Inside Facebook

As brands increasingly embrace Facebook, new social media agencies and service providers are helping brands navigate Facebook and building for the Facebook Platform. We spoke with Toby Beresford of Nudge London about their commercial Facebook application development work and view of the social media agency world in London.

Hi, Toby. Tell us a bit about Nudge.

Nudge has grown out of the partnership of an existing web agency, Dynamo Partners, and my own Facebook application development business, which has been running since November 2007. We’ve been running in this form since June and have picked up some good clients including an application for The Apprentice for the BBC, Sky News and Last.fm on Bebo.

What sort of people are you dealing with?

A lot of them are brand managers. Their opinions vary from “Facebook is a fad” to “Social networks are here to stay”. Brands need to be informed with how people use social networks to interact with their friends. They may do that by partnering with an application or sometimes building their own. The brand owners all use social networks, and they’ve seen the Nielsen stats and how long people spend ton these sites. They see it as a good middle ground for brands to meet users.

We get questions like “How can we put our brand on social networks?” but it’s not always strategic; often we’ll just be given a straight application brief. We spend a lot of our time writing proposals.

Why do you think the digital agencies don’t just move into this space themselves?

There definitely seems to be a need for dedicated social media experts as a creative agency often comes from a standard web perspective. They don’t think about things like viral loops whereas we live and breathe application virality.

The Facebook platform changes so fast, it’s hard to keep up if you’re covering a larger digital landscape. We’re often dealing with other interactive agencies and have put together our own content management system for Facebook Pages called “Page-Fi”. It’s set up to allow agencies to manage their clients’ Facebook Pages.

Which social networks are you developing for?

We’ve concentrated on Facebook and Bebo so far, but have an in-house OpenSocial application in development. So far there have been fewer requests for OpenSocial apps and we’re wary of spreading ourselves too thin. For many, it’s a case of “get the application right on Facebook, and then think about migrating to Bebo or Open Social”.

What sort of projects do you look for?

We’re more interested in clients with long-term application projects than short-term campaigns. People who are asking “how do we create a sustainable presence?”. We see user value as absolutely paramount.

Generally, we work as an agency in that we’re paid to develop an application, but we are working on some revenue share ideas. In terms of costs, a typical project might be something like £15k, and that includes design, some marketing, such as Facebook Ad seeding, and optimisation.

What do you see for the future?

We think the new profile changes will be good for the Platform. It does seem as if Facebook is pushing applications back a bit, but a lot of apps don’t need to be on the profile. Using the mini-feed is fine for those.

I think we’re going to see bigger budgets for the marketing of Facebook applications and brands will realise they don’t need to use them just to send people to a website. We’ll see campaigns where the website becomes secondary.

We also haven’t seen many web applications really being marketed to end users, and the ones that have been are useful tools that are of value to users; things such as Hotmail or Google Maps. We’re likely to see more business built up solely operating on Facebook.

Finally Toby, what could Facebook do to help?

We’re keen, as application developers, to stay friends with Facebook. Part of their business value is that they’re a platform, not just a social network, and they’d be mad to kick the applications off. I really like the idea that we can create an application that feels like it’s part of Facebook. It’s very satisfying to be part of the Facebook navigation structure.

You can follow Nudge futher on their blog.