What is the value of your Facebook fan base?

Brands are fighting to get the biggest fan base on Facebook, and are investing huge marketing budget to convince consumer to join them. Expected benefits are quite simple : create more intimacy with the core customers And use them as brand ambassadors.
But how much Brands are willing to pay to acquire a Facebook fan? What is the value of a Facebook fan base ?
Here are a few examples :

The most admitted order of magnitude for a Facebook fan is around 1€ . A lottery with an iPad prize worth 500€ should bring around 500 fans. So your company 1M Facebook fan base is more or less a 1 M€ asset.

Digital signage with a matrix syndrome

I’m not Neo in the matrix film from the Cohen brothers but I had a strange feeling of ‘déjà vu’ when I bumped into this big Samsung screen in Paris metro.

Matrix syndrome...

It reads:

Keyboard failure
2,66 Mh Quad-core processor (…)

They should try to make it funnier like some 404 error pages from tutoriallounge.com:

Blue pill or red pill? That’s your call.

STB vs. Smart TV

With the arrival of SmartTV, triple-play ISPs are facing a huge challenge. The connectivity and interactivity coming through their Set-Top-Boxes is no longer a unique feature. Smart TV are now rich with interactive services. ISPs don’t like at all Smart TV as they are flooding their network with data and stealing their customer. What VoD service will the end user use? The one from its ISP or the one embedded in the TV set?

There are 2 tracks that ISP can follow:

1. The first is to offer a 2-tiered service. Over the Top (OTT) services coming with SmartTV have no QoS whereas they guarantee the QoS of the services coming from their STB.
2. The second track is to push further their STB experience with more features. It is the track followed by Free in France offering a STB featuring an Atom processor, a full browser, a remote control with an accelerometer, a blue ray player, etc. On the other hand TV set makers cannot compete as they cannot subsidize all these features. With these specs the STB is more like a smartphone capable of running games and advanced applications. E.g. the new Freebox revolution can run Asphalt 6 Adreline game (picture from last Aug.).

By increasing its specs the STB is now eating in the console plate and some console like the Xbox is starting to feature interactive services. Frontiers between these product categories are blurring.
Some small ISPs are currently considering another route. As very soon, TV sets will be able to display multicast streams for the additional TV channels, they want to withdraw back. Their plan is to save some CAPEX in not offering any STB at all. They are just assuming their pipe positioning.

Happy new year

First of all, I would like to thank you for reading this blog and wish you all the best for 2012.

Just to give a few figures, this blog was viewed about 11,000 times in 2011.

Visitor map 2011

Most of you came from the United Kingdom. The United States & France were not far behind…

See you in 2012 !

3 Smart TVs pitfalls

There are a few pitfalls to avoid in SmartTV.

The first is for TV manufacturers: It is really painful when you switch on your TV set to have a nice message ‘Please wait. Downloading new firmware…’, because when you switch on your TV usually it is to watch a program and usually it is right now! The firmware update should happen when you switch off your TV. Unlike a laptop you are not in a hurry to move your TV. I don’t like either the Windows update process when you want to switch off your PC and already late for an appointment. But that’s another story.

The 2 other main pitfalls are for CSP.

A TV is a video first device. So when you land on the home page of a service a video should fire at once and maintain the user in a soft lean back experience.

The last one is the click experience. It is tedious to navigate a page with just 4 arrow keys. The end user should be able to navigate using a minimum of click and if possible in a single page. The loading of page takes 1 or 2 seconds which is a time end user aren’t used to anymore. So when designing your service use the colors buttons but not the red one which is reserved for HbbTV services.