The Facebook News Feed is becoming evermore critical to engagement on Facebook. When you design branded social solutions, they need to serve as conduits for storytelling. 100x more people are likely to see the stories that your social product or campaign pushes out than will ever actually experience the product or campaign. This amplification through the Timeline and News Feed is inherently key to awareness and viral distribution of the brand’s message, but it’s even more important because those stories in the Timeline and News Feed are more accessible by mobile users (63% of Facebook users) than the solution, itself, today. This focus on the ‘story’ can mean success or failure of the program as it relates to actual business outcomes – the metrics that matter.

There are also other ways to have consumers effectively story-tell through a branded social experience: Rich Media News Feed Experiences. This is an HTML5 experience on mobile and a Flash media unit that is the experience within a promoted page post, or pushed out of a custom experience on Facebook (by either a user OR a page). Both can be activated and engaged with directly within the News Feed. Even into Q2 of 2013, these are rare for brands, but they are extremely effective at engaging users. Some, like Dunkin Donuts, Rovio, and Lexus have leveraged such units in their social repertoire. At Stuzo, we make sure that clients are intimately aware of the possibilities; one of our most successful Rich News Feed Experiences was for People’s Choice Awards this past season, which enabled fans to explore all of the award categories and vote for their favorite nominee. This gives the user the full voting functionality in-stream and exposes them to the main business metric for the People’s Choice Awards – votes – without the user having to leave their News Feed browsing experience.

When do you, as a brand, want to consider these Rich News Feed Experiences on Facebook? Here’s a simple list of questions to ask yourself – do you have:

• A CRM conversion point, like an email sign-up?
• An engagement conversion, like a social vote or poll answer?
• An awareness conversion, like a social good campaign?
• An off-site traffic conversion with teaser content?
• A lightweight social game that users could preview in-stream?
• A product that could be interacted with via News Feed?
• An inventory that users could explore in-stream?
• A service that customers could reserve in the Feed?

The list goes on, and the above should serve as thought starters. There is an array of potential use cases for Rich News Feed Experiences on Facebook, and to maximize engagement and conversion of your audience, these mobile-accessible, mobile-optimized products are an extremely powerful solutions for your digital and social marketing toolbox. If you have questions about Rich News Feed Experiences, get in touch today to set up a 1:1 conversation with a Stuzo Solutions Architect.

Facebook Open Graph Stories give users the ability to showcase their engagement within a social experience on their Facebook Timeline. For these campaigns and solutions, stories build awareness via exposure to the user’s Facebook friends and thereby generating earned engagement. Stories are absolutely critical to mass adoption of your social solution or campaign. The average Facebook user has 245 connections, and if a conservative 1/3 of them see a branded story from your product, then that’s 81 more people who will see a story about your product rather than seeing the product itself. Therefore, the stories should be designed first, even before your wireframes.

To strategically approach story design, you need to understand the building blocks of Facebook Stories. The options showcased below should be implemented as appropriate, depending on the user flow of your campaign, product, or solution. These features should be used only as intended or they could be rejected during the Facebook approval process or lead to a negative user experience.

To learn more about Social Story Architecture, contact a Stuzo Solutions Architect for a one-on-one conversation today.

Lightweight vs Quality

With the most recent changes to the News Feed and Timeline, it is more important than ever to push quality stories. Stories that include a user created message and are explicitly being shared to Facebook have a much higher probability of appearing on both News Feed and Timeline, as opposed to stories that are ‘seamlessly’ pushed ou to the graph as a result of an interaction. The lightweight actions that occur as a user interacts or engages within your application, without explicitly asking if a user would like to share, rarely appear in the Newsfeed or Timeline. They may appear as aggregations of a user’s activity or in News feed when multiple people take those actions, but these stories have contingencies.

