FBML Exporting

When you create a social campaign, the ability to add this content directly to your Facebook Fan Page or Application previously required a developer.  This is no longer the case.  With our direct-to-Facebook exporting functionality, you can embed your content using a simple snippet of FBML code.

Conditional Content

As online display advertisements become smarter, they will show you content based on the interactions that you’ve already taken with that ad.  As part of the campaign we just launched with Disney for the movie, Alice in Wonderland, we developed an ad that will dynamically display your content after the first time you interact with it.  For example, if you “Mad Hatter” yourself once, then every additional time you see that ad, it will show your picture and give you access to an exclusive trailer.  Give it a try yourself:

(Tip: if you click the top right section of the ad, it will clear your image after you refresh the page)

Expandable Ads

As many of you have seen, advertisements have the ability to take over a section of your screen that is larger than the ad unit itself. This type of advertisement is called an, “expandable ad” and they are becoming more and more prevalent on popular web sites.  We now have the ability to create these using the Sprout platform.  See the example of an expandable ad for our upcoming event, below:

What exactly is Ustream and how does it work on Sprout?

Ustream allows anyone with a camera and an internet connection to broadcast live video to a global audience.  Using the Ustream technology, you can setup a channel and engage your audience within a matter of minutes. Ustream has been used to live broadcast events such as political debates, talk shows, sporting events and more.  While Ustream offers basic embedding functionality, many of our clients asked us for the ability to embed a live broadcast directly into the Sprout Platform so that they can completely customize the look and feel of their broadcast. This is now possible with the integration of Ustream in the Sprout Platform.

We are proud to announce the launch partner for the newly released Ustream component, Dick Clark Productions for the Golden Globe Awards.  Here is the fully functional Ustream live broadcast within a Sprout social experience:

Let us know what you think and if you’d like to run your own Sprout campaign with live stream functionality.

Beauty product manufacturer Living Proof recently scored a big hit surrounding a free sample campaign for its No Frizz hair care product. Living Proof used a number of avenues to specifically appeal to its target demographic, taking advantage of Facebook’s ad system to supplement the Free Sample tab on their official Facebook page.

Read the entire article.

Two of the changes in particular that will affect your Facebook Fan Pages is the removal of boxes and narrowing of application tabs from 760px to 520px.   This will result in Fan Page administrators only being able to customize content in application tabs and those tabs being narrower.  The narrowing of the application width is a result of changes to the upcoming design of profiles and pages.   If you read the posts on Facebook’s developer wiki, you’ll see more explanation as to why they are making these changes and what’s in store for the future.  There are two posts on this topic: Facebook – Tabbed Profile and Roadmap Profile. According to the roadmap, these changes will take effect in late 2009/early 2010.

What does this mean if you have already customized your fan page and created a custom tab?  Chances are your content will be cut-off or appear distorted. If you used Sprout to create the custom content on your fan page, you can make the appropriate size edits to your sprout and then republish it.  The FBML code has a height and width attribute which will also need to be changed.  We will create a video tutorial for this when the time comes.

If you are developing on the Facebook Platform, as we are, I highly encourage that you keep a close eye on the Facebook developer’s roadmap.

Sprout Builder is now integrated with the leader in community-powered support, Get Satisfaction, to give our users a channel into the Sprout feedback cycle.  Users can share an idea, ask a question, report a problem and/or (if you like what we’re doing) give us praise. We have integrated Get Satisfaction widgets across our support section.

If you look at the articles in our support section, you’ll see that we have embedded Get Satisfaction widgets.  These widgets provide our users with a direct line to our support team and the Sprout: Get Satisfaction community. Whenever you see a widget that looks like this, feel free to fill it out and connect with us!

You can also use our Get Satisfaction company page to browse popular ideas, questions and see what other users have asked.  This is a great resource to see if someone else has the same concern or feedback that you have.  If it already exists, you can vote on that item to raise its importance. (see image below)

As always, we truly value your feedback and look forward to the on-going conversation around our products.

Jing is a lot like Twitter at first: when you try it you might think, “Interesting, but when would I ever use it?” Then you start playing around with it, see how others are using it and you’re hooked.

This is a guest blog post by Michael Britt, host of The Psych Files podcast.

Essentially, Jing allows you to take a quick (5 minute max) screen capture (still or video) of whatever you’re doing on your computer. If you take a video screencast you can:

• save the video to your computer as a .swf or .mp4 file (.mp4 is only available if you have a Jing Pro account),
• save the video to Jing’s servers (Jing is owned by TechSmith, the makers of SnagIt and Camtasia). Jing will send you a URL to the video which you can share however you like, or
• send the video to your YouTube account.

If you’re having a problem doing something with a program on your computer for example, you could take a quick Jing video and then when Jing sends you the URL (takes about 2-3 minutes), you email/IM the link to someone who can see exactly what you’re doing.

Here’s how you might use Jing with your Sprout: in my previous post I showed how a teacher could use a Sprout to handle all those annoying writing errors (like confusing “then” and “than”) which crop up every year in students’ papers. A teacher could create a Sprout with buttons for each typical writing error, and then link the buttons to a page that contains written examples of how to write properly or links to YouTube videos in which someone else explains how to avoid the writing error.

You could also use Jing to explain things to your students yourself and then embed that video into your Sprout.

To embed a Jing video into a Sprout, get yourself a free Jing account and play around with Jing. Make a video and either:

• save the video to your YouTube account, or
• save your Jing videos to your computer in .swf format.

In your Sprout, open Assets, click “Add Assets” and then upload the .swf from your computer. At that point you can just drag the Jing .swf file to your Sprout or just click the green plus sign below the Jing file and it will be added to your open Sprout.

Couple of things to note:

• When you make your Jing video you’ll probably want to make it small. Hold down the shift key when you’re determining the size of your Jing video and you’ll get some options you’ll probably want to use.
• The Jing video will play find, but it will use its own controls in your Sprout – it won’t work within the Sprout video component unless you upload it to YouTube and embed it from the YouTube URL.

Give it a try. Here’s a quick  video that shows how I combined Sprouts with Jings:

Works great.

- Michael Britt

The rush to create engaging Facebook fan pages is on, and we’re thrilled to leverage our platform to bring great brands to Facebook. Moving forward we’ll be showcasing some of the best fan page examples through our blog to get you inspired. For example, the band 311 just launched a new fan page to showcase their new album entitled Uplifter. Check it out and take a moment to listen to the entire album through the Sprout. We’re also happy to see REI’s page that features the latest deals from the REI outlet.

And, you can always see our latest examples in our Facebook fan page gallery.

In our conversation, Walter describes what the workflow looks like with Sprout as a key component of the process. In his example, he talks about a project with MySpace around a particular band’s music video premiere that needed some custom Flash elements. One of these elements was a slideshow with a countdown clock. This element previously took about one hour to code by hand but Walter was able to create this in 15 minutes using Sprout. The client received the final product and was very happy.  Here is the sprout that was created:

“If I had done that straight-up in Flash, it would have taken me an hour or so, but with Sprout, it only took about 15 minutes once I had my assets ready.  What makes it even cooler, is that I am able to get really great reporting on my sprouts.” - Walter Gross

Here is the entire interview: