I concluded that there was about a 14% click through from “Suggest a Friend” to actually becoming a “Fan”.

The ultimate goal to have people being Fans of these Pages is to get them to the website. And having a poke around Google Analytics shows that there is a significant bump in pageviews and visitors after just 1 evangelist’s efforts to spread the word.

I would love to compare what “suggestion” vs. Facebook Ads conversion rate is and see if we can measure ROI. See if I can harass Mike to do me a favour!

The great thing about public holidays is that it gives everyone a conversation topic, “so what’d you get up to yesterday?!” and “gosh it was hot wasn’t it?!” and more importantly — “do kiwis celebrate Australia day?!”

The 3 founders of GradConnection are from a special corner of Australia we call, New Zealand.

Jots from my notepad.

• fire alarms go off, its a great excuse to have coffee
• twitter and facebook images go live — i rendered them in photoshop for the guys, and they’re delighted with it, and i’m stoked!
• love doing creative work, its a short term project, and you see immediate change
• had a look at analytics, rounded up a good set of articles the boys to repost on their social media attempts – gave me access so i can do it myself!
• did some researched about social media and consumer trends and behaviour, decided to do my own testing.
  [you'll see later]
• Dave: sales is about relationships, they’ll buy off you if they like you — and you don’t seem like some cowboy.
• it’s like an interview too, important to dress to their standards

Personalising a Facebook Page ain’t that hard!

So I’ve fixed up GradConnection’s Facebook page. Its a bit cosmetics, but the landing page now hits “Boxes” which show off two pretty cool FBML static apps with pretty heavy graphics to engage first time viewers. In addition, on Wall – put the Youtube link and the Twitter link there.

All this…

• Took me 10 minutes to “learn” FBML.
• Took me 1 hour to make the images.
• Took me 1 minutes to show it to the boys.

I have no idea why people are touting some of the other pages as the industry standard they want to achieve. Its (a) not hard, and (b) -ugh-.

Also @GradConnection is now from my Photoshop!

Marketing research – guerrilla style

So apparently an average Facebook user spends 55 minutes on “fb” a day, has 130 friends and only fans 2 pages a month. I distilled a lot of great research from Social Media Examiner, give it a read if you’re interested in the mechanism of consumer behaviour on social media!

I did my own test. I promoted GradConnection’s Facebook page to groups of my friends — through Facebook’s “Suggest to Friends” — that I thought would benefit from the service, i.e. soon to be graduates (this is not just meaningless promo!).

So I sent out to (some of these users overlap) the following users:

• 27 UTS
• 302 UNSW
• 102 USYD
• 12 Macq
• 12 James Ruse
• 7 Pymbles Ladies College
• 33 Sydney Grammar

There was no methodology behind it. I just chose whichever network had a lot of people, and so I didn’t have to go through each individual and click their name (o Facebook functionality, still a bit lagging!).

It was roughly 400 people that I sent a suggestion to.

GradConnection’s facebook page had 534 page at 4PM on Wed 27 Jan 2010.

At time of writing 12:10AM Fri 29 Jan 2010 – 604 fans.

A very quick headcount shows that 57 GradConnection’s fans are my friends.

That’s roughly, a 14% click through rate. Compared with (anecdotally) Facebook ads, which even when targeted to regions/demographics — oh you holy grail of you centralised user base — have a click through rate of about 0.04%.  [Thanks sis for the correction, I'm still maths retarded].

Why?!

WHY!

Because personal recommendation may be better than just faceless advertising. There is still no doubt that word of mouth is the most effective form of promotions. But how do you inspire evangelists to personally recommend your product/page to their friends?!

Another contributing factor could be because the demographic of the people I was targeting and the students I know. Most of them are career orientated and are willing to respond to attempts at conversation between corporations and students (I bet a lot of these students are also fans of the Ernst & Young and Deloitte pages). Either that — or as I would like to believe (and a master of self delusion I am) — my friends regard me as a valuable source of information.

And while I do repost things that are quality — job opportunities and career-enhancing posts — I also post a lot of Achmed the Dead Terrorist. Silence. I KILL YOU!!

NEVERTHELESS I think a 10% increase in fans in 52 hours is a pretty impressive.

SNOWBALL!

I think there’s a significant snowballing effect. While users who receive the suggestion may reject it initially, once their friends start fanning it, they might be interested in why they chose to fan it. Put it infront of your user once, they’ll forget it. Again, they might take note again. Third time, they might actually look at it! I’ve been keeping an eye on my social feed (and while Facebook aggregates news stories dependent on what I find engaging…) I saw the story that “X and Y number of friends became fans of GradConnection” consistently on my wall throughout the day.

And while I don’t want to take credit for the other 14 new fans – I think there’s a chance it may be a 2nd degree (therefore indirect) relation to me; they saw their friends fan it – and they checked it out.

Google Analytics and Facebook Insights is a bit laggy in its reporting, but when they do get it up — I think I might note down the performance!

So?

WHAT DOES THIS PROVE?

1. targeted marketing WORKS! you’ll have a much better ROI on people who are interested in your message.
2. social media, if grown organically – is great engagement.
3. people are mobile on Facebook – so fickle are the GenY!

Got a bit ahead of myself.

Lets start with day 0. The “interview”.

I found out about GradConnection after doing a few graduate searches. As part of BSOC, I wanted to make myself aware of when the grad offers come out in 2010. And I landed on GradConnection.

Went on the forums, found a post somewhere that they were looking for an intern. So I picked up the phone, gave Dave a call – told him a bit about myself, how I thought the website was very cool and 2.0 – and he said, come have a coffee! And we’ll talk about what interests me, and where we can take it.