It is not to say that lightweight stories should not be used; rather, they should be used when appropriate. If there is an opportunity or a likelihood that a user would want to share an action, then have them explicitly do so, preferably with a user-generated comment associated with that share. Lastly, by all means A/B test different types of stories and see what gets the most engagement and returns users to the application, as all brands and consumers are different, and best practices need customization and personalization. Whatever the case, however, your key metric should be referrals back to your campaign or solution generated by the stories that are being published.

Explicit Sharing – Facebook Documentation

Facebook allows applications to set the Explicit flag when publishing a story if the user clearly indicates that they wish to share a story to their Timeline. Explicit sharing indicates to Facebook that the story is of higher quality than implicit stories. Without explicit sharing application stories usually do not get individual posts on the Timeline and are relegated to the Recent Activity aggregation which is now buried far down in the left hand column. To ensure that this feature is not misused explicitly sharing requires Facebook approval.

User Messages – Facebook Documentation

This is the story you’re probably most familiar with. When sharing a story, give the user the opportunity to add a message. User messages provide context to friends as to why they like something or why they think their friends should care. Like explicitly sharing, User Messages show Facebook that the story is of quality; however, it does not appear to have as strong a weight within the EdgeRank algorithm. From a policy standpoint, user messages can not be pre-filled in any way; it has to be completely organic user-generated content. Keep in mind, this feature also requires Facebook approval.

Here’s a custom example of a User Story share:

Mention Tagging Friends – Facebook Documentation

This feature allows users to tag their friends within the text of their User Message; this is quite powerful because the story will appear on the Timeline of the user who is mentioned. This is a learned behavior and users now expect that when they type a friend’s name in a post field, they will have the ability to tag that friend. If an application provides the capability to add user messages, there is no reason not to add mention tagging even if the capability is not described in the UI. Recurring theme: this feature also requires Facebook approval.

Here’s a custom example of the mention tag story:

Mention Tagging Pages – Facebook Documentation

Much like mention tagging of friends, users can also mention Pages. Auto-completion of a user’s Page likes in a comment field is a good way for users to mention brands within a campaign or product. This feature is an excellent method for allowing users to pull brands into the conversation. Again, this is an option that must be approved by Facebook.

Action Tagging – Facebook Documentation

Notice the nuanced difference between action tagging and mention tagging based on the two images? Action tagging, like mention tagging, allows for posting to a story to a friend’s wall. If a user is taking an action with another user this feature may be used. Facebook is very strict when approving this type of tagging. The user must specify the friend they wish to tag, the action must be occurring as the story is published (not a future or past action).  The term “with” is also taken quite literally; if one user takes a picture they cannot use action tagging because only one person can take a picture. If the action taking place is virtual both uses must be in the app taking the action together. The user must tag the user, the application can not predefine action tagged friends.

Check out a custom example of the action tag:

Place Tagging – Facebook Documentation

Similar to action tagging, places can also be tagged in posts. After tagging a place using Open Graph, the place will appear at the end of the story in the “Jonathan ate a sandwich on Awesome Eating App – at Reading Terminal Market”.

User-Generated Photos – Facebook Documentation

Applications that encourage users to post photos of actions can create stories that utilize user-generated photos. These stories will include a large view of the photo that was applied to the action and will appear in the Timeline and, very likely, in the News Feed. To get Facebook approval, these photos must be taken with a device at the time they are sharing, and they should not be modified or have overlayed branding.

Final Thoughts

If you’re looking to build a custom social solution, design the UI around stories to push the best possible quality story with the most weight. To ensure that stories appear on the Timeline as an individual post, explicit or user generated photos should be used. Mention and Action Tagging ensure that an individual post will appear on the tagged user’s Timeline, once approved (some users require approval before tagged posts will appear), but they may only appear in Recent Activity on the poster’s Timeline, if Explicit is not used.

Giving users the choice on when and how to share will generate a smaller number of higher quality stories that will appear with more prominence across the Facebook ecosystem. While the data varies in each campaign or solution, the referrals increase dramatically with using Explicit and adding social context with user messages. Use the above sharing options where they make sense and in the way that they were intended by Facebook to ensure a successful campaign or solution that generates earned media for your brand or client.

