I first spoke with Erik Ober, CEO of Booshaka, in 2010 because his startup, which started as a search engine for Facebook, had caught my interest. I expressed that while it was great to find out about what people were publicly saying about Samsung on Facebook, it would be great to also know specifics about the engagement in our Samsung USA Facebook page. I really wanted to discover who Samsung USA’s “top fans” were.

Today, Booshaka ranks Facebook pages based on engagement and, as I had hoped, Booshaka identifies your “top fans” and ranks them in a nice leaderboard. You can see Samsung USA’s “Top Fans” on a tab on our Facebook page, and find more details on the Booshaka page for Samsung USA.
Read my interview with Erik below to learn more about the startup, how “Top Fans” works, and where his team is headed.

1. Who is behind Booshaka and what does your “Do the Impossible” tagline mean?

Booshaka is backed by a proven leadership and advisory team with 100+ collective years in social applications, data analysis, algorithms and advertising. Our mission is to help brands and businesses drive engagement and advocacy on Facebook.

From the start, we wanted to create big, meaningful company.  ”Do the impossible” is more of a motto than a tagline and its derived from the Urban dictionary meaning of “Booshaka.” Since naming the company, we’ve been told that all the biggest internet domains have two “O”s in them — Facebook, Google, and Yahoo :)

2. While the site initially started as a way to search on Facebook pages, it is now focused on Facebook Leaderboards based on engagement. Tell me more about this evolution.

The first few iterations of the product were experimental and designed to test how the market would respond to innovations built on Facebook’s Graph APIs.  In August 2010, we launched a version of the site which showed what was trending in different topical categories (ie Sports, Movies, Politics, etc) on Facebook.  We received some great organic press for the app and hundreds of developers and companies reached out to see how they might be able to leverage our technology.

After several months of customer development, we learned two things:

a. Marketers were overwhelmed with the amount of social data and interactions on Facebook and didn’t know how to take advantage of it.

b. Everyone was measuring the success of their Facebook Page(s) in terms of total number of fans / likes.

From our perspective, social media is all about how active your community is, how engaged your customers are, and how much they talk about your brand or business. At that point, we set out to develop technology solutions for the next frontier of social marketing — customer engagement and advocacy.

According to recent eMarketer research, Facebook is the number one seller of display ads in the US. eMarketer expects Facebook to generate $2.19 billion in display advertising revenue this year.

How much is expected for Yahoo? $1.62 billion.

And what about Google? Only $1.15 billion.

We all know that if we want to place text ads on a website or blog, AdSense is the first place to go for revenue. AdSense is great because it delivers ads based on the website hosting the ad. But AdSense doesn’t seem to really know much, if at all, about the audience viewing the ads.

So what about display ads? And what about targeted, relevant display ads?

Everyone talks about targeted and relevant advertising, but no one has been able to deliver this in the way that Facebook can within Facebook.com.

It must be only a matter of time before Facebook decides to add advertisements to the Open Graph.

We already see “Like” buttons everywhere and companies like Amazon, CNN, Levi’s and Huffington Post have done some interesting personalization-like implementations on their sites.

Anyone can add a Facebook plugin in a matter of minutes.

So why not Facebook ads all over the web? Why not a FacebookSense of sorts that would allow both large and small sites to deliver targeted and relevant ads to Facebook users?

Think about. You’re connected to Facebook and happen to stroll away from Facebook for 5 minutes and end up on a sports blog. And let’s say you’re a young woman who recently got engaged. Facebook knows you’re engaged and you’re a young woman who likes to run so maybe it would show you a wedding dress ad and a Nike Women Sponsored Story. It might not be perfect because Facebook wouldn’t know whether you’ve bought that wedding dress yet but it would be a better experience than seeing an ad about muscle gain next to an ad for a questionable dating site, right?

And what about visitors who are not on Facebook or don’t feel like connecting to Facebook at that time? Well, Facebook could deliver ads based on the content of the site itself just as Google AdSense does.

My guess is that a Facebook AdSense coming and it’s coming before 2012. Why before 2012? Well, because 2012 is the alleged IPO year. Oh, and also because 2012 might be the end of the world. And Facebook doesn’t have time to wait until the end of the world.

Michael Jaindl is the VP of Client Services for Buddy Media, a Facebook management system that has been making a lot of news lately. The Buddy Media Platform allows brands, including Samsung (check out our Samsung USA page), to create engaging Facebook tabs, monitor the wall, schedule posts, and more.

b) Motivate your fans to share content:
Brands and agencies need to create interesting content that fans are motivated to share. Facebook users have become very savvy and they realize that there is a negative impact to spamming their network. They can receive a negative comment, be hidden, or worst yet defriended. Just as people understand that forwarding on an email chain letter is spammy they get that sharing boring content can hurt their social cred. Just because there is a share button on a piece of content doesn’t mean that anyone will actually share it. It’s important to create compelling content that your fans are motivated to share. (more…)

Brandon Prebynski is an Emerging / Social Media Strategist at FKQ Advertising and Marketing and the host of a live USTREAM show called Web Trends. Brandon is one of the first people I “met” on Twitter; you can follow him @Prebynski.

