Welcome to My Blog

Over the past couple of months, you may have heard some things about Facebook’s metrics.

There was talk of numbers — lots of them. Things were overestimated. Others were underestimated. People were kind of upset. But mostly, they were confused. What the heck happened? How was Facebook going to respond? And at the end of the day, what did it mean for marketers? Breathe, and don’t panic — we’re here to answer all of that.But before we dive in, let’s make one thing clear — none of it is the end of the world. In fact, most of the issues have already been addressed and repaired; at this point, the most important item on our agenda is to clarify what’s actually going on.

What Happened?

It started with video

The drama began in September 2016, when Facebook revealed that there was a problem with its video viewership metrics — the average time that users spent watching videos was being largely overestimated.

Mathematically, Facebook wrote in a statement, that metric should have been the resulting figure from dividing the total time spent watching a video by the total number of people who played it. Instead, the total viewing time was divided by the number of times the video was watched for three seconds or more.

So, let’s say a video received a total viewing time of five hours, or 300 minutes, and it was watched by a total of 1,000 people, 700 of whom watched it for at least three seconds. The viewership metric should be 30%. Instead, Facebook was dividing those 300 minutes by 700, resulting in a larger metric of nearly 43%. And, says the Wall Street Journal [WSJ], that went on for nearly two years.

For a social media platform that boasts how effective its video tools are for marketers, the announcement was an embarrassment. The advertising world was especially unhappy about it — Publicis Media, an ad-buying agency, told its clients that Facebook indicated viewing time overestimates of up to 80%. There were calls for third-party metric verification protocols to be put in place, and while Facebook said that it fixed the error and would be looking into such improvements, the metric misfortune didn’t end there.

A bit of a bug

In fact, just yesterday, Facebook announced that it discovered a bug in its Pages Insights that’s been lurking since May. The summary displaying seven- or 28-day organic page reach was incorrectly added up as the sum of daily reach over that period. That means duplicate visitors were being counted in every instance, leading to a number that was 33% higher than it should have been for seven-day summaries, and 55% for the 28-day ones. Facebook clarified that this error would not impact paid ads.

Here’s how Facebook visually represented the error — the red circle indicates where the duplicate viewership would have appeared.

Source: Facebook

But you’ll notice that there are green circles in that image, too. Those indicate the insights that were unaffected by the bug — which was the “vast majority” of them — and includes the following measurements:

• All graphs
• Daily and historical reach
• Per-post reach
• Exported and API reach data
• All data on the Reach tab

What else was impacted?

In addition to the Page Insights, the bug really only impacted a total of four out of Facebook’s 220 measured metrics, according to WSJ. The remainder included:

More video miscalculations.

This time, the “video views at 100%” — which has been renamed to “video watches at 100%” — metric was impacted, thanks to a glitch that sometimes causes a video’s audio and visual components to be unsynced.

That means that even though the visual is played to completion, the audio may continue after the visual stops. But since about 85% of Facebook video is consumed without sound, viewers are likely to stop watching the video before this latent audio completes. As a result, “video watches at 100%” metrics might now increase by an estimated 35%.

Instant articles.

Here’s another case of Facebook’s overestimations. The average time spent reading Instant Articles — a method by which Facebook displays news articles at a rate 10X faster than a typical mobile web browser — was reported to be 7-8% higher than the actual length of time per article.

Referrals.

In Facebook’s Analytics for Apps dashboard, “referrals” are intended to measure the number of clicks on a post that were directed to an app or website. But it turns out that the “referrals” metric was counting more than that, and inaccurately also included clicks on the same post to view media, like photo or video. That led to an overestimate of referrals by about 6%.

Facebook’s Response

In Facebook’s defense, significant measures have been taken to resolve all of the above issues.

For some, the errors pertaining to ads seem to be the most pressing, which could be why the social media platform has dedicated an entire page to the updates around ads reporting alone. Most of those changes are intended to provide clarification over what exactly is being measured and how — mostly in the interest of “fairness and transparency,” Mark Rabkin, Facebook’s VP of core ads, told WSJ.

Plus, Facebook claims to be taking the feedback to implement third-party measuring protocols seriously, and aims to further clarify how it’s going to calculate ad viewership, as well as the source of that data. Some of it will be coming from Moat and Integral Ad Science — platforms that are used to measure ad and content engagement — which will be used to measure display ad campaigns (previously, those platforms were only available to measure video campaigns).

