on 7 The Audience Measurement Event Speaker Spotlight Series

8 maximizing the value of that impression so that you re making sure that you re focusing on influencing all of the people who are going to be exposed to what you re doing. You ll have the best results if you do that. That s great advice from someone on the inside who would know! 8 The Audience Measurement Event Speaker Spotlight Series