The Vitrue Publisher development team is PROUD TO ANNOUNCE the launch of Vitrue Publisher 2.2. It wasn’t going to go up a WHOLE POINT, but then we took a look at the scope of the release and said to ourselves “selves, this is deserving.” Time to renumber the roadmap. Sigh. But I digress; here’s what we saw when we peered into that scope-o-scope:

Architecture Upgrades
We have upgraded our system architecture to be faster, more streamlined, elegant, and powerful.
Why In The World You Should Care: With these enhancements we should see an up to 20% reduction in the time between a post occurring on Facebook and it being acted upon by our moderation system. That’s serious. That’s like 1/5 yo. Two tenths!

Beta tag removed
We figured it’s time. It’s not like we’re Google or something. This ain’t no disco.

Email Notifications for Moderation
This is a thing for Facebook Moderation. You can now enter a list of email addresses on a Word List, and those email addresses will receive a message every time that Word List is triggered.

The email will tell you whether any automatic actions were taken. Right now moderation can automatically delete comments/posts, so you’ll know via email that that happened so you don’t go rooting around in the Moderation page for something that’s not there any more.

What’s more, if somebody goes and moderates an item that was flagged by a Word List, you’ll get another email letting you know that item got moderated, so you don’t have to bother going and checking for something that’s, again, not there any more and wind up going “what the excelsior is going on here” and scratching your head in confusion as a single tear rolls down your cheek. Here’s a picture of what the box looks like in the Word List dialog, just ’cause I didn’t feel like these release notes were long enough:

Sultry Streamlined Stream Authorization
Once Vitrue has set up a “Custom App Name” for you, the new app name will automatically replace the old app name (”Vitrue Publisher”)– but not until you re-authorize your streams. This will make life a lot easier for everybody. Uh, I don’t have a screenshot for this, but that’s how it works now. Here’s the process:

1. You submit a ticket at help.vitrue.com for a custom app name
2. We set up the custom app name and let you know it’s done.
3. You reauthorize your streams.
4. The custom app name is used for posts that are published from then on.

CSV Links to export Posts and Comments
You can now export all of your Posts as a CSV, and you can export the comments for a post as a CSV too! This option lives under the moderation list, on the right (same place other “export CVS” links are on other pages in Publisher).

The tool will export whatever comments are displayed, so if you have the “All” button pushed that’s what will be exported (all the comments for that post), and if you have the “Flagged” button pushed that’s what will be exported (all the flagged comments for that post).

You cannot, at this time, export all comments. That could be a LOT of data. If you need to have multiple comment exports, it’s best to export the comments for the posts you need, and merge the CSV files either in notepad or by importing them into your spreadsheet one after the other.

IE 7 Sign In issue resolved
We love our friends at Microsoft, but sometimes their browser is a pain in the p’toot. This release mashed a bug that prevented IE 7 users from setting up a stream during the initial setup wizard.

Moved the Vitrue MSA
The Vitrue Master Service Agreement PDF now lives at http://publisher.vitrue.com/pdfs/Vitrue_Platform_MSA_v5_ms.pdf so modify your browser bookmarks accordingly.

Congratulations to the team on another successful release!

Let’s face it - spam has been around ever since the Internet was invented, but lately it’s become even more of a problem for brands on their Facebook Pages. Facebook Page porn is the latest spam trend plaguing brands, where spammers upload sexually provocative pictures to Pages, trying to lead viewers “astray” over to their adult sites.

I mean, it’s bound to happen. Brands gather large fan bases, so guerilla marketers naturally try to take advantage of a brand’s large audience by posting their messages on brands’ Walls.  We’ve all seen it.  It’s annoying.  And it’s up to page administrators to do something about it.

Spammy post on a non-NASCAR related brand Page.

What’s at stake, you ask?  Fans of your brand. Brands stand to lose valuable fans who became fans to engage with your brand and hear your voice – not somebody else’s.  An unmoderated page also deters new people from being fans.  Users who are genuinely interested in your brand will most likely leave before becoming fans once they find your page littered with unrelated, spammy posts.

How to Moderate
Facebook provides the basic abilities to delete unwanted comments and report or block users who violate Facebook’s Statements of Rights and Responsibilities.  Page administrators tend to use these functions while going through whichever moderation process they use, which brings us to the three moderation methods: manual, automatic and one that combines the previous two.

Manual moderation is a time-intensive process that requires dedicated employees to controlling the fan-generated content on your brand’s Facebook Page.  One or more of the page administrators will need to constantly patrol fans’ posts and comments on the Page’s Wall, photos, and other content, reading and deleting posts that are irrelevant or inappropriate.  Facebook is a 24/7 medium and will need constant attention from these folks.