But Facebook is also enlisting the help of a true viewership pioneer: Nielsen.

Nielsen has its own Digital Content Ratings metric, which Facebook will be implementing to count video viewership — both on-demand and live. That comes with Nielsen’s Total Audience Measurement, which helps marketers compare digital metrics to those from TV.

There’s also a new blogging property launching — Facebook’s Metrics FYI — which will contain regular updates about any and all changes to the platform’s metrics henceforth.

These efforts are all compounded by the formation of a Measurement Council — or, as we like to call it, Facebook’s jury of peers. The Council will be comprised of “business and measurement executives,” and is a bit of an extension of Facebook’s existing Client Council, which helped to develop the tools that help businesses measure ROI.

What It All Means for Marketers

So just how seriously should we be taking it? Well, in short, marketers have reason to be happy about the improvements that Facebook is making, but shouldn’t freak out over the miscalculations.

Why is that? According to Daria Marmer, HubSpot’s social product manager, “Most of the metrics in question are what we’d call vanity metrics. Views and impressions are important, but don’t have a huge impact on your business at the end of the day.”

And while Marmer echoes the benefits of Facebook’s measures to fix these discrepancies, “We really encourage marketers to tie their social efforts to more concrete metrics,” she said, “such as website visits, downloads, new leads.”

She adds, “The social data from Facebook in HubSpot customers’ portals won’t change based on these updates.”

We’ve got you covered. And, we’ll continue to bring you updates to all things social as they emerge.

What do you think of Facebook’s latest announcements, and what sort of action are you taking? Let us know in the comments.

Thanksgiving is just around the corner, which means #GivingTuesday isn’t far off. This year, it’s on November 29. If you haven’t already put together any special campaigns to promote giving or volunteering around #GivingTuesday, don’t worry. Yes, we’re getting down to the wire here, but that doesn’t mean you can’t create something around that day that will make a big impact on your annual goals.

Video is the New Darling of Digital Marketing

Email is awesome, no doubt. But people can only read an email so many times. It’s time to give a little shock to your subscribers’ system with something new. How about a little video content? How about a little live video content?

Adults in the United States watch, on average, an hour and 16 minutes of digital content every day. The shift from television viewing to online video viewing continues to grow, which is great news for organizations (most of them) that don’t have budget to produce television content and buy airtime.

It may be too late to produce a full-fledged digital video, so live video may be your only option on short notice. Don’t panic. Live video on short notice may actually be some of your most authentic, accessible video content. You don’t really need anything more than a smartphone.

See, publishing live video is much easier than it sounds. It offers the chance to connect in a less formal, more direct way with your community. Consider doing a Facebook Live video or Periscope session. The video capabilities on pretty much every smartphone produce some decent quality video. It’s certainly video quality we’re all used to. Facebook’s new Live Stream function also lets you use traditional video camera for your live stream if you prefer. You can read about how to set that up, along with other good Facebook Live Stream tips here.

Your live stream can be of a visit to somewhere that’s received funds from your organization or follow a group of volunteers. Pair up with another local nonprofit and broadcast a goofy “giving Olympics” competition (e.g. who can pack the most care baskets in 5 minutes), with viewers voting on the winners. Let your lack of planning work for you and bust out some rough-and-ready creativity.

Plus, once you’re done, you’ll have recorded video content you can slice up and repurpose in other ways.

Activate Your Undiscovered Ambassadors 

Use #GivingTuesday as an opportunity to tap into your most digitally engaged constituents and convert them into donors or volunteers. You probably have a crew of people who have engaged with your online content, but have not yet donated or participated in any of your events.  You can find them by analyzing your metrics. They have a higher than average email open or click-through rate, or number of site visits. Maybe they have a lot of interaction with your organization via social media, sharing your content or making comments.

Segment this untapped community and run a #GivingTuesday campaign to fuel some offline engagement. Start running targeted email or social ad retargeting campaigns promoting #GivingTuesday as their chance to finally get involved.

The #GivingTuesday organization provides great examples from previous years. For example, the HALO Foundation ran a campaign asking people to forgo their daily cup of coffee and donate the $5 instead. Take the day to get a large group of volunteers to take care of some backburner project. Community Missions in upstate New York used the day to get more than 120 volunteers to help repaint and renovate its food pantry.

These digital warriors have shown a lot of interest in your mission. Take advantage of the global giving momentum the day generates and provide them a specific, purposeful call-to-action that converts them into real world participants in your organization’s mission. 

