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FACILITATING BRAND AMBASSADORS AT FACEBOOK SCALE

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By David Macias and Vince Vasquez

he emergence of social networking has grown to dominate not only online market-ing but all of consumer marketing. The 800 pound, strike that, the 8,000 pound gorilla known as Facebook has created a new means for brands to weave into people’s daily lives, 24/7. Delivering a successful, always-on, viral campaign that scales at Facebook scale can be ominous, ominous unless you become a social network insider.

CONTEXT OPTIONAL ENABLES BRANDS TO SOCIALIZE, WHILE JOYENT PROVIDES THE UNDERLYING CLOUD INFRASTRUCTURE

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A key to becoming relevant in the world of social media is to develop brand ambassadors, people who will enthusiastically promote your brand to their friends. However, building brand ambassa-dors is no slam dunk. A technology-enabled ser-vice provider like Context Optional can work with your brand marketing team to develop engaging social media campaigns, including the building of Facebook applications. In parallel, a cloud com-puting provider such as Joyent can deliver the un-derlying infrastructure to enable the campaigns that go viral to scale at Facebook scale.

BRANDS DIVE INTO 24/7 SOCIALIZING TO BECOME RELEVANTWe saw it within a specific demographic at MySpace, but now Facebook has emerged as a multi-consumer segment pop-culture phe-nomenon. Just as CNN delivers the 24/7 news media, Facebook delivers the 24/7 online social media destination for nearly all.

Socializing one’s brand has become impera-tive, but not easily executed, as over the past decade consumers have become dramatical-ly better informed and savvy. To be effective to-day, marketing is much more about relationship building and getting users involved, and less about marketing to someone. The strategic start-ing point is to build brand affinity through brand ambassadors.

CALLING ALL BRAND AMBASSADORSSocial media is about people, but not everyone is created equal when it comes to brand advocacy. Cultivating and engaging the category influenc-ers with your brand experience is key. This means going beyond simple engagements like user com-menting. To be effective, brands today need to enable brand ambassadors to speak about, inter-act with, and even extend the brand experience.

This is the present-day marketers’s challenge, and it represents the new best practice. For example, its a good thing when brand ambassadors en-thusiastically comment on the brand’s blog and even answer other users’ questions. It’s even better when they positively rave away about your brand on their own blog and personal publishing space outside of Facebook.

Although this challenge can seem somewhat daunting, it’s not like leaping into the abyss. Rath-er, it’s more like walking in on the party. And like all successful partygoers, take the right wing-man, and let the good times roll.

Rafi Jacoby, Director of R&D at Context Optional,discusses how Context Optional assists brands

to become social network insiders.

Rafi Jacoby shares his experience running Context Optional’s infrastructure on Joyent’s cloud.

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CONTEXT OPTIONAL SOCIALLY ACTIVATES BRANDSContext Optional provides brands with a suite of applications, services and solutions to help them build, manage and track all of their efforts on the social web. This enables brands to go along with these soon-to-be brand ambassadors as they weave their brand affinity into their part of the so-cial fabric (or socialgraph as Facebook defines it).

How? By brands delivering experiences that speak to the brand ambassadors. For instance, Einstein Bros. Bagels provided free bagel coupons through a Facebook application. The result was the num-ber of fans skyrocketed as friends virally told their friends. After all, who doesn’t want a free bagel!

In essence, the Context Optional enterprise-class solution provides the nec-essary tools a team needs to manage a brand’s so-cial media presence, such as moderation, publishing, analytics, and app-build-ing. In addition, services are also provided that include social strategy development, community building, promotions, and application develop-ment.

PICKING THE CLOUDWhen it came to the decision of whether to build or outsource the infrastructure it would need to run their potentially viral Facebook applications, Con-text Optional knew it needed to focus on its dif-ferentiated value-add. Put another way, buying, racking and running compute, storage and net-work to meet stringent service level agreements and customer expectations just wasn’t a core competency Context Optional wanted to invest in.

Therefore, going to the cloud was a clear decision. However, since not all clouds are created equally, and differ in such areas as architecture, instance persistence and support, an early question be-came which cloud? Enter Joyent.

SCALING PERFORMANCE ON A FACEBOOK SCALEFor brands striving to develop a presence in Face-book, the ability to scale at Facebook scale is crucial. A successful campaign can require infra-structure to support millions of users within the first months of launch. It’s like needing a top fuel drag-ster to get you from zero to blasting down the track.

One such dragster-necessary campaign was the Travel Channel’s Kidnapped! This Facebook ap-plication delivered a totally new and fun experi-ence, enabling a playful and viral virtual kidnap-ping of your friends, and your friends’ kidnapping

their friends. The appli-cation grew to 7 million Facebook users in just six months.

Meanwhile, Joyent pro-vided the proverbial cloud dragster, which operated like a well-oiled machine, dem-onstrating that Joyent’s infrastructure scales full throttle as needed.

VERTICAL BURSTINGMany cloud providers can burst horizontally by adding more instances. Joyent, on the other hand, also allows vertical bursting. This means an appli-cation is not constrained within the defined com-putational constraints of a purchased hypervisor image, while spare cycles on the underlying core go unused.

Rather, because of Joyent’s unique architectural approach, applications can utilize all available re-sources on a particular compute node. This abil-ity to vertically burst helps Context Optional scale by providing headroom to handle momentary spikes in workload. The result is that application us-ers don’t experience frustrating delays as popular-ity grows, while Context Optional doesn’t have to overprovision through unneeded horizontal scale either.

To be effective today, mar-keting is much more about relationship building, get-ting users involved and less about being marketed to.

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DATABASE, UNINTERRUPTED AND PERSISTENTAnother requirement for Context Optional is the ability to run a real, persistent da-tabase. Pseudo-persistence won’t work. Applications can’t be put on pause as customer data is reloaded if a database instance need to be rebooted.

Unlike many other cloud providers, Joyent provides persistent databases, meaning Context Optional can start up a database and not worry about it. In fact, some of Context Optional’s customer databases have been up and running for well over a year and continue to run with zero down-time.

KEEPING SUPPORT REALMany cloud providers’ idea of support is check out the forums and read about how other people may have solved a similar problem. Yet, when running social media applications, there are no available down-time windows. Applications run 24/7/365, so questions need to be answered and an-swered now.

With Joyent, Context Optional gets the best of both worlds. Joyent operates a true Infrastructure-as-a-Service cloud, but it also provides support like a managed hosting provider. This means Context Optional has real relationships with real people who can answer the real questions that undoubtedly come up.

If an infrastructure question or hiccup oc-curs, Context Optional can’t say to its cli-ents, “Please come back later!” Out to lunch just doesn’t cut it when delivering social media experiences. Therefore, day in and day out, Context Optional places its infrastructure bet on Joyent delivering as promised. And Joyent has delivered just that.

What this ultimately means to the Brand Ambassadors and other brand application users is they can go on enjoying their Con-text Optional-developed experience with-out giving a second thought to all the sizzle happening under the hood.