To learn more about designing social and mobile experiences, campaigns, and solutions, contact a Stuzo Solutions Architect for a one-on-one conversation today.

This post originally appears on AllFacebook.

It was a sunny morning back in August of 2008 when Stuzo launched the first ever experience on a Facebook page for Gossip Girl. Back then, our engineers were still coding in FBML and the creative was constrained to 520px. Facebook and the branded experiences have come a long way since then. Specifically to pages, the canvas width has gone from 520px to 760px to 810px. While each iteration brought with it new challenges and opportunities for brands, we’re now in 2013 going through the most transformative change yet, and almost everyone except for the consumer is behind the curve on this one.

What change you ask?  The mobilization of the consumer. More specifically, we’re talking about the shift of consumers no longer using the desktop as their primary vehicle for online social interaction and, instead, rapidly adopting their mobile device as their preferred tool for engaging with apps, both native and on the social web. This shift in consumer behaviours is monumental!  One that even Facebook, with its vast resources, is still figuring out both on the user and brand sides of the engagement coin.

For brands looking to engage consumers with experiences on Facebook, this means that experiences that have lived on or have been promoted through tabs, need to now be promoted through the news feed, and most importantly all Facebook experiences moving forward need to be accessible via mobile. At Stuzo, we believe in creating a seamless experience for the consumer, regardless of what device they are using to access the experience. We deliver experiences that have both mobile and desktop specific designs, and consumers are automatically directed to the appropriate experience based on the device they are using at that moment. On mobile, our experiences live within the Facebook mobile web chrome, which enables consumers to engage and interact with the experience directly within the native Facebook iPhone or Android mobile applications.

Over the coming months it will be interesting to see if Facebook extends the functionality of the new More feature on pages that are accessed via its native apps on mobile devices. From our perspective, we see this being the perfect mechanism for enabling brands and developers to deliver rich mobile experiences that are accessible directly within the page on mobile devices. Regardless of whether this happens or not, the time has come where brands can no longer afford to treat mobile as an afterthought in the design of Facebook experiences. Data gathered from a bi-monthly fan offer program that we launched nearly ten times between Q1 of 2012 and Q1 of 2013 had mobile engagement going from 78%:21% desktop:mobile in 2011 to 41%:58% desktop:mobile in Q1 of 2013.

This drastic shift in engagement from the desktop to mobile was made possible only because the application experience had both a mobile-specific design and a desktop-specific design with a seamless experience for the customer, regardless of device. If we had launched the same experience without a mobile design and with no way for the customer to access the experience from a mobile device, engagement through the 12 month period would never have catapulted to such rates, and, in the end, would have resulted in nearly a 60% drop in engagement. It disappoints us when we think of the number of brands that we see out in the wild without seamless experiences and ways for their consumers to access optimized mobile experiences on Facebook, as these brands are missing out on 60% of their engagement potential; a number that will only increase through 2013.

If you have questions about branded social solutions, the future of mobile, or want to connect about your broader objectives in social and mobile, reach out today to set up a 1:1 conversation with a Stuzo Solutions Architect.

We no longer ‘surf the web’ – we now interact with brands and experiences in a simultaneously social and mobile environment.

Mobile is critical. This is something that brands have heard for the past couple years; however, the ‘hearing’ and ‘implementing’ have been severely disconnected. Countless brands have entered the mobile space, but most of their efforts fall into the “Let’s just make sure we have something available” category. Today, the first question when creating a new digital marketing campaign, program, or product should be, “How can we differentiate ourselves on mobile because that’s where more than half my visitors will be coming from.”

One path for brands to create effective and unique experiences is to successfully leverage the mobile UX triad: touch, gesture and voice.

Brands need to re-focus on mobile and can do so by allocating resources to research the mobile UX triad: touch, gesture and voice.