Freshen Up Current Projects

Create some new ways for current members and volunteers to get involved. Hold a special event for donors, such as a cocktail hour or BBQ. (Hey, maybe you live stream the event too…) 

You could also offer a new incentive to donate. It’s never too late to find a new gift-matching partner, especially when you can pitch the partnership as part of a global event. Run a campaign that asks current donors to submit matching gift requests with their employers. 

Or put together a limited edition #GivingTuesday swag bag giveaway for different donation levels. Include a CTA for some user-generated content with their new swag in your thank-you email.

Whether you’re off-pace to reach your annual giving targets or itching to blow them out of the water, create a #GivingTuesday – focused donation campaign and start running it now.

If you don’t want to pay out for a lot of swag, put together a line up of super-swag and run an online auction that closes on November 29. If you have the experience (so the legal issues are already sorted) running an online raffle, you do can do that with the winner’s drawing happening on #GivingTuesday.

Do Something 

The organization behind #GivingTuesday wants to make it easy for you. They’ve put together a rich resource page of content, tool kits, and templates you can use in your campaign.

Put together a targeted campaign or two, say one for active members and one for your subscriber/lurkers. It could be a single event, whether a real world volunteer day or online auction, but customize different promotion campaigns for these different groups.

Don’t overthink this. The day is coming up fast.

Content marketing continues to dominate as a key component of a successful marketing strategy, but to see strong results, you need to regularly produce content — specifically content with a high-viral potential.

Most marketers would argue that no one can predict whether or not something will go viral, but a lot of these same individuals simply aren’t satisfied with run-of-the-mill results. In their ideal world, an investment in content marketing should deliver exposure that rivals celebrity headlines and breaking industry news.

The problem? They’re failing to recognize that many of these high-profile headlines gained traction because they were highly controversial.

You see, polarizing ideas work because they trigger an emotional response — and this kind of reaction has a huge ripple effect due to the innate self-interest generated. Remember, though, that brands walk a fine line when it comes to controversy. That’s why we’ve put together a few things to keep in mind below that will help your team stir the pot while not crossing any boundaries.

How to Experiment With Controversial Content (Without Alienating People)

1) Produce something that will resonate with your target audience.

For controversial content to work, it has to be rooted in more than just shock value. In fact, it should aim to provide real value to your target audience, too.

Who could forget the Ad Council’s incredibly successful “Love Has No Labels” video? The organization’s mission — to “produce, distribute, and promote campaigns that improve everyday lives” — aligned perfectly with the clip, which promoted tolerance through acceptance by taking an interesting look at each other’s differences.

The idea was quite simple: Using an X-ray machine, passersby saw different sets of skeletons showing different signs of affection to one another before revealing identity — their gender, race, sexual orientation, religion, and so on. This approach forced viewers to rethink any unconscious biases they might have and appreciate that love is love no matter who is involved.

The result? More than 57 million views on YouTube alone, and currently holds the title of the second most-viewed community and activism campaign of all time.

2) Use a familiar, credible, and relatable data source.

In order to mitigate any backlash from publishers and readers, your campaign should feature reliable content and credible sources. The last thing you want is the validity of your content to become a point of contention, especially for something that is already controversial.

Consider UN Women’s “Auto-Complete Truth” campaign from 2013. The concept of each ad was simple: Using the world’s most popular search engine (Google), the images highlighted real search results of female-focused queries like “women need to,” “women should,” and “women cannot” to reveal some of the most appalling opinions women face around the world.

What made this campaign work is that it relies heavily on a data source that is both familiar and credible: Google’s autocomplete feature. And by presenting the data in a visually striking manner — each ad’s fine print reads, “Actual Google search on 09/03/13” — the message reached a wider audience without being diluted.

The campaign instantly went viral, earning spots on Adweek, The Guardian, and Fast Company. This encouraged the brand to revisit the campaign, where it saw similar results.

3) Offer a unique perspective.

Another thing successful controversial content does well? It offers a different look at a familiar subject.

Fractl is no stranger to controversial content, and for our client Bulimia.com — a California-based organization that provides resources to individuals struggling with eating disorders — we produced this campaign that reimagines superheroes to reflect more realistic body types.

With the help of Photoshop, comic book icons like Batman, Iron Man, and Captain America shed their bulging biceps in an effort to look more like an everyday individual. When paired with the originals, the stark contrast between the two images offered a new way to discuss body issues, particularly for men.