Brandon and I have a panel proposal with Sarah Austin, Joel Cheesman, Christopher Kahle and Ryan Paugh for SXSW 2011 so please vote for us at http://bit.ly/howtogetajob before August 27th, 2010!

Listen to this entire episode of “The Social Nerdia Show!” with Brandon Prebynski on the Flash player below. You can also subscribe on iTunes, stream from your phone on Stitcher, and listen to upcoming shows LIVE on blogtalkradio.

Brandon recently joined FKQ so I asked him about his new role as a strategist. “It’s been great because within a set of guidelines I’ve been able to shape what the position is,” Brandon told me. He is helping clients create long-term strategies around marketing, customer service and product development.

He’s also been working on tracking, analysis and metrics. “We have this big myth out there that it’s really difficult to measure social media and there are many who say you can’t measure the results especially when it comes back to revenue, and that you can only look at trends over time, but frankly with the correct tools implemented correctly, you can sometimes measure it directly.” (more…)

Web analytics are cool. If you agree with that statement, there’s a good change you’ve spent some time reading Occam’s Razor, the fascinating blog about web analytics by Avinash Kaushik (author of Web Analytics 2.0 and Web Analytics: An Hour A Day).

If you don’t know who Avinash is then just Google “Web Analytics” and you’ll surely find out who he is. I’ve personally  learnt much from his thought-provoking and action-oriented writings, and I’m sure you will too. Below is an interview about some of the hot topics in web analytics today.

1. Tools like Woopra have introduced us to real-time analytics. Is real-time the future of analytics? Why are we not there yet?

There is more and more real-time data available. Google Analytics is updated, officially, every hour. Then there are cool tools like Chartbeat, etc. My personal perspective on real time analytics is…. if you can’t take real-time action then why do you want real time data?

In 99% of the cases real-time data is not actionable (it is not statistically significant and people jump the gun on the wrong signals), and companies (big or small) can’t actually take any action even if there is an actionable signal (change campaigns, landing pages, stop emails from going out or whatever). Then why do you want the data?

Real-time data becomes an excuse to stare at computer screens or do data puking. It keeps people from doing thoughtful analysis and looking at non-tactical things (and adding value to their employer).

If your organization meets these two rules: a) You have enough traffic / responses on your site to get statistically significant data AND b) You have a capacity to change things (take action), you should seek out real time data and you should make use of it. If you don’t meet the two rules take a long hard look at if you are engaging in any activity that is adding to your company’s bottom-line when you tap into real time data.

2. In 2007, you wrote a post  about “engagement” often being an “excuse,” not a metric. Now that we can measure things like comments, Facebook likes, ReTweets, check-ins, etc., what are your thoughts about the importance of measuring engagement?

My point of view on engagement is simple: What the heck does it actually mean? The answer is? Everything to everyone. Hence my minor displeasure at that metric. I believe in clarity of communication and a razor sharp focus on solving specific problems. Hence precise measurements, and naming metrics for clarity.

Engagement means nothing, hence does not drive action. (more…)

Have you ever wanted to see who is on your web site at any given time? I’m not talking about the number of page views that your web site got this month. I’m talking about now, right now. Well, Woopra might be able to help.

Last night, on The Social Nerdia Show! live podcast’s 27th episode, I had a conversation with John Pozadzides, the CEO of iFusion Labs, the parent company of Woopra, an innovative web analytics application that lets you see who your visitors are and what they are doing, in real-time.

You can listen to the entire conversation with John about blogging, analytics, marketing, social media, and much more, on the Flash player below. You can also subscribe to all our shows on iTunes, stream it from a mobile phone on Stitcher, and listen to it LIVE on Thursday nights on blogtalkradio.

Enter Woopra

Woopra makes me very excited about the future of real-time because real-time is how the web should be. It’s what the web needs to be. I’ve done my share of waiting, refreshing, and reloading, and if 2010 is not the year for the real-time web to explode and break out of the tech bubble and into the mainstream, then I’m going to hang out in real-time in real-life with actual friends under the real-time sky drinking some real-time water. So take note Google. And take note everybody else. Anyone creating online products and services has a bit to learn from the accomplishments of the FriendFeeds, FourSquares, Radian6s, and Woopras of the world.

I first heard about John P. and Woopra at WordCamp Dallas. I must admit that I did not realize what Woopra was at first. The words “live” and “real-time” simply did not sink in. But once installed, I was able to see who was visting socialnerdia.com at that point. I was used to getting some of this info from Google, but Google Analytics always provided it a day too late. Woopra is about the now, and that adds a whole new layer of meaning to how we measure the web. (more…)