The most basic element to discuss is touch. When a user is interacting on the web, we must account for a large amount of information to relay content clearly, while relying on strong calls-to-action to send a user where we want them to fall into the funnel. For the mobile web, however, the amount of space available begs for a new approach to calls-to-action. Creating sections that allow for full touch interaction, such as Twitter does, creates a simple user experience for discovery. The user doesn’t have to figure out where to select (a text link, a button); the total area of the content is selected, and you are driven to the logical place for more discovery.

The term ‘gesture’ casts a wide net. You have touch gestures — full swipes, half swipes, pulls, pushes, and pinches — and movement gestures — waves, bumps, shakes, inverts, etc. Mailbox is a breath of fresh air for anyone that views user experience as an essential focal point of app design. Mailbox has one goal, reach inbox zero. In order to achieve this, they have created an extremely successful experience based off gestures.

Diverting from your traditional mail functionality has given Mailbox an advantage and solid foundation for success as they have turned email management from a job, to a more fun experience by allowing for the user to interact, rather than navigate to numerous areas while finding basic functionality./p>

Voice has the biggest delta in terms of current usage and potential utility, as Siri showed us on the iPhone 4S. Google Now is another type of digital personal assistant that has a robust voice integration, and it was named Innovation of the Year for 2012 by Popular Science. Table Drum, too, has created a truly unique experience for voice for their consumers.

By using augmented audio, Table Drum allows users to record custom sounds within their own environment and sync these sounds to actual instruments in app. This gives the user the unique ability to easily create a recordable drum environment wherever they are, with glasses, tables, thighs, fingers, books, anything.

These companies stand out, not because they are household names (in Mailbox and Table Drum’s case), but because they were able to innovate on the 3 key principles of mobile interaction. As our readers most likely have experienced the mobile version of Twitter, I highly recommend exploring both Mailbox and Table Drum to begin getting your brand’s creative and user experience juices flowing on how to best implement your objectives in the burgeoning area of mobile.

If you have questions about mobile, or if your team would like to discuss a potential mobile app, campaign, or product, reach out to set up a quick one-on-one conversation with a Solutions Architect today.

Coming on board at Stuzo I realized that we deliver great custom social engagements that can scale and are delivered with repeatable patterns and process. We have built common web services and technology allowing us to build those engagements. Our social technology platform determines what other kind of software can be used, right?  Why not call ourselves  a platform company; everyone else is doing it.

Why does everyone want to label themselves a pure platform?

Every product manager and owner stretches to find a way to call themselves a platform, but why are they seeking this label?  In the definition we find something very alluring, “determines what other kinds of software can be used”. If you can be the platform which “determines what other kinds of software can be used” then you rule the world. Hard to blame anyone for wanting that label.

Even more alluring enterprise customers want platforms. Enterprise customers are a smart group and have learned that platforms give them power as well.

• Standards across many organizations can be followed
• Shared repeatable process and practices can be realized
• Platforms provide flexibility for defining what can be built on top and integrate with them
• Open platforms keep them less beholden to one provider

In economic terms we have demand and supply. So the demand side has to work hard to define what they want and validate what they are hearing. While the supply side listens to the market, builds their platform, and then hopefully sends a clear message to the market.

Why don’t we call ourselves a platform company?

Business DNA. At Stuzo our culture is defined by fanatical delivery for our customers.  Doing our best to getting it right and doing right by the customer. When coming on board at Stuzo you don’t have to be told this; it is set everyday by example.

This does not preclude us from calling ourselves a platform company, matter of fact we are our proud of our social technology platform. It allows us to help organizations standardize across their business. We have for ourselves and help others build repeatable practices for social technology. With the type and amount of applications we have built and the integrations applied we can claim flexibility.

