Facebook launched “Questions”, a new application intended to allow users to ask questions to the Facebook community today.  Currently, Questions is available in beta to a small amount of users in the U.S. and the U.K, but is planning to make the feature available to everybody in the near future.

Since Facebook users currently ask many questions to receive suggestions and advice from their friends, the social network wanted to share the knowledge publicly to benefit the larger audience.

Users can pose their questions to the Facebook community by submitting them to the Questions Dashboard — the link is located in the homepage’s left-hand column.  While asking, users can direct questions towards their existing friends if they’d like.  They can also tag key words that will help Facebook expose it to those who might be interested in the subject and may give more accurate answers.

Users’ questions will show up in their friends’ news feeds and also in the public Questions Dashboard to open up the information for non-friends to see the question and help answer it.

Brand Implications
For brands, the Questions feature brings some new implications.

Facebook will automatically be adding a “Questions” tab to house the questions that users ask that involve your brand.  Brands can adjust the positioning of the Questions tab by moving it among the current tabs to appear above or below the double-arrowed fold. When a user asks a question about a brand, they can tag, or hyperlink a keyword that matches an existing page.  So if a user asks “How can I get in touch with Vitrue?”, the user can link the word ‘Vitrue’ to our Page, and it will appear on our Questions tab for us to answer.

Brands, similar to users, cannot have questions removed from Facebook just because they would not like to answer them or do not want them on their Questions tab, but they can report a question that contains offensive or objectionable material.

Will this new feature cause an influx of questions? Maybe, but it’ll most likely cause a shift from the questions appearing on the brands’ wall tab to the brands’ Questions tab instead as users become more accustomed to the feature.  This could change things for brands who currently answer fans’ questions on their Page’s wall and page moderators.  Instead of having one place to respond to fans’ questions and moderate conversation, now there will be two.  Does this mean more brand moderation will be necessary?

A brand can both ask and answer questions.  When answering a question, Page administrators must decide whether they’d like to answer using their own personal profiles or as the Page.  Answering as an individual person can humanize a brand and help add to its brand personality.  However, affiliating someone’s personal profile with the brand could potentially reflect negatively on the brand if the personal profile has lax privacy settings which can expose users to undesirable material on their profile.  Which method of answering should a brand choose?

Vitrue is interested in how brands will be affected as Facebook Questions is being rolled out to the public.  Rest assured, we’ll continue to analyze the environment in order to help our clients with the introduction and adoption of Facebook Questions.

Today we say goodbye to our summer interns, Katie J. and Christina B., as they venture out into their junior year at the University of Georgia in Athens, GA.  As their final assignment, we asked them to write an entry about their time here at Vitrue.

This summer we had the opportunity to work as interns at Vitrue. We had a great experience. It was our first time to work for a company and get the feel of an office setting. Coming in the first day, we were somewhat awkward, nervous, and had no idea what to expect, but comfort set in with the guidance of our bosses and Vitrue’s staff. We felt at ease to ask a plethora of questions, learned quickly, and became a part of the Vitrue team. We participated in a variety of projects, and were able to sit in on meetings and learn the dynamics of the company and the problem solving strategies needed to achieve results.

One of the projects we particularly enjoyed was researching and choosing appropriate social media events for Vitrue to showcase products or send a speaker to. We were able to learn the varying importance of international conventions and conferences and became knowledgeable of the importance of our competitors and their presence in media. Another project we enjoyed was creating and revising an enterprise client portfolio and PowerPoint. We learned in-depth details of specific apps and tabs that Vitrue customized and fitted to their clients’ needs. This gave us a deeper understanding of Vitrue’s ability to specifically cater to the needs of their clients.

It might sound cheesy, but the past two months have truly flown by. Being college students, countless hours of our day and the hours of those around us are spent on Facebook and the Internet. Leaving Vitrue, we take away the realization of Facebook and social media’s extreme influence on how we perceive products and brands. Vitrue’s products are giving brands the tools and guidance to have an active social presence, and we are glad to have been a part of a company with insights into upcoming advances in the social media world.

- Katie and Christina

A topic we’ve covered in our Best Practices Series is the use of URL shorteners when sharing information on social media.

URL shortener services, such as bit.ly and tinyURL, are free but do not offer the authenticity of a custom, branded URL shortener (not to mention making your click data public to your competitors). We encourage brands to use branded URL shorteners to gain credibility and authenticate their links.

CAPTCHA window

One of the biggest downsides to using a free service to shorten a URL is that spammers often use these services to hide links that could be dangerous to your computer or try to steal your information.

Facebook is making strides to create a safe environment online. Last week they broke bit.ly links and marked them as abusive. Facebook posted a blog entry addressing the issue in June 2010. While they have since been restored, to post something with a bit.ly link, users will now see a window with a CAPTCHA authenticator to ensure the link is being posted by a person and not a spammer or robot.

These new safety precautions makes me wonder if it is a sign of things to come for bit.ly and other consumer-based shorteners on Facebook and other social media platforms.

The best way to let your fans, followers and friends know your link is trusted and will not lead them astray is to use a branded URL. The Vitrue Platform offers solutions to create unique, trusted, branded URLs.

Last week it was my privilege and pleasure to spend a day in the company of my Product Management peers, participating in a round table for the Facebook’s Preferred Developer Consultants.

Our relationship with Facebook as one of their Preferred Developers is one of mutual responsibility.  The round-table last week is one way they are keeping up their end, by giving us the chance to tell the story of our value proposition directly to the people who enable us to realize that value by creating such killer social apps. We jumped at the opportunity.