The project was incredibly successful: In just nine days, the campaign earned more than 200 pickups and nearly 90,000 social shares in 20 U.S. states and 25 countries as visualized below.

4) Don’t go in with an agenda.

Think about the last time you read an article that seemed like it was only presenting one side of a story — specifically the side that benefitted the author. You probably didn’t think too highly of the news source after, right?

The same thing goes for polarizing content. To keep your campaign from being too negative or one-sided, you shouldn’t come across like you have an agenda. For instance, many believed that McDonald’s crossed the line in its “Carry On” campaign. Audiences felt like the commercial was propaganda, trying to parade itself as an exemplary model of corporate kindness when most people believed otherwise.

5) Avoid shaming one group over another.

Although polarizing content should easily resonate with its target market, it shouldn’t alienate other groups entirely either — particularly through any sort of shaming. Remember there’s a fine line between assurance and arrogance.

Last year, U.K. fitness brand Protein World ran billboards that featured a skinny woman in a revealing swimsuit with the provocative tagline, “Are you beach body ready?” Unsurprisingly, a lot of people were unhappy with the bold weight-loss ads, arguing that it encouraged an implied standard of beauty.

Although the brand did see significant, short-term results — in large part due to the massive exposure generated by the controversial tagline — the campaign ultimately failed because of the narrow-minded treatment of the ad.

6) Respond to disagreement respectfully.

People are going to disagree with your content; that’s a given. To minimize backlash, you need to make sure that you respond to criticism in a cool and collected manner. However, this same principle works when producing your content — specifically if it’s in response to an idea your brand disagrees with.

Airbnb got into some hot water back in 2015 with its passive-aggressive ads that told San Francisco citizens what to do with the several million dollars in back-taxes the startup finally paid due to the city’s 14 percent hotel tax. “Dear Public Library System, We hope you use some of the $12 million in hotel taxes to keep the library open later. Love, Airbnb,” read one ad.

“Dear Board of Education, Please use some of the $12 million in hotel taxes to keep art in schools. Love, Airbnb,” read another.

Although the ads were intended to inspire gratitude in San Franciscans for the additional funds, they mostly ticked people off. Citizens lambasted the ads all over social media, forcing Airbnb to pull the campaign.

Final Thoughts

Producing a polarizing idea isn’t a kiss of death for your brand. As these examples prove, many marketing teams can find success in controversy — it’s just a matter of finding the right balance on an incredibly fine line.

Remember that in a web full of clutter, you need to stir the pot to get noticed, but the recipe calls for something a little more than vanilla.

What tips do you have for experimenting with controversial content? Share them in the comments.

We’re all familiar with traditional brainstorming as a method for producing new ideas, but there are many alternative exercises for tackling problems and developing new ideas, both individually and in a group setting.

Ranging from structured to silly, here’s a selection of ten simple techniques and exercises to help you get your problem solving juices flowing:

10 Alternative Creative Exercises

1) Storyboarding

If you’re trying to design a process, storyboarding can help you see where your collective understanding of a problem supports or conflicts with a proposed solution, and where more thought/research is needed. By developing a visual story to explore the problem at hand as a narrative, your team will be able to see how ideas interact and connect to form a solution.

Sticky notes are your friend. Take a few minutes to have everyone on the team write out their ideas as individual notes. These don’t have to be complete thoughts — physically pinning up quotes, pictures, user info, and the like can help you see new relationships between different components.

Once you have a group of sticky notes to work from, start arranging them on the board as a progression: first this, then that. Organizing your ideas as a continuous series will help you see new connections and eliminate extraneous material that doesn’t support your end goal.

2) Forced Connections

This exercise involves bringing together ideas that serve very different needs or interests to form a new concept. You see this sort of thinking all the time in products like the Apple watch, the Swiss Army knife, smartphones, or even sofa beds.

To put this method into practice, bring a bag of random items to your next meeting, or draw up two lists of unrelated items on the board. Ask team members to pick two or more items and explore different ways they can be connected. This technique can produce some silly results, but it’s ultimately a helpful way of getting your team out of a creative rut.

3) Brain-Writing

In this exercise, participants simply write down a few rough ideas for solving a particular problem on a piece of paper. Each piece of paper is then passed on to someone else, who reads it silently and adds their own ideas to the page. This process is repeated until everyone has had a chance to add to each original piece of paper. The notes can then be gathered, ready for discussion.