We are also privileged to work in between agencies and brands.  Sometimes using the full flexibility of our social technology and other times being adoptive of customers preferences. Our drive is in creating social applications on the Internet of things, this is fun for us. And we have a platform more diverse than anyone in the social technology space allowing three architectures – Compact, Distributed, Cloud. Like any good platform, here is a box diagram:

We are a social technology company first with a deployment proven platform. Our services architecture allows us to use best of breed services where customers require specific implementations or where partners provide functionality outside our core expertise.

How are we becoming a better platform company?

By going open of course. In our architecture we have three layers

Application: The framework for building applications. Our application development has been PHP and we have recently updated our application architecture to be a pure API model. Pure API model allows our applications to be integrated with native mobile applications ( if we build them or not ). Our web and mobile web front end architecture is build using Angular, however, everything on the back end is an API – Angular is our choice.

Internally we have standard applications, which act as a base for different categories of applications.

Services = API, implementation  Admin UI: We have a set of core services that are required by most social applications. These services are things we do not need to continually rebuild and range from publishing to analytics. An application can choose to use the compact form of analytics deploying within the application or leverage the shared analytics installation.

Admin = Admin UI, DevOps API: Our Admin infrastructure is also a set of APIs with an overall Admin UI using those APIs. In making our deployment options flexible and admiring all things AWS we think of our DevOps capability as an API of our own, though under the covers it cleanly wraps Capistrano and AWS.

The process of going open will happen over time, our first task is to make public the API end points for all of our services. We will follow on with implementations of some of the services as we map out the important parts of an open platform.

PHILADELPHIA, PA – April, 29 2013 – Stuzo, the industry leader in the design and development of social and mobile engagement, loyalty, and advocacy solutions, today announced the appointment of Richard Friedman as Chief Technology Officer and Yan Rozovsky as Executive Vice President of Client Engagement. The new hires come fresh off of the heels of Stuzo spinning out from its parent company, where it in 2012 was the fastest growing and most profitable operating unit within the company. These new additions to the executive team will play a key role in driving Stuzo forward with momentum as a newly independent company to deliver the world’s leading social and mobile engagement solutions and products.

Richard Friedman, Stuzo’s new Chief Technology Officer, is a seasoned, results-driven technology executive who brings to the company years of experience using software to solve business problems. He most recently served as VP of Engineering at MeetMe/myYearbook where he helped grow the engineering team while the business grew from 10M to 46M. Prior to MeetMe, Richard was founder of Ringside Networks, a social network open source startup. Previously Mr. Friedman has held senior positions at JBoss/Red Hat, Bank One/JP Morgan Chase, Bluestone Software and its acquirer Hewlett Packard.

Mr. Friedman will provide technical and visionary leadership to grow the 20+ member Stuzo Engineering team and drive the architecture, design, and implementation of all products going forward. “I’m excited about joining the team at Stuzo as everyone is passionate and committed to being the best at social technology and engagement. The team understands and has delivered a repeatable technology that best meets the needs of companies requiring to build custom social engagements throughout the organization,” explains Friedman. “I’m especially enthusiastic about how Stuzo listens to its customers becoming experts on everything Open Graph to delivering in the cloud or on-premise, that’s impressive for any technology company.”

“Rich brings a powerful and diverse blend of technology executive experience. He’s grown and managed large teams of engineers, delivering complex enterprise products, and social and mobile software solutions that engage tens of millions of users on a monthly basis. Importantly, Rich aligns with our culture of putting people and clients first,” said Gunter Pfau, Founder and CEO of Stuzo.

Yan Rozovsky, joining as EVP of Client Engagement, brings over 15 years of leadership experience and deep industry knowledge in digital, social media marketing and analytics. Prior to Stuzo, Yan was VP of Social Sales & Strategy at Oracle, formerly Vitrue. He was responsible for managing and growing Sales and Business Development efforts across North America, working with some of the world’s leading brands, agencies and social networks. Yan also held numerous executive roles working for some of the category leaders such as CoreLogic, United Business Media, QuinStreet, SAP and General Electric.  Yan has a tremendous track record of helping companies achieve significant revenue growth.

