The most shared sectors on Facebook is FMCG.

Fashion-savvy brands have the strongest and most social communities on Facebook, according to an infographic from Socialbakers.  They arrived at this by Measuring activity from 5,000 Facebook users during one month, the graphic shows that fans of fashion, automobile, and e-commerce pages take the top three spots when it comes to total interactions, total “likes,” and total comments.

Not surprising, as new lines & products are introduced virtually every day in these categories, however, what did interest me was that when it comes to total shares, fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) led the pack, followed by the nonprofit and travel sectors. FMCG brands a reason to smile on their FB walls.

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It’s time for dinner! Lawry's Digital Dinner Bell.

Lawry’s Digital Dinner Bell was born as the modern way to get family and friends to the table. 

The initiative / campaign is focused on the core of Lawry's recipe database.  

Start by selecting a flavor for tonight's dinner. Next, browse the Lawry's recipe database of the chosen flavor, pick a recipe, and prepare it. 

When it’s ready, invite family and friends to dinner. 

With a simple shake, your phone rings the Digital Dinner Bell and lets your family know that dinner is ready via SMS, Facebook posts, or a personalized phone call. 

It’s the modern way to get your family and friends to the table for a quality, family meal. 

Download your own dinner bell from here (Android only) and enjoy a family dinner.

The impact of online on offline behavior.

Nature - international weekly journal on science published a mass social-network study which shows that influence of close friends raises participation.

Just how much can activity on Facebook influence the real world? About 340,000 extra people turned out to vote in the 2010 US congressional elections because of a single election-day Facebook message, estimate researchers who ran an experiment involving 61 million users of the social network.

Where tomorrow‘s customers will place their trust.

One thing is clear: mass marketing has had its day. For decades people have consumed what they learned about through the constant barrage of advertising – and what was available in the shops. Retailers stripped their shelves of everything that only sold occasionally, in order to free up valuable shelf space for the real top sellers.

That is all in the past. In the new online economy of the “long tail”, providers increasingly earn their money with niche products. Thanks to limited costs for storage and for the “showroom”, it is well worth their while to offer the unusual and the quirky as well.

Consumers like niches. They no longer want to be one of the masses; they want to own things that are rare and unusual. Small groups of aficionados grow up – “social networks”, which replace the mainstream as a peer group.

These networks take over the job of communication. Information about “cool” new offers travels round in no time. Providers who want to be noticed in increasingly fragmented markets must therefore make themselves visible in these circles.

The explosion of choice makes heavy demands on consumers. To reduce the flood of information, they go along with a calculated risk: they trust the recommendations and tips of others. They increasingly take decisions for emotional rather than objective, factual reasons.

Read the report here

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Facebook Considers Adding The Hate Button.

Just imagine the impact on your brand's Facebook centered marketing strategy if you have more "hates" than "likes" on your brand's timeline. 

When the original Like button was announced, Mark Zuckerberg made a bold prediction there would be over 1 billion Likes across the web in just the first 24 hours. Sources at Facebook say Mark is estimating 2 billion Hates on the first day. Facebook studies have shown the sad fact that people hate things on the Internet more than they like things. There’s also an internal debate on whether the new button should be called “Hate” or “Dislike.”

Since the tiny Like button makes up such a huge part of Facebook’s revenue, the introduction of the Hate button could raise Facebook’s valuation further ahead of the IPO.

If FB decides to add the button, then personally I think "dislike" has a better ring to it than "hate".

Read more about the possibilities of hate button here

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Understanding Frictionless Sharing

The term frictionless sharing refers to one’s online activity on his or her social network and connected personal profiles being automatically shared without having to click a button. Anticipating a potential decline of social button usage, Facebook launched frictionless sharing so that the volume of content on Facebook would continue to grow at an accelerated pace. Frictionless sharing potentially eliminates the need of social buttons as a way to share content with social network connections. When end users approve frictionless sharing applications, all media consumption is automatically posted to their profiles for the world to see.

Many companies like Spotify, The Washington Post, and The Guardian have already adopted frictionless sharing, and we can expect more companies to do the same as people grow tired of clicking multiple buttons to share content across their social networks. While frictionless model continues to be controversial – especially around the invasive quality of its functionality – some reports suggest that many people have come to accept information sharing as the price one pays to participate in social networking. However, it’s only a matter of time before the passive sharing of content causes too many privacy violations to be ignored – forcing more people to question the need to “pay a price” at all.

Read more of Frictionless Sharing and about Building Connected Brands without Disrupting here

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The Social Media Advocacy Model

In theory, as social media becomes more common place, organizational audience engagement objectives, strategies and tactics should evolve past acquisition towards advocacy. Mark Smiciklas is quite sure some consumer brands are heading in this direction but, in his experience, many companies and agencies still seem to be focused on driving audience awareness and using “likes” and “follows” as success metrics.

To spark some discussion on the topic Mark thought it might be helpful to present an encapsulated view of advocacy. This brilliant infographic aims to present advocacy at a glance, explaining where it sits on the audience relationship spectrum while visualizing the steps organizations can follow to move connections towards becoming advocates.

Here are a few notes on the process and the model:

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