Automatic moderation uses an automatic moderation tool.  Brands can hook up the automatic moderation tool to scan their Facebook Page at different time intervals to delete predetermined words and phrases.  A big problem with some automated tools is that they can’t use context clues to discriminate between appropriate and inappropriate content. The tool will use a blind eye, deleting posts that the brand should have kept or keeping posts that probably should have deleted.

We recommend a combined approach that’s a compromise between the time consuming manual process and the imperceptive automatic tool.   Brands should configure an automated tool to scan the Facebook Page for a pre-defined list of words and phrases, which the tool sets aside for review by a page administrator.  The page administrator can then go into the system and choose to keep or delete the flagged content.  The combination of the two processes allows for a more control over fan-generated content to keep a brand-appropriate atmosphere and it saves time.

In case you thought this post was all out of the goodness of our hearts, I’d like to point out that Vitrue Publisher is a great solution for your moderating needs.  The Vitrue Publisher goes above and beyond simply eliminating spam by managing multiple lists that serve different purposes.  For example, some brands use our moderation tool to flag product feedback, industry or competitive content, fan sentiment and so on.  Fans post valuable information that your brand can learn from, so it’s worth taking a closer look.

However you look at it, Facebook moderation really is an important part of keeping your Page healthy and vibrant, so that it stays valuable for both your fans and your brand.  It’s up to you to stop guerilla marketers from taking advantage of your fans and stealing their attention away.

Hey Hey Hey, it’s Tabs Release Day!

New Features in Tabs

1. Pages are now called “Views”.

2. Views now have a disclosure triangle next to them on the Views page. Stuff’s hidden under that that used to not be. It’s nicer. They’re green. The triangles.

3. Ace developer Sean B. removed some extraneous logging that may have affected some IE users. He just went and did it, ain’t no big thang.

4. There’s a new beta feature that lets us change the colors on generated charts. Like for poll results and such– we can set the colors appropriately for a brand’s preference. It’s not ready for prime time yet, but it’ll be available for general use in the near future. In the meantime, your friendly neighborhood Vitrue personnel can change the colors upon request.

5. New “raw” chart mode. If this is turned on for your brand (ask us, we’ll do it, no problem really), charts for polls and such will appear as a basic “bar” sort of deal, done via HTML and CSS, which you can then proceed to prettify to your heart’s content via the pre-to-fore re-leas-ed Custom CSS box.

6. If you want to make your own locator page, we can turn on the “Edit locator” function for you. It works very much like the existing “Edit custom css” permission, only with the Locator FBML. So, like, you can make your own Locators and attach them to a tab and build your own stack o’ Tabs Views and just generally go crazy Broadway style. Once this is turned on, you’ll see a new “Edit Locator” link off the Pages page, which has editing/history capability just like Edit Custom CSS.

7. Both Edit Custom CSS and Edit Locator have a “View Revision” link to let you just casually view the contents of a revision rather than reverting to it. Like it’s nothing.

8. Oh, just a little thing we like to call ON FACEBOOK PREVIEW. (!) (OMG!) You can now preview changes that you haven’t published yet. Stuff like repositioned modules, new modules you haven’t published yet, resized stuff, FBML, and Brand CSS changes– and you can do said previewing right on Facebook itself. When you’ve got some unpublished changes, you’ll see a “Preview on Facebook” button at the top of the page (next to the “Publish to Facebook” button, natch). Click it and the magic will commence.

8a. You can preview a locator too by doing likewise from the Edit locator screen. What’s that? Don’t have a locator? Dude, you’re covered. Go ahead and preview your stuff on the “Edit Custom CSS” screen, and we will generate a simple locator to link you to all your pages. (Or at least all your pages that have slugs. Ewww, slugs.)

8b. Custom CSS now uses the “Changes have been made” block at the top, when there are changes made, with the “Publish to Facebook” and “Preview Changes” buttons on it. I know this is a sad day for fans of the “Make Changes Live” link (or whatever it said), but we think that soon you’ll become as fond of the “Changes have been made block” and will somehow find the courage to move into this, the new golden age of change-indication on the Custom CSS page in Vitrue Tabs. *salute*

9. We’re trying out a new code editor for Edit Custom CSS, FBML, etc. It’s fancy. You can do all sorts of stuff, like see line numbers, search, make it full-screen, etc. We’re going to tweak it some more, but it should be a nice tool for editing text in Tabs. Swank.

10. BONUS BETA FEATURE! We’ve added an option to the Video module, which is now called the “Video Library” module. You can choose how to display your videos– in the “popup” format, which is what everybody’s got now, or in the new hotness that is the “inline” format. When videos are displayed inline, that means they show up in a little player box right on the page, and you can play them right there like it’s the most easiest thing in the world. We’ve got a few tweaks to make before the feature is as slick as we want it to be, but it’s there now and ready to be used if anyone should so choose.