In his new role, Rozovsky will drive company bookings growth by building strategic client relationships and business alliances as Stuzo expands to meet the increasing demand from leading global brands for social marketing solutions that span to engage consumers in an authentic and seamless manner across mobile devices and the social web.

“I’ve been impressed watching Stuzo partner with the some of the top social brands and agencies in executing social and mobile programs across every major social network and mobile operating system by leveraging their technology and services platform,” says Yan. “I chose Stuzo because of the impeccable industry reputation and respect earned by being a pioneer in the social media space and operating with high integrity, always working to achieve the maximum value for clients.”

“Yan brings a proven track record of growing strategically oriented client engagement teams and executing go-to-market strategies to help Stuzo drive the new wave of products and solutions that deliver meaningful consumer engagement across platforms and devices,” said Gunter Pfau, Founder and CEO at Stuzo. “As we continue to expand our team with the industry’s top talent, Yan will help ensure the company accelerates key strategic partnerships and Fortune 500 customer adoption worldwide.”

“Rich and Yan bring invaluable experience to Stuzo as we drive forward to define Audience Relationship Management in a evermore connected and mobile world,” said Gunter Pfau, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Stuzo. “We are excited to have them join our executive team to lead and expand our technology and client engagement organizations in a time of growth.”

About Stuzo

Stuzo is a social technology company that brings to bear a platform: a combination of people expertise and technology that helps enterprises optimize social marketing activities and address social business challenges. The only remaining independent company out of the first five Facebook Preferred Developer Consultants (PDCs), Stuzo is the standalone leader in the delivery of innovative social and mobile marketing solutions and products. Stuzo counts as its clients Proctor & Gamble, HBO, Facebook, MasterCard, CBS, and many other Global 2000 enterprises.

Stuzo standardizes the technical delivery and amplification of engagement, loyalty, and advocacy solutions across mobile devices and the social web. The company’s flexible technology stack, which can be hosted in the cloud or behind the enterprise firewall, provides a repeatable and scalable foundation for the development, deployment, management, measurement, and optimization of social and mobile products and solutions. Stuzo drives efficiencies and scale for global enterprises with multiple brands and leading AORs in the delivery of social and mobile marketing solutions and enterprise social technology products. The technology combined with a seasoned, globally distributed team of social and mobile technologists, enables Stuzo to deliver clients unparallel quality and value on invested dollars.

If you are interested in finding out how Stuzo can help your business, contact: inquiries@stuzo.com.

To stay connected to the ever-changing world of social and mobile marketing, check out Stuzo Insights.

Stuzo is always looking for talented individuals and leaders, contact: careers@stuzo.com.

No longer are they taking a one-size-fits-all approach to business pages. Now the pages are context aware on mobile, with different layouts and actions available for brands, local business, municipalities, and more. Complementary to a product like Graph Search, users can be driven directly to a business page and immediately discover the most crucial information consumers need and want. With more than half of Facebook users who access Pages doing so on their mobile devices, FB has, for the first time, debuted an exclusively mobile experience that accounts for the different ways users use their mobile device versus desktop.

The redesign also amplifies the ongoing shift in the conversation from timelines to the news feed. Tabs have disappeared in favor of directly displaying the information on the brand page. Actions such as Like, Call, and Check-in appear first thing on the page, offering a direct conduit from customers to businesses. Next comes an expanded map, important business specific info like location or phone number and hours, and finally the ratings and reviews which tie your friends’ social opinions into the business. Facebook has turned the mobile business page into a resource for customers to discover important business information. You might be forgiven for thinking you’ve stumbled upon a Yelp listing.

Though primarily user focused, admins have not been left behind in this update. While they still cannot update important business information from the mobile app, they now have access to both an admin view and a public view. Facebook’s mobile tools continue to mature as mobile takes on more importance.

One issue that may cause hesitation for brands and businesses is the pushing of a Page’s organic content below the fold. The solution to that is more prominence for pinned posts. Despite this, Facebook is clearly continuing their push to encourage business to use sponsored stories and their various news feed and timeline ad products to increase viral likes and app installs.

