Advanced Moderation For Your Facebook Page [INVITES]

There’s no question about it, brands are on Facebook. From small businesses to the biggest corporate names, chances are that if there’s a consumer-facing product, there’s a Facebook Page to go with it.

The tools that Facebook () provides brand managers and Page admins is rather limited. When you combine that oversight with the abundance of brands on Facebook, a new need emerges: Facebook Page moderation that scales.

ContextOptional has just launched their solution to the problem: the Social Monitoring Console for Facebook Pages.

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Moderation Console Overview

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The new premium tool allows brand managers to manage multiple Pages, locate new comments on old posts, like and reply from within the console, mark Page comments for review, and receive email notification for designated bad words. The idea is to eliminate nightmare situations that can develop quickly on Facebook, and make it easier to maintain a clean community.

After registering with ContextOptional, you’ll be able to use Facebook Connect to grant access to your Facebook Pages, which will enable you to use the moderation console. The console is divided in six different areas: Dashboard, Pages, Issues, History, Reports, and Account. From the Pages tab you’ll be able to get a quick view of fan status per page, and have the option to click “Moderate Page.” Once in moderation mode, you can view, like, escalate, reply, remove, or go to each post on your Page.

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Issue Management

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Should you choose to escalate a post, you’re essentially marking it to be reviewed by your support team. Additionally, you can provide a specific reason and action recommendation to clearly identify why you escalated the post. Once completed, the comment/post will now appear in the Issues tab of the console, where users can then send the marked items to email recipients.

Perhaps the most useful features are the auto-deletion and bad word alerts. You can automatically configure the system to flag and/or remove comments based on bad words, as well as send out automatic email alerts for the bad words as they happen.

A few additional features include:

- All pages are consolidated into one place for easy review.
- All new comments appear in chronological order.
- Once reviewed, comments are removed from the dashboard.
- All deleted comments are archived for reporting and tracking.
- A history of all moderation actions performed are recorded for auditing.
- Comment workflow manages process.
- Auto‐delete feature immediately removes undesirable comments.
- Email notification of comments containing specific words.

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Try it Free

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The moderation console normally runs $500 to $2000 p/mo, but ContextOptional is giving 100 Mashable () readers with Facebook Pages a free trial of their product.

To receive the free trial be one of the first 100 people to retweet this post, but make sure to include a link to a Facebook Page you want to moderate, and follow ContextOptional on Twitter (). They’ll direct message you with the necessary details.

New Facebook: Hundreds of Thousands Organize in Protest

Although the latest Facebook homepage changes seem relatively minor compared to some of the more drastic moves the company has made in the past, there are once again hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of users voicing their frustration.

The most visible group to emerge so far: “PLEASE GIVE US OUR OLD NEWS FEED BACK!” (caps and exclamation point included). The group will likely cross 500,000 members this morning, as more users catch wind of their friends joining it via the News Feed.

While much of the frustration seems like the usual anger and resistance to change you always see when any major website pushes a redesign, I have heard a few valid complaints about the new Facebook ():

1. The “Live Feed” isn’t all that live. Seemingly, you need to refresh to see new stuff, as there are no alerts when new content is available. That’s not completely true: if you’re viewing the “News Feed,” you’ll get alerts when new content is available, but that’s not immediately clear.

2. The “News Feed” isn’t very good. The goal of the feature is to be a digest of what’s important in your network, much like “Highlights” in the previous iteration. My own opinion: I’d give it a B- … most of the stories seem interesting, though nearly 24 hours old at this point. Given the “Live Feed” now includes more information and is hence more cluttered, it would seem the “News Feed” should be more up-to-date to emphasize important happenings.

3. Facebook didn’t give much warning about the changes. Unlike previous iterations where announcements were prominently placed on member homepages, Facebook seemingly just flipped the switch on this change without doing much to prepare users.

Facebook did address a number of issues that members had with the previous iteration by re-adding information like new friends of friends and changes in relationship status into the feed, and by moving events and birthdays back above the fold. However, those issues seem like they were light years ago and mostly forgotten.

The problem here seems to be that Facebook didn’t add much in the way of new and exciting, but rather just made a few incremental changes that make sense from a UI perspective, but once again frustrate and confuse those that are resistant to change (and don’t read Facebook’s blog … or Mashable ()).

Will it blow over? You have to think so given Facebook’s history of surviving far more significant revolts. Further, the issues with this latest change seem fairly easy for the social network to address with small tweaks to the product.

Coke Zero Facebook App Searches for Your Digital Double

When big brands try to create novelty Facebook applications, the results are often disappointing (remember Whopper Sacrifice?).