Congrats to the team on another successful release!

The social media landscape is in constant motion. Agencies must be prepared to dodge and weave in time with the roiling ocean of change in order to stay on the cutting edge. No doubt every agency and brand realizes the importance of ongoing social media management, distinct from and more valuable than the traditional one-off campaign.

So how does an Agency float this boat? Do they build out large social media departments and hire experts to track Facebook’s changes and iterations so they can keep up? Or do they continue to concentrate on what they do best and partner with a product and tools company that specializes in social media technology and management?

Can you guess which one I’m going to recommend?

Vitrue believes that an agency and a tools company can, through partnership, become more than the sum of their parts. At the core, agencies are experts at strong brand development and messaging, regardless of the medium. Agencies have always faced changes, from Newspapers to Magazines to Radio to TV, suffrage to prohibition to Reaganism to… whatever the 90’s were. Each time they were faced with a sea change, agencies answered with an evolution (sometimes a revolution) in creative brand management.

Today’s revolution is social media, and Facebook is the 500 million pound gorilla. Our latest release is full of features that give agencies the tools to focus on their expertise and apply it to this new medium. Let the Vitrue SRM Platform put the wind in your sails.

There are ‘growing pains’ with every new emerging technology. Remember agencies spearheading website development? Thus the “digital agency” was born. The “social media agency” may be around the corner.

That’s precisely why we’ve been concentrating on features that meet the needs of an agency. The newly enhanced Agency API lets your existing talent and content start working on Facebook now. And those ever persistent Facebook platform changes? No worries, we’ll keep the platform up to date for you and let you know when there’s something important you need to consider. As our CEO Reggie Bradford says: “Agencies help build brands. Our tools help make those brands social.”

Did I mention the price? I don’t think I did. Oh right, it’s FREE.  Any agency can use the full Vitrue SRM Platform as an acquisition and retention tool. Build out all the clients and tabs that you want. You don’t pay a dime until your pages go live and start building a fan base.

Here are some third parties on the matter:

Key Benefits for Agencies

1. Your Flash, Facebook’s Wall: Vitrue Publisher lets agencies leverage existing games, banners, and widgets (any SWF file) by posting it to their clients Facebook Page as a “wall app”
2. Customizable Look and Feel: Directly design and edit the CSS stylesheets for the tab, to agency specifications
3. Convenient Application Modules: Vitrue’s products include out-of-the-box content applications and modules that make it easy to customize coupons, polls, videos, uizzes and more that reflect a brand’s style and personality.
4. Customizable Tab Content: Agencies can build their own content modules and place them on the tabs of their brands, using Vitrue’s “Custom FBML” app module
5. Workflow Management: With Vitrue Publisher, brand administrators can control who creates and publishes content

Sign up for our free agency API today!

You can also view our official press release here

In Facebook’s continuous quest to create a user-friendly environment online, they have begun testing a notification unsubscribe button on posts a user has ‘liked’ or commented on.  Before this update, users who interacted with a friend’s post would receive a notification for every subsequent comment on the post.

Facebook has realized that it can be overwhelming to receive so many notifications from subsequent comments because users may not always want to know about them.  For example, milestones, like engagements or birthdays, of a friend are typically the posts that users interact with most.  While a user may want to congratulate their friend on a post about upcoming nuptials, they may not want to receive notifications generated from the other 20 friends congratulating them.

The notification triggers are a little different for brand Pages and interactions.  If you comment or like your favorite retailer’s post, you will not get a notification for fan comments after yours.  You will only receive a notification if the brand comments on the post.  Users who click the ‘unsubscribe’ button on brand posts will turn off any notifications resulting from a brand comment.

This change is welcome news from a user’s perspective.  Less “noise” encourages users to interact within the social network more and keeps them coming back.  This option also puts the power in the hands of the 500+ million Facebook users.  They now have more input on what they are served up on the networking site.

Overall, this change is more geared towards improving user experience - a change that supports Facebook’s long-time focus to keep users and their experience as their top priority.  The end result of a positive user experience is higher user retention and an increase in their already enormous user-base.

Brands should continue to thank Facebook for their attention to their users, as their efforts keep them coming back to engage with your brand on Facebook.

The Vitrue Publisher Development team, in a blatant attempt not to be outdone by their rivals and “colleagues” on the Vitrue Tabs Development Team, is pleased to announce the release of Vitrue Publisher 2.1.

This release adds some really nifty stuff to the app. I won’t drag this out, here’s the list:

Author, Author!
Vitrue Publisher now allows you to create participants in the role of an “author”, who can create posts but cannot publish or schedule them to be published. This is an addition to Publisher’s ever-evolving “workflow” feature set, with more to come.

