Social media mavens went gaga last week following the official launch of Facebook Studio, a new hub for social media advertisers, marketers and creatives to showcase their work in a “celebration of innovation on Facebook.” The site provides examples, thought-starters and tools for social marketing campaigns and advertising.

 

Specific features of the new site include:

To submit a campaign you are particularly proud of, enter a short description including details about the audience and goals, a list of people who worked on the campaign, metrics and results and examples of the creative (slides, video, photo, etc.). Facebook Studio’s team then reviews the submission and determines if it’s worthy of posting to the site. If it’s deemed a fit, it will appear in the gallery section and if enough users “like” it, it may be featured in the Spotlight section as well. 

The launch of Facebook Studio creates a great platform for sharing best practices for marketing on Facebook. The site serves as a living inspiration board of sorts, in addition to being a key place to visit before leaping in to a new campaign, to see what other brands have tried.

 

However, keep in mind that while Facebook Studio is a nice way to source ideas and inspiration, it’s still at its core a site for Facebook to market itself. We expect that there will be very limited lessons learned that skew negative. Visitors will likely predominantly see positive results featured on the site, which won’t prove constructive for everyone. The site’s featured campaigns don’t include details on audience perception, cost, and pre-launch research, for example – information that would be valuable for brands who might want to embark on a similar approach.

 

In any case, Facebook Studio is an interesting tool to use when building a social media marketing campaign. Time will tell whether other social media marketing platforms will launch similar studio-style sites – we’d love to see galleries of the best work on Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube as well!

 

Last week, the New York Times R&D Lab unveiled a first look at “Project Cascade,” a data visualization tool that examines how New York Times’ content is being shared across the social space. According to Michael Zimbalist, the Times’ vice president of R&D, Project Cascade (which is a working title) attempts to “dimensionalize and make really physical and tangible the way news is shared” using data from Twitter and Bit.ly URL shorteners. What differentiates this visualization from other social analytic tools is that it “treats people not as data points, but as information agents that are active participants in news consumption.”  

 

The tool allows viewers to zoom in on particular events to see key points in how a story’s sharing activity unfolded and identifies “deep, hidden influencers” which, according to Zimbalist, are people who are followed by famous people that drive a lot of RT activity and social discussions. The tool also takes into consideration which variables affect the cascade, including time-of-day and day-of-week of the tweet. 

One of the first practical uses of the tool for the NYT will be to inform the way stories are packaged and presented online. In the short term, the NYT is looking to extend the tools out to other publishers and content providers who would have a need for this sort of data and eventually will expand to any entity looking to analyze data for its impact. While in its infancy, this tool will be applied to NYT stories and information, its underlying logic can be applied to any publisher or brand interested in understanding how messages are shared.

 

If you’re interested in data visualizations in general, check out our recent SXSW post on data visualizations in the music industry. For another cool project coming out of the NYT Lab, check out News.Me, a social news experience that shows you not just what your friends are sharing, but what they are reading as well. 

 

Speaking of data visualizations, check out one of Google’s latest tools, Google Public Data Explorer. While the site itself has been around for two years and has served as a hub for the public to view statistics on unemployment, population, world development and other indicators, it only recently became available for public users to upload and visualize their own data sets. 

 

If you’re interested in exploring the datasets already available on the site, select from the current lists of datasets. Once you’re in a data set, you can sort by a range of demographic variables – age, gender, state, geography, country, etc. You can also choose to view the data in different types of visualizations: line charts, bar graphs, maps or bubble charts – and compare data over time.

Uploading a new dataset is equally as easy. Google created a new data format, Dataset Publishing Language (DSPL), which provides an interface for anyone to upload their datasets. Using this XML-based formatting design, once imported, a dataset can be visualized, embedded in other websites, shared with others and published. 

 

For more details on how to use Google Public Data Explorer, check out this Google Docs presentation.