It’s too early to make a final judgment on Coca-Cola’s Coke Zero Facebook tie-in, but the idea is fun enough that it just might work.

The Coke Zero Facial Profiler app aims to use Facebook () to find your digital double. Coca-Cola promotes its Coke Zero brand under the guise of “having Coke’s taste but with zero calories” so finding an identical stranger is an interesting tie-in.

The app is pretty simple. Grant the Coke Zero Facial Profiler app access to your Facebook account via Facebook Connect and it will search for photos you have uploaded of yourself and scan them with its face recognition software. If you don’t have enough photos uploaded or if the photos aren’t right for the software, you can upload a photo from your computer or take a picture from your web cam.

As soon as the app has enough information, you’re added to the database and asked to invite your Facebook friends to join in on the fun too. Once the database is large enough (how large isn’t specified, but it was 22% full as of this writing), Coke Zero will show your doppleganger.

Coke hints that you might be able to have some fun with the information after a match is made, but is playing coy with the details. If you decide you DON’T want your photo in Coke’s database, you can request that it be removed and Coke says it will comply within 48 hours.

Like iPhone apps, Facebook applications are increasingly being used by small and large companies to promote or reinforce a brand. Personally, I like the idea of this app and can’t wait to see who it matches my face with!

Facebook Is the Most Valuable Source of Traffic [Stats]

Between search engines and social media, there are a lot of different ways that people can get to your website. But which of these sources provides loyal users that come back to your site multiple times?

That’s the subject of a new study by ad network Chitika, who analyzed the browsing habits of 33 million unique users over the course of September.

According to their findings, Facebook provides the most loyal visitors, with 20% of those that originate from the social network in turn visiting the site they landed upon four or more times in a week. Among other social media sites, Digg traffic produced loyal users 16% of the time, while Twitter traffic was only good for 11% loyalty.

In the realm of search engines, Yahoo () provides the most loyal visitors at 15%, followed by Google () and Bing () with around 12% each.

YouTube Down, Facebook Wonky

YouTube is having a less-than-reliable Saturday as unscheduled downtime is preventing video pages from loading. YouTube embeds around the web are also broken. While the YouTube front page continues to load, clicking any of these video thumbnails will deliver a downtime message.

YouTube () acknowledged the problems on its Twitter () feed earlier today, Tweeting: “We’re aware some users are having trouble accessing YouTube videos. We’re looking into it, and we’ll update everyone soon.”

In the meantime, you could head over to Facebook () … except that too appears to be experiencing issues today: users report their timelines are not updating.

Are you having issues with YouTube and Facebook today? Let us know in the comments.

[thanks to Eric and Stephina for the tips]

See

Facebook Now Supports Latin

Facebook’s been on a multilingual tear recently. Ever since Facebook launched its Facebook Translations app, where Facebook users could help translate the social network into the world’s many languages, Facebook has added support for everything from Hebrew to Persian to even Pirate Speak.

Facebook (Facebook) just announced that it has added an interesting language to its roster: Latin. Yes, the ancient Italic language has made its way onto the world’s largest social network.

You might be asking yourself: why is Facebook adding Latin support? Doesn’t it seem like a waste of time to support a dead language? Facebook explains its rationale in its announcement:

“To students of Latin, the availability of the language on Facebook may be just what’s needed to narrow the distance between themselves and the venerable language. After all, the experience of studying Latin can frequently seem somewhat far and away. Even the readings prescribed by Latin teachers have an air of detachment about them: Cicero and Demosthenes, Caesar and Virgil. While students of “living languages” practice on subtitled films and in conversation groups, on vacations and with exchange students, Latin scholars soak in rare living breaths of their studied language, satisfying themselves with the occasional legal phrase, nursery plant, benediction or school motto. Recognizing verb stems and identifying vocabulary roots just somehow aren’t quite the same as ordering off a menu or asking for directions.

Though Latin has been long out of use, for some of us, it never loses its intrigue. As a native English speaker, I enrolled in Latin to supplement my study of Romance languages. I still remember reading a translated copy of “Winnie the Pooh” in Latin, and gradually working my way through state speeches and philosophic commentary dating from the Roman Empire. When I joined Facebook a year ago, I chose a Latin phrase, “dictum meum pactum” (”my word is my bond”), as the phrase that currently appears on my Facebook business card.”

Summary: A lot of today’s update has to do with helping students of the old language. Using Latin every day to interact with your friends is actually an ideal way to pick up a new language. And while we may not use Latin anymore, so many historical documents were written in the language that we cannot afford to forget how to read and speak it.

We like this update. A lot. Now I have a new reason to learn Latin.