While your page will be “home” for your business, you must now seriously consider Sponsored stories and ads as your primary marketing channel on Facebook. Additionally, parent-child relationships become much clearer for brands on Facebook; the user can now easily distinguish one from the other, and the ‘checkin’ feature is highlighted for child pages, like this example from Nordstroms as compared with a global page like Showtime (with no parent-child relationship and no checkin feature).

What may have appeared as simply a fresh coat of paint on business mobile pages is in fact a major reconception of the purpose of mobile pages on Facebook, the role they serve for businesses, and Facebook’s future as a social business utility. Alongside new versions of News Feed and Timeline, new products like Graph Search and Home, Facebook is putting a greater focus than ever on connecting the dots between local businesses, big brands, and the consumers that they share.

To learn more about the new Facebook Mobile Brand Page get in touch with a Stuzo Solutions Architect today.

AWS Summit 2013 & Facebook Mobile DevCon 2013

NYC on Thursday April 19th was a technologically happening place. Amazon held #AWSSummit at the Jacob Javits Center and Facebook was holding Facebook Mobile DevCon a block or two away from Chelsea Piers. While it would have been preferable to clone ourselves to attend the entirety of both events we decided on a more split approach, attending the AWS keynote followed by the Facebook break-out sessions.

At Stuzo we can and do deploy on premise, to enterprise clouds like Savvis, and deploy our global offering on AWS. It has been a cost effective, high performance, scalable and flexible solution. Dr. Werner Vogels, CTO, Amazon delivered an excellent (dare I say inspirational) keynote focusing on how far AWS has come, how it is being used, and thoughts on where it is going. He was supported by several case studies illustrating how AWS is used presented by clients from a range of industries. The Mortar guys are doing some interesting work with Hadoop and big data on the cloud.

What really resonated was the thought that we no longer weigh the cost of turning on a light. The cost of electricity is so low that we use it indiscriminately. Dr. Vogels then posited the idea of what would happen if we no longer weighed decisions based on the cost of computing resources? You can’t help but get excited about the future of computing, cloud or otherwise.

We then quietly and humbly left Javits Center walked down to Chelsea Piers and were able to attend the Facebook Mobile DevCon hands-on sessions. For us the following sessions turned out to be the right mix

• Facebook Login for Android
• Open Graph For Mobile App
• Facebook For Mobile Web
• Cross-Platform Apps
• Technology Partners Program
• Panel with folks from Nike, Fab.com, GetGlue, and Poshmark
• Office Hours & Drinks

There is too much information to go over each of the sessions so here are three takeaways.

• Simon Cross presented reference architecture for cross platform development. This clearly laid out the best practices for building integration with Facebook. In a diagram he detailed how things are shared and the impact of having a presence on all mobile platforms. Would be great to see some presentations and documentation come out around this reference architecture.
• Connor Treacy presented on building for Facebook mobile web, which he noted is still a large percentage of traffic is mobile web instead of native applications. In the short presentation he demonstrated integrating FB Login, Sharing and AutoLogin features.
• Finally the panel discussion demonstrated social engagement with your audience matters. Each of these companies increases their customer satisfaction, expands their customer audience and drives more revenue by working together with Facebook.

Overall a great day of knowledge, thank you so much to the sponsors of these events.

Stuzo has recently been named one of the Top Software Developers in the Philadelphia region by the Philadelphia Business Journal.  The annual list recognizes the Greater Philadelphia region’s most reputable software development organizations and we are thrilled to have received this distinction.

We are proud of our amazing team and thankful for our wonderful clients who have given us the opportunity to achieve this recognition. We are committed to continually executing at this best-in-class level as we help leading brands engage with their constituents through social & mobile web products and services.

If you have an upcoming mobile initiative, reach out to set up a quick one-on-one conversation with one of our Solutions Architects today.