Preview Button
To assist in the process of approving prospective publicatable posts, users can now select a post from the list of posts, and click the “Preview” button to see a mockup of what that post will look like on Facebook or Twitter. It’s essentially the same thing that appears on the “review” page when creating a post. But still. Cool. And the button is a little magnifying class. Cute.

“Include Link in Facebook Status”
Although Vitrue’s best practices suggest that including a URL in your Facebook status generates more engagement with a post, some of our customers enjoy the cleaner look when there is no link. So we’ve added a neat little check box when you include a link in a post. If you uncheck the box, the link won’t be included in the Facebook status (it’ll still be in the post, in the usual place, just not in the status).

Image Scraping
If you’re adding an image to a post, we’ll now show you all the images on the page the post links to, so you can just pick a picture and kerpow there it is attached to the post. Nifty spifty.

Email on Fail
You can now activate a feature that will send you email when a post fails to publish. When does this happen? Five scenarios: 1. You need to re-authorize your stream. 2. You need to re-authorize your stream. 3. You need to re-authorize your stream. 4. Facebook is down. 5. Other. (We’ll only send these emails if you ask us to turn the feature on. Which you should do. If you use Publisher.)

Faster Navigation of the Moderation Section
Paging through posts and comments in the Moderation section is now faster. “Waaaaay faster” in developerese, which is some variant of Swahili I think.

These enhancements (and there are some bug fixes in there I didn’t mention) offer significant improvements to the functionality and general experience of using Vitrue Publisher. Please let us know what you think in the comments, or by starting a conversation at http://help.vitrue.com

Happy Publishing!

The Vitrue Tabs Development Team is pleased to announce the release of Vitrue Tabs 1.5.2: “Easily Emulsified Elderberry”. This release contains a few fairly fantastic features that will enthrall and delight Tabs users the world over. To wit:

Moving Stuff Around Is Awesomer
Previously, moving a module around a Tabs View was a dull exercise in clicking the move button and watching the module “pop” into its new position. No more! Now, moving modules around will provide endless hours of entertainment as you watch them gently slide from one slot to another, like a waltz routine on So You Think You Can Dance. This new, javascriptified animation isn’t simply eye candy, but is an important usability enhancement allowing the user to more easily follow changes made to the position of items on the page. And it’s eye candy.

Give ‘Til It Hurts
You can now add a module that lets you send gifts to your friends. Well, virtual gifts. In the form of little pictures. Try it out. Give somebody a Rhiley!

Invitation Explosion!
Get this: you can now invite somebody to all of your Tabs views at once! That’s right, no more selecting each and every view one by one if you want to invite somebody and let them manage all the pages. You just go “click” (you can even make the sound effect if it helps you in some way), and voila, all the views are selected. But wait, there’s more! You can also, if you want to, just check a box and invite somebody as a Brand Administrator for your Tabs account right off the bat! No more making a page and then inviting them to the page and then promoting them to a Brand admin. No. None of that. No more!

Full Width Twitter Module
Right. You can add a Twitter Module to a Tabs View that’s in the single-column format. OOH RAH!

And you may have noticed that I’ve started calling them “views”. We’re going to be switching the interface to some new nomenclature in the near future, so that what are now called “Pages” in Tabs will be called “Views” instead. This should help us alleviate a little bit of confusion that we’ve got going because of, well, Facebook Pages.

Congratulations to the team on another successful launch!

Have you heard that Facebook Tabs are slimming down?  This is all about the upcoming Facebook Tab width reduction.  Announced last fall, Facebook said Page Tabs would soon be limited to tab widths of 520 pixels, previously 760 pixels.  While this change was originally expected to take place “late 2009/early 2010″, the preview period for developers is now slated for August 9th. Some say previously created tabs with the wider dimensions seem to be the reason behind the delay.  The change is set for an August 23rd public release.

Agencies and Page administrators ought to take notice of the new belt-tightening news.  If the new dimensions are ignored when creating custom tabs, design quality and elements may look underdeveloped or broken.

When these changes are publicly launched, another change users will notice is the removal of boxes on Pages and Profiles.  The Boxes tab on Pages and Profiles will be removed along with the boxes in the left-hand column.  Along with the boxes, iFrames will also become disabled.  Custom tabs will now require FBML code on another Tab.

Because Vitrue has been expecting these changes since last year, we’ve been consciously optimizing our products and client implementations accordingly.

With the removal of boxes and iFrames, it makes us wonder- what is happening to all of that extra real estate on Pages and Profiles? After the boxes go away, will we be left with empty white space on the left side of our Pages and Profiles?  Inside Facebook thinks that the width reduction is to make Pages fit “more neatly” on smaller screens.

What do you think will replace the imminent box-less space?