After one month (instead of two days as per original estimate 
of mad and desperate programming by Shahid, my new Pakistani friend, we are finally ready to launch Brandbook (.it, .com was already taken).
The idea is to try to put together an instrument to analyze the comments posted on Facebook pages to help brand better understand how to engage their fans (which, if the theory is right, should sooner or later translate into a concrete impact on some measurable metric - hopefully sales).
After one month (instead of two days as per original estimate ) of mad and desperate programming by Shahid, my new Pakistani friend, we are finally ready to launch Brandbook (.it, .com was already taken).
The idea is to try to put together an instrument to analyze the comments posted on Facebook pages to help brand better understand how to engage their fans (which, if the theory is right, should sooner or later translate into a concrete impact on some measurable metric - hopefully sales).
The site is in private alpha. At the moment it is little more than a proof of concept.
It is focalized on “monitoring”, with a mainly “offensive” focus.
Brandbook is not a “defensive” real-time instrument designed to identify potential “webstorms” early-on and respond on the fly to possible negative fan posts (or remove them altogether).
Neither is it an instrument – as Vitrue, for example – designed to improve the quality and “engagingness” of the page’s posts by making it easier to generate “rich content” posts with images, coupons and similar goodies.
The idea was born out of the following considerations:
1) Most social media monitoring software does not capture (or captures only a fraction) of the comments posted by fans on Facebook’s (public) fan pages (that seem to be not all that “public” after all, at least as far as some crawlers are concerned).
2) Since brands do all these efforts in order to “accumulate” fans, “engage them” and have them respond positively and post back to the fan page, it might be a good idea to keep an eye on fan comments and try to understand whether – as a brand – we are posting “well” or “not well”
3) There are lots of “spontaneous” fan pages that are not “controlled” by the brand, but are managed by the fan that has set them up. It is not written anywhere that the gold standard is to take control of these pages. On the other hand – since the lucky administrators of these pages often take undue advantage of their position and use the page to promote products that have nothing to do with the product in the honor of which the pages has been set up – brands have a keen interest in keeping an eye also on the pages they do not control
4) When a brand posts something on it’s wall, it would be nice to now, on top of “how many” fans have commented it and how many “likes” it has got, also “who are” (in terms of sex, age, and so forth) those that liked (or at least noticed) the comment and decided to comment/like it.
One final “social” consideration.
Often discussions tied to some real world event take place on some Facebook page that enjoys immediate (if often short-lasting ) fame. It can be interesting to analyze these comments even for aims that have nothing to do with marketing. I remember the discussion on Mr Marazzo’s page (an Italian politician caught in a sex scandal) the day before his resignation. There were at least 3.000 comments. If I had been a political analyst (from the right or from the left matters little), I would have liked to analyze them.
Clearly Facebook already allows anybody to read the comments posted on a fan page. If you administer the page, using tools such as Hootsuite of like Radian6’s new “engagement console”, you can read and answer to all comments posted by fans directly from the console, without even opening Facebook.
If instead you are interested in “spontaneous” fan pages, these consoles do not allow you to load the comments .
So, if you have the luck of being like nutella (or like other equally beloved brands), that has maybe 500 fan pages (of with about 50 “important”) – well, opening 50 different Facebook pages most probably isn’t the most exciting way to commence your day.
Even if you admin all pages you are interested in, your desire might not be to spend your life in front of the screen, see comments in “real time”, and decide on the fly, in the most efficient manner possible, “what to do” with each comment.
Also because, in 99.9% of the cases, the answer is “nothing”.
In my opinion what you really want to understand is how your fans have “reacted” to your past posts, and how to improve their effectiveness. You want to understand the general “mood” of your fans (Facebook is a fantastic tool for market analysis), and maybe you want to search, in that ocean of comments, for that “golden nugget” comment that will finally help you understand what your consumer is thinking and what she/he really needs.
Brandbook works on pre-selected Facebook pages (for instance the pages dedicated to brand X).
The version we are about to release makes it possible to quickly and effectively scan the fan comments, to create an archive of present and past comments, and to filter them by keyword and date.
The next version will associate each comment to its “nested” comments (aka the comments to the comment) and to analyze the demographic data of those that have commented on each post of the brand.
The system is in private alpha. So it is not possible to open an account and run the pages of brand you are interested in. Sorry.
There is a demo user, that we would like to use not on a “example brand” but rather to analyze fan comments on “hot” Facebook pages that are tied to something that is presently in the news.
Suggestions are most welcome.
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