The big advantage of brain-writing is that it makes sure everybody is given the opportunity to have their thoughts and ideas thoroughly considered by the group. This avoids the loudest or most extroverted people unintentionally dominating the sessions.

4) Zero Draft

The Zero Draft is an ideation technique for individuals often used by writers and is essentially a form of focused free-writing. For marketers and agency professionals, it can help focus the first stages of a new project by establishing what you currently know and getting your initial ideas out of your brain and onto paper.

Taking your central theme or topic:

1. Write down everything you currently know about the subject.
2. Write down what you need or want to know about the subject, but don’t currently know.
3. Reflect on why the subject is important.
4. Add anything else that takes your fancy — this is a chance to get whatever’s floating around in your head out into the world.

The Zero Draft method is all about getting everything you can think of relating to your topic down on paper, so don’t be concerned if it looks messy and unfocused. The goal is just to get past the initial block that often plagues creative professionals in the early stages of a new project.

5) S.C.A.M.P.E.R.

S.C.A.M.P.E.R. is essentially a process for expanding and improving upon ideas by testing and questioning them from different angles. For each letter of the mnemonic, ask yourself a related question about your project or the problem at hand:

• Substitute, e.g.: What would happen to the project if we swapped X for Y?
• Combine, e.g.: What would happen to the project if we combined X and Y?
• Adapt, e.g.: What changes would need to be made to adapt this project to a different context?
• Modify, e.g.: What could we modify to create more value on this project?
• Put to another use, e.g.: What other uses or applications might this project have?
• Eliminate, e.g.: What could we remove from the project to simplify it?
• Reverse, e.g.: How could we reorganize this project to make it more effective?

This method forces you to approach your project or problem in unexpected ways. Each question asks you to dig a little deeper into the issue and consider new possibilities.

6) Questioning Assumptions

We all carry assumptions with us — assumptions about what is and isn’t possible, about what people want, what will work, and what won’t. This exercise forces us to challenge these and put everything on the table.

Draw up a list of all the assumptions you can think of about your currently project — true or not — and discuss the list as a group, questioning each one. Doing this at various stages in your campaign development can spark fresh ideas, as well as identify knowledge gaps.

7) Wishing

This technique encourages your team to let imaginations run wild. Ask participants to dream up the most unattainable, extreme and impractical solutions they can think of to a given problem. Create a list of a few dozen wishes pertaining to the task at hand.

Focusing on a selection of wishes, consider and discuss the ideas in detail, with the aim of triggering new but more realistic concepts to pursue. What makes them so impossible? How can that idea be scaled down? Which features of that wish could we integrate into this other approach? You might be surprised to discover applicable, real-world solutions among your team’s wildest wishes.

8) Alter-Egos / Heroes

This is a fun exercise where small groups imagine how they would go about solving a given problem if their team were led by a famous character, fictional or real. How would Cat Woman go about positioning your brand as a thought leader in virtual reality? What would Steve Jobs do to improve your latest communications package? How would Don Draper get your core messages across to millennials?

You can either chose someone you think embodies the right qualities for the job to help develop your vision, or someone at the opposite end of that scale, to explore less conventional ideas.

9) Group Sketching

You don’t have to be an artist or a designer to benefit from sketching. Visual thinking can help to trigger and develop ideas that discussion and writing might otherwise leave unturned. Similar to brain-writing, group sketching involves participants building on each other’s ideas.

Each member of your team will sketch an image related in a central way to a concept, idea or topic you want to explore further. Each sketch is then passed to someone else, who sketches another related image on the same piece of paper. This is repeated multiple times around the group. The final images are then reviewed and discussed with the aim of discovering connections that individuals hadn’t spotted on their own.

10) Six Thinking Hats

There’s a whole host of problem solving exercises and tools that help participants to put themselves into the shoes of another. This particular tool was invented by Edward de Bono, a psychologist, author, and consultant who pioneered the technique in his 1985 book Six Thinking Hats. The method involves breaking down ideas into six areas of thought:

When approaching a new problem or project, have each member of your team put on one of these different “hats” for the discussion. Each “hat” represents a unique set of priorities and perspectives that will help focus your discussion and consider the project from a wide variety of angles.

For example, if you’re wearing the “Devil’s Advocate” hat, it’s your job to consider the project’s limitations and challenges. It may feel uncomfortable at first to temporarily adopt a very narrow form of thinking, but the extremes can help teams fully explore a project or idea.

This is a modified excerpt from Creative Ideation for Digital Marketers: Theory to Practice by Dani Mansfield