Day or two later, I’m early for my 10AM coffee. The book says I should be early for all interviews. And I had prepared myself for the standard interview questions, as well as a few topics we could discuss that’s been trending in the social media landscape recently.

So it’s 9:45AM and I’m in the CBD, fiercely kicking myself for not writing down on a piece of paper the phone number, the building number, the building floor — all the rookie errors that I’ve read in the book a thousand times. But I was certain I had the building right — so I lucked it, went in, punched the elevator AND PRESTO!

I was there, in the right place.

After a few quick intros, a few handshakes, Dave and Mike took me to a really nice little coffee shop down the road.

We spent a good 40 minutes talking about what I’m up to, what I’m interested in, and where I could learn from these startup kids! It was a nice conversation and they seemed happy to take me on for a flexible work experience engagement.

If you’ve read day#1 – you’ll know I’m kicking caffeine. I also had orange juice that day.

So recently I’ve started some work experience at GradConnection and it’s been a really good environment to learn some things about digital. And I now have a pretty good indication of where I want to go after I graduate.

That is to say, within the next five years – see what kind of learning and growing environment I can find in a graduate position at a corporation — maybe move sideways a bit. Maybe in my spare time, continue to work with entrepreneurs — maybe not startups, maybe within corporations (internal entrepreneurs, I think Kawasaki calls them). Ideal situation. On my way to be 27. And I got this from talking to @mikecasey, @davejenkins and @danpurchas.

The guys say that being a B2B business, it’s been invaluable to learn how corporate governance works. Dave often says that it’s a bitch getting into the budget, but once you’re in – its gold.

And working in Westpac’s grad program over in New Zealand has allowed them to understand things from the other side’s perspective. I think I’m keen to get into a grad program.

Since last year, I’ve been keeping notepads with me whereever I go. So I can jot down notes and try not to forget things that I need to do. And here’s what I’ve been jotting down on my first day.

• life as a startup is not glam – but function not form
• coffee is an addiction
  [I'm kicking caffeine until I'm back at uni, when I need it most]
• drinking out of a straw in conversation is harder than it looks, and messier
  [so I'm kicking caffeine and Dave buys me juice... was having conversation with Dan and Dave, big orange juice, with a straw - hard task, gets everywhere!].
• build, test, grow; build upon old — imperfect way, but progress is workable. the system might not be perfect, and it’s held together with masking tape, but rewriting the whole thing is counter intuitive as short term goal
• its hard to convince the old school of the bleeding obvious
• mike’s really good at foosball

Hey

i was wondering if unsw has many hot chicks cause iv been hearing usyd has soe impressive ones. But not sure about unsw in comapriso for the comerce faculty

tallkid34

Fuck, this question never ever seems to actually go away…

The answer is subjective… Being as that is the case, here is a little questionaire to gauge whether hot girls (in your perception) exist at UNSW.

1) Are you Asian?

Yes = Yes, there will be hot ‘Asian’ girls
No = No, there will probably be not many hot girls as Asians are the majority at UNSW
No but likes Asians = Yes, there will hot ‘Asian’ girls and no, you will probably have little chance with most of them

2) Which faculty will you be in?

Commerce = Hot asian girls
Law = Hot asian/caucasian girls
Engineering = Sausagefest
Medicine = Hot asian/caucasian girls
Arts = Hot caucasian girls
Built Environment = Sausagefest

Use this as a guide and then confirm for yourself by going to UNSW o-week for further clarification.

So, what? Well, Dickens, Alcott, and Doyle all wrote during times of great social and economic turmoil. It’s not for nothing that Dickens’ name has become synonymous with bone-chilling poverty, and Alcott published her most popular work during the Reconstruction Era. By contrast, Doyle’s Holmes period was almost peaceful, except that it was teetering on the edge of world war and revolution. By that kind of measuring stick, it’s no surprise that Star Trek and Star Wars would essentially create their own religions after the turmoil that was the 1970s and 1980s. Boil that all right down to this decade, or even to this very year, when fandom seems to have reached a fever pitch of obsession. People need to obsess and talk about movies, books, comics, and video games like they never have before. Now they have a global platform from which to do so. A post on a message board can be read by thousands. A comment left on an Internet article can be read by millions. Facebook and Twitter let you get up close and personal in ways that Dickens and Alcott fans only dreamed of.

And why? Because the world is bleak. It isn’t because fans have nothing else to worry about, but because they have too much eating at them. They need to purge. They need to build up and tear down something that doesn’t matter because too much in their lives does. So, it’s Avatar. Transformers. James Bond. They are sacred cows precisely because they really aren’t all that holy. By allowing drama to create drama, you can engage in that ancient catharsis Aristotle nailed all those thousands of years ago only on a scale unimagined by any ancient Greek – and one that’s needed desperately by your average geek.

by Elisabeth Rappe, “The Geek Beat: Why We Do What We Do” Cinematical

Microsoft Office, Version Bland.0

http://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/archives/microsoft_office_version_bland0.php

Microsoft Office, Version Bland.0

I’m trying not to hate you, Microsoft Office shortcut links. Redesign – why why why why?!

With Office 2010 we’ve unveiled a new Office brand system. The logo has evolved, moving from the original four colors that signified Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook to a mark that fully embraces the Office orange brand. The logo also completes the evolution from the puzzle pieces last seen in Office XP to a mark that conveys energy, impact, and connection.
Office 2010: Visuals and Branding by the Microsoft Office 2010 Engineering blog

The new icon set, on the other hand is a mess.

Unilever