The Facebook “campus” is a fascinating place. Right off the bat my eye was caught by seemingly dozens of Internet memes used as the taxonomy of Facebook conference rooms. They have one called “I’m On A Horse”, and another called “Leeroy Jenkins”. I love that kind of thing. Vitrue’s main conference room is just called “Executive Conference Room”– Classy, but somewhat staid.

Other impressions of the Facebook physical plant were the wonderfully open spaces everyone works in, the interesting materials used for walls and other structures, and the massive amount of snacks and refrigerators stuffed with sodas and water lining every other wall.

Facebook’s human component is a corps of young, incredibly bright people all of whom seemed to adore Vitrue sales guy, Jim Tramel. He worked there for a year or so before moving to Vitrue and was kind enough to show me around the Facebook offices, where everybody we saw had a huge grin and a hug for him. I don’t blame them; he’s hard not to like.

Whereas it often seems like Facebook is some monolithic entity making unilateral decisions about its feature set and policies, the truth is that Facebook is 1500 or so people (and growing every day) who are all trying to keep up with not only the space they’re competing in but the pace of change driven by their peers at Facebook itself. It’s a daunting task that they meet head on, but one of such proportions that companies like Vitrue are needed to provide real-world product experience for the folks on the inside. When you’re peering out the porthole of a submarine it’s not always easy to see how the fish are swimming.

The developers, designers, and product managers in charge of the various sections of Facebook are, rightly, primarily concerned with how changes will affect their user base– the ordinary people (like you and me) who spend an hour a day on average “Facebooking”.

Their focus on the everyday user makes it important for us to demonstrate the value that brands can bring to Facebook– how brands can help fulfill the human need to attach ourselves to ideas in order to define our place in our culture and increase our connection to other like-minded people.

At Vitrue we see it as our job to make sure that Facebook personnel are exposed to how brands and marketing via Pages and Tabs actually serve the wants and needs of Facebook users in general.

To that end we promise to continue our conversation with Facebook and live up to our responsibility as a Preferred Developer on behalf of everyday users, marketers, and brands.

There are a lot of changes coming to Facebook, and soon. Enhancements to Insights, to Pages, to Tabs, to Social Plugins. Nearly every section of Facebook is targeted for substantial improvement both in the User Interface and under hood.

What you see now is really just a baby. A really big baby, but still an application that only really started to come into its own a couple of years ago– compare that with a service like Google, which has been a serious concern for over a decade. I look forward to watching Facebook’s progress and contributing to its success in my own small way, as part of the product team here at Vitrue and as a participant in the conversation at future events involving the Preferred Developer Consultants group.

My thanks to Facebook for the opportunity to meet so many great people and talk shop to my heart’s content over the fantastic food in the cafeteria at Facebook HQ.

This year, Mashable will be hosting the first-ever Social Media Day, a global celebration of a technology that 2/3 of the global internet population uses (according to Forrester).  Social media continuously connects hundreds of millions of people around the world and has changed people’s lives.  Because our mission at Vitrue is to “make brands social” and help marketers connect with their audience with the right combination of technology and services, we’re proud to join in on the celebration.

There are 340+ Social Media Day meetups scheduled to take place from Sheboygan, WI to Kaunas, Lithuania.  Using Meetups Everywhere, communities around the globe have come together to help host this first-ever event  Look for Mashable staff to provide more insight into the world of social media in New York, San Francisco, Atlanta and Austin.

Look for photos tagged with #smday on Flickr and comments with #smday on Facebook or Twitter to track this global conversation.  Also, Mashable has set up a website for the event at smday.com and attendees are asked to upload pictures and event information to the Social Media Day Facebook event.

The Vitrue team is looking forward to joining the conversational global celebration in person.  Look for us in San Francisco, Atlanta and Cincinnati where Vitrue is also an official sponsor of #smday.  Our team will also be en masse in New York City.

San Francisco, CA
Porter Novelli Office
550 Third Street
6:00 PM

Atlanta, GA
Hub Atlanta
1375 Spring St NW
8:00 PM

Cincinnati, OH
Lavomatic Cafe (upstairs patio)
1211 Vine St

New York City, NY
The Mean Fiddler
266 W 47th St

We hope to see you out tonight!  Where will you be celebrating?

I am thrilled to welcome a true innovator and internet-marketing pioneer to the growing Vitrue team. Well, I should say “Welcome Back,” as many know J.B. Kropp was a key contributor in the very early days of Vitrue.  From 2006-2008, he served as our Vice President of Strategic Development.  J.B. has rejoined us and will serve as Vice President of Channel Partnerships where he’ll be responsible for expanding our product suite across our partner channels, giving Vitrue a much larger footprint nationwide.  A primary focus for J.B. will be developing new partnerships and expanding current ones with publishers, agencies and technology companies as those relationships will be pivotal for our future.

J.B. is certainly qualified and up-to-the-challenge, bringing almost 15 years of product, operations and strategic-leadership experience to Vitrue. He has both started and participated in numerous early-stage advertising and marketing companies such as Sharkle.com, Flycast Network, Web Visible and Cucina.com. He most recently served as an executive with ShareThis, the company known for the social-sharing tool that now reaches more than 400 million users across 130,000 sites on the web. During his more than two years at ShareThis, J.B. led the product strategy and distribution efforts helping pave the wave for the company’s outstanding success.

J.B. is joining Vitrue at a very exciting time as we are experiencing tremendous growth with our client base, technologies and research advancements. He is extremely creative and knowledgeable and will immediately make his mark here at Vitrue.  With J.B. joining our talented staff, we are uniquely positioned to continue our growth and further solidify our status as the leading social media management company. Welcome back, J.B.!