Tyler’s Toolbox

Facebook Pages is the future. Seriously, it’s amazing. Scoble wrote a sweet article defending the recent facebook redesign which I don’t want to rewrite — so go read it.

Here’s what I do want to talk about: All of the people who have become fans of your pages before yesterday will not see your updates in their newsfeed. Have you already built an awesome audience on Facebook?  Well, you’ve just lost a big access point to all of them! Forever!  Want photo proof?

This makes sense if users didn’t intend to give that permission and have fanned a ton of pages (like me, with 165 pages I’ve fanned, I’m not excited about the prospect of seeing them all in my feed), but because most users aren’t fans of that many pages, and most of them will never take the chance to opt-in if it’s not made easy for them, the default should be on with opt-out capability. Or, if Facebook wanted to build the best experience it should ask the user to assign posting privilages to all pages that they previously fanned using a gloabl setting (which a user could edit settings later for individual pages).

Thanks Facebook, I’m glad to see I just lost access to the vast majority of the 71 fans of Tyler Willis. Luckily, I’m not the New York Times and didn’t just get screwed out of 362,387 fans. Good job ‘book.

There’s been some speculation about what would be the Twitter of SXSW 2009. What breakout app would everyone begin to know and love. And while your answer might be foursquare, the real answer is Twitter. There was no more powerful tool for communication and sharing than good old twitter. Actually, the breakout app this year might be Tweetdeck, many here were using it and I personally converted at least 3 people to use it.

So what does tweeting your experience at SXSW result in?

I added well over 100 followers in the last 7 days:

Graph from twittercounter.com

Here’s my schedule for SXSW 2009, courtesy of Sched. If you’d like to meetup, text me at 650-796-9815. I’m especially looking for people to interview who are relevant to trends in the video and general online marketing spaces.

I’m using google docs to manage my contacts for sxsw, please submit your information below:

I’m developing a great relationship with my friends over at MediaPost, I’ve really enjoyed the contribution process, and the editors there are really great people!

My second article came out in Video Insider last week, it’s titled: “Partnering with Your Employees: Creating Brand Ambassadorship Within Your Organization” and I think it’s worth the estimated 3-minute read. Here’s an excerpt to help you decide:

More often than not, a key to building better relationships with your audiences requires that you connect them to a real person who can serve as a sincere face for - a more humanized angle to – your brand identity . Here, empowering your own employees to promote your viral campaigns can lower your acquisition/marketing costs, create a tangible brand experience for your audiences, and boost morale within your organization.

 If you’re running viral campaigns (using video and/or social methods), you should read the article. Check it out.

An article I wrote, “New Metrics For Success In Video Marketing,” appeared in MediaPost’s Video Insider blog today. Go check it out. Here’s an excerpt:

Video marketing is a big field encompassing many kinds of video presentation, including branded videos, pre-roll and interstitial advertisements, and product demonstrations. Increasingly, budgets are shifting to this (relatively) new category. In part, this is due to a growing recognition among media planners that video marketing can deliver cost-effective and high-bar results. But what are these results, and how are they best measured?

Here’s the full version to read.