One of my favourite projects I’ve been working on recently has been the RSPCA Think Pig campaign. I stopped eating meat when I was nine years old after reading about factory farming, and was vegetarian for 12 years (I’ve since failed, and am now pescatarian / attempting-to-be-positive-chooser). After going around ranting at people demanding that they stop eating meat due to the horrors of factory farming for a few years, and losing lots of friends in the process, I eventually realised that some people will always eat meat. So, if you’re going to eat meat, surely you should try and eat meat where the animals have been treated as well as possible?

That’s what Think Pig is about – raising awareness of the different farming methods, labelling on meat, and what they mean for pigs. There’s a great educational video and animation for the campaign, a downloadable shopping guide [PDF], and lots of other information on the Think Pig campaign site. Our contribution at NixonMcInnes was to create a Facebook Game and Facebook Page for the campaign. The game is a word game – pigs being so intelligent and all – where you get bonus points for answering facts about pigs and pig welfare correctly. People can then share these facts on their Facebook Wall, and ‘Like’ the Facebook Page to keep informed about the campaign progress and to discuss the issues around pig farming and pig welfare.

There’s been some lively debate on the Facebook Page about whether it’s helpful to promote higher welfare for pigs being farmed for meat, if you don’t agree with eating pigs in the first place. However, even though I don’t eat them myself, I’d rather people were well informed so they could make an educated choice about what (if any) kind of meat they eat.

So I clicked this Facebook ad today:

Cos I’m trying to put some weight on. Seemed like a good app, I started adding the food I’d eaten today and it counted my calories for me. Then went to put what activities I’d done. It asked me to put in my weight and target weight first so it could calculate stuff.

It then gave me this absolute bullshit:

What an absolute bitch of an app. Fancy telling underweight people they ought to lose weight! I don’t normally swear but this has really got me angry. How small minded and down-right dangerous! This app had the potential to be really useful for people trying to put weight on and they’ve just decided to only serve fatties.

I’m deleting this app right away and suggest out of support for the skinnies you do the same. I’m also going to write on the app wall about how rubbish this is.

Just received an email from my contact at Facebook with the following information:

As of tomorrow, it will be possible to create engagement adverts using the self serve tool. This means that you can promote business profiles and events on Facebook using the run-of-site (ASU) adverts and encourage users to become a fan of that page or RSVP to an event invitation directly from the ad space, as the (very basic!) examples below show:

New Facebook Ads - examples from Facebook - meat not my choice!

This is replacing the ‘social actions’ feature which allowed ads to link to a page but didn’t let users fan the page from the ad itself. This is potentially huge for brands/businesses with profiles (create a profile here: http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php) as it means you can pay on a CPC basis to generate fans. This used to be only available on the homepage on a CPM model.

With business profiles becoming much more like a personal profile, they are a great way for brands to communicate with their customers on a more personal level, with status updates, videos, competitions and so forth, e.g. http://www.facebook.com/adidasoriginals The ability to run targeted ads driving traffic to those business profiles means that users can interact with their favourite brands with just one click whilst browsing Facebook. the average CPC on the self-serve tool (http://www.facebook.com/advertising) is currently around $0.25, so effectively, a brand/advertiser can gain an engaged user/consumer for about $0.25.

I’ve just emailed back with the following questions so I’ll let you know what the answers are when I get them:

1. if someone clicks ‘become a fan’ on the ad, do they still get taken to the Fan Page or do they just become fans and not move pages?
2. can someone click the ad and go to the fan page but not click ‘become a fan’?
3. can you now only pay when they become a fan and not when they click through to the Fan Page but don’t become fans?
4. can you still get ‘endorsed’ by existing fans when the ad is shown to friends of fans by having their friend’s name and picture accompany the ad? AKA ‘Social Actions’?

When you accept a friend request on Facebook, you’re given the option to add detail about how you know that person. You used to be able to add ‘We hooked up’ here. Today I discovered that this option is missing:

Panicking that my whole list of hookups would have disappeared from Facebook, I rushed over to check my complete friend list. Luckily, the hookup data is still there. What’s more, at this point you can then go into the ‘edit details’ of how you know someone and put the hookup info in there:

I wonder why they removed the hookup option from one dialogue and left it in another? Unless this was an accident?  I know sometimes Facebook give different features to different users depending on age and/or country, so maybe this has something to do with that?  Does anyone else get the option to have ‘hooked up’ with someone they accept friendship from in the initial ‘add details’ dialogue anymore?