Today’s blog post is a little different than I had originally intended.  First, it was going to be a positive about how Expedia led me to spend 15 minutes taking part in a contest via Facebook, but as my contest experience continues, it worsens.

First let me say this, I use Expedia for all of my travels, primarily because of the special access you get as a return customer and of course from time to time, the obvious savings you get from using their travel service.  So, when Expedia sent me a link to participate in their contest that would give me a chance to win a free trip, I was interested.  It’s a brand I use regularly and trust.  In addition, they were conducting the contest through a handy Facebook app., which is obviously right up my work alley.  As an interested and loyal Expedia customer, I signed up and signed up a few friends to travel with me.  In order for my entry to be processed, all of the friends I had selected to accompany me on this free trip had to accept my invitation, which was sent to them via Expedia.  Most of my friends were able to do so, with ease – so far so good - but I have a friend who is travelling at the moment, and like most of us light travellers, they chose to travel with their iPad and iPhone only.  Makes sense as I normally travel with those two devices as well.  Nonetheless, when my travelling friend tried to accept the invitation, this is what they got:

Needless to say, I was surprised, considering the facts and statistics that are readily available to marketers and brand owners:

• There are more than 250 million active users currently accessing Facebook through their mobile devices
• Apple is now seen as the most valuable brand
• The iOS market share is 27%

Knowing all of the above, making your Facebook application not workable via mobile, is a major faux pas.

Just another word of truth around understanding your audience and the tools they use before you go to market, with an audience generating campaign.

Facebook’s Journalism Meetups: Another Release Uncovering Their Strategy

If you have been following the news in media, advertising and social networks, you would have by now become familiar with a trend in Facebook product and idea releases –  The changes to their Facebook page formatting that allows businesses to iFrame in their very own site content; updating user contact information with Facebook user ID’s, making your mobile Rolodex a Facebook calling card;  their purchase of Snaptu an Israeli mobile app. building company, which supports not only smart phones but feature phones as well; and the list goes on.  It was clear to us, in reading all of these Facebook releases that they were working on a deep and monetary rich road map that would make them so entrenched in our businesses and personal digital lives that the dependencies would enable them to monetize in ways they may have never thought possible.  So today, hearing that they’ve launched a program to befriend journalists was no surprise.

Facebook launched their  Journalists on Facebook page under the guise of being a learning and thought sharing tool that would enable journalists to easily integrate the different Facebook features, into their stories.  The blog post published by Jeffery Osofsky, Facebooks Director of Media Partnerships, speaks to this as another attempt to aid newspapers in making their news more social and he sites some convincing statistics “the average media organization has seen a greater than 300% increase in referral traffic from Facebook” and it’s enough to encourage anyone in journalism and media to ‘like’ the page and join the group.  In addition to the Facebook group, the social network mogul is also setting up a series of journalistic meetups around the world, with the first one being in Paolo Alto, California, at the Facebook head office.

With the talk of Twitter’s missing the mark in coming up with the right balance between business and social uses for their platform, there is no time like the present for Facebook to forge ahead on their product releases, which seem to be  positioning them to take over the world … literally.

If you are in media and interested  and end up liking the page, you will be in the company of folks like Katie Couric, Diane Sawyer and me of course.  Nonetheless, it will be interesting to see how and if Facebook’s reach out to journalists changes the media landscape.  Could it be that Facebook will create their own online news source that aggregates content shared by their opt in journalists and media partners?  Hmm…