Social networking has grown to dominate not only online marketing 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, unless you become a social network insider.
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 ambassadors is no slam dunk. A technology-enabled service 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 computing provider such as Joyent can deliver the underlying infrastructure to enable the campaigns that go viral to scale at Facebook scale.
BRANDS DIVE INTO 24/7 SOCIALIZING TO BECOME RELEVANT
We saw it within a specific demographic at MySpace, but now Facebook has emerged as a multi-consumer segment pop-culture phenomenon. 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 imperative, but not easily executed, as over the past decade consumers have become dramatically better informed and savvy. To be effective today, marketing is much more about relationship building and getting users involved, and less about marketing to someone. The strategic starting point is to build brand affinity through brand ambassadors.
Rafi Jacoby, Director of R&D at Context Optional, discusses how Context Optional assists brands to become social network insiders.
CALLING ALL BRAND AMBASSADORS
Social media is about people, but not everyone is created equal when it comes to brand advocacy. Cultivating and engaging the category influencers with your brand experience is key. This means going beyond simple engagements like user commenting. To be effective, brands today need to enable brand ambassadors to speak about, interact 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 enthusiastically 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. Rather, 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.
CONTEXT OPTIONAL SOCIALLY ACTIVATES BRANDS
Context 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 social 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 number 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 necessary tools a team needs to manage a brand’s social media presence, such as moderation, publishing, analytics, and app-building. In addition, services are also provided that include social strategy development, community building, promotions, and application development.
Rafi Jacoby shares his experience running Context Optional’s infrastructure on Joyent’s cloud.
PICKING THE CLOUD
When it came to the decision of whether to build or outsource the infrastructure it would need to run their potentially viral Facebook applications, Context Optional knew it needed to focus on its differentiated value-add. Put another way, buying, racking and running compute, storage and network 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 became which cloud? Enter Joyent.
SCALING PERFORMANCE ON A FACEBOOK SCALE
For brands striving to develop a presence in Facebook, the ability to scale at Facebook scale is crucial. A successful campaign can require infrastructure to support millions of users within the first months of launch. It’s like needing a top fuel dragster to get you from zero to blasting down the track.
One such dragster-necessary campaign was the Travel Channel’s Kidnapped! This Facebook application delivered a totally new and fun experience, enabling a playful and viral virtual kidnapping of your friends, and your friends’ kidnapping their friends. The application grew to 7 million Facebook users in just six months.
Meanwhile, Joyent provided the proverbial cloud dragster, which operated like a well-oiled machine, demonstrating that Joyent’s infrastructure scales full throttle as needed.
VERTICAL BURSTING
Many cloud providers can burst horizontally by adding more instances. Joyent, on the other hand, also allows vertical bursting. This means an application is not constrained within the defined computational 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 resources on a particular compute node. This ability to vertically burst helps Context Optional scale by providing headroom to handle momentary spikes in workload. The result is that application users don’t experience frustrating delays as popularity grows, while Context Optional doesn’t have to overprovision through unneeded horizontal scale either.
DATABASE, UNINTERRUPTED AND PERSISTENT
Another requirement for Context Optional is the ability to run a real, persistent database. 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 downtime.
KEEPING SUPPORT REAL
Many 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 downtime windows. Applications run 24/7/365, so questions need to be answered and answered 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 occurs, Context Optional can’t say to its clients, “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 Context Optional-developed experience without giving a second thought to all the sizzle happening under the hood.
Rafi Jacoby, Director R&D, has over a decade of experience solving complex technical problems as an engineer and architect. Prior to Context Optional, Rafi held positions at Sun and various startups. He holds degrees in Computer Science and Philosophy from Oberlin College. His focus at Context Optional is on stability, scalability and building cutting-edge solutions for our customers.
Joyent has been providing Infrastructure as a Service since 2004, before anyone called it cloud computing. Today, Joyent is the only cloud computing company that has built its own complete technology stack, runs a major public cloud on that stack, and makes the technology available for anyone who wants to build a cloud.
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