In the last few weeks Facebook has announced a number of new features throughout its site. The biggest change is the introduction of Timeline – a totally revamped way to organize your online presence. Timeline will change the way users share information, interact with each other, and interact with brands.

Beyond the launch of Timeline, Facebook developed ways to make the overall site more engaging and social for brands. They have made subtle changes to Facebook Pages, and more importantly, Page Insights. The number of Likes a page had was the be all and end all of a brand on Facebook. The more Likes a particular campaign received during its duration, the more successful the campaign was perceived.

Endless studies have been conducted in an attempt to understand the value of a Like, but these numbers may not matter much moving forward (e.g. 15 Stats Behind the True Value of the Facebook Like | Business 2 Community). One of the most important things for brands to notice about their updated Page is the number right below the number of likes, People talking about this. This number shows how many people are actively engaged with the brand’s page, posts, photos and applications.

The people actually talking and engaging with a brand are much more valuable to it than someone who clicked Like a year ago. This number will be the one that determines what campaigns are successful and what brands are really the powerhouses on Facebook. The importance of this number inevitably reduces that of the Like and therefore means marketers must change the way they think about Facebook marketing.

Many brands use some sort of Like-gating to entice users to Like their page. They may offer alternate content, a coupon or maybe the chance to win something only after a user Likes their page. This technique is used to pad the number of users that actually like a brand with those that simply want to download a coupon or watch a video. People talking about this is a number that accurately represents those engaged with the brand.

Facebook Insights also improved to show per-post reach, engagement, virality and more. Total number of Likes, general engagement and number of fan friends reached are also clearly listed and represented in a visual graph for page administrators. All of these analytics push brands to create content worth sharing and interacting with.

Updates to Pages and Insights hint at the slow demise of the Like button, while Timeline Actions demonstrate a revised way of sharing all together. Currently users can share a story to their wall through a status update, send it in a message to a friend, or click Like and have it appear on their wall. Actions allow updates to be posted to the user’s Timeline from an application or website after an action is taken. Applications become part of the user’s identity and integrate seamlessly with their Timeline.

These actions are customizable and unique to your application or brand. Instead of seeing, ‘User likes Brand’ after clicking the Like button, you can create numerous unique actions. For example, ‘User cooked Recipe’ (see above), ‘User ran a marathon,’ or ‘User watched Titanic.’ Each action and object can have a specific image and description associated with it that gets featured on the user’s Timeline. Read more about how Actions are used in the Facebook Documentation.

Facebook marketing is evolving to a new level – a level where the Like button is losing importance while social interaction and personalization are taking over. Marketers and developers alike need to take this into account and begin to demonstrate a better understanding of how to communicate with their users.

Yesterday, I came across this snippet of a Most Effective Agency acceptance speech from David Thomason (a fellow Kiwi and fellow planner):

“For some reason it’s traditional that the planning director is the one that gets to talk at the EFFIEs. But so many people had their way with these campaigns. In fact I’ve been thinking about what we’ve learned and if there’s one common theme across our most effective campaigns it’s that they’re the ones we had the biggest arguments about. Planning arguing with creative. Arguments with media. And perhaps slightly more diplomatic debates with our clients. So here’s to really healthy arguing!”

He makes a great point –that the effectiveness of a campaign (or, indeed, an agency) is the responsibility of everyone, not just the planners.

I like this. A lot.

The days of a planner spending weeks ensconced in an ivory tower before deigning to descend with stone tablets graven with a single beautifully crafted, internally cohesive strategy are over.

I’m firmly of the belief that an agency needs to work more like a rugby team and less like a relay race. Each player has a clearly defined role but the team can only succeed if everyone is working together, passing the ball when required and being prepared to step outside one’s position if the situation dictates it. Fluidity and collaboration are as important as the set plays.

A great brief (and, more importantly, a great briefing) is but the starting point of a great campaign. It is the game plan which should absolutely guide the work, but it must also stimulate and provoke the teams, opening doors to new places, new patterns of thought. It should be a document that creatives can write from, rather than write to. And it can’t ever be set in stone.

My good friend Richard Huntington (CSO, Saatchi & Saatchi London) is fond of the axiom that it is better to be interesting than right –after all, one can always check the veracity or appropriateness of something interesting, whereas it is much harder to add interestingness once you’ve convinced yourself that you have already landed on the “right” answer.

Once you move away from a didactic view of what is right, there is more room for collaboration across disciplines. Now, real collaboration is rarely frictionless, especially in an industry such as ours, filled with opinionated Type-A personalities. And friction creates heat –a culture where everything gets challenged and tempered will get us to better work than one in which a creative brief is simply passed like a baton from suit to planner to creative to production. I once worked at an agency where the work was consistently good, but was rarely great. The agency was full of terribly nice, polite English people who were always terribly nice and polite to each other while servicing terribly nice, polite English clients. It was all very “Keep Calm & Carry On” – there was no culture of challenging and pushing and shouting and fighting for better, and it showed in the work (which was invariably nice and polite).

Here at TAXI, we strive to create a culture where our work is open and up for debate. So we are in the process of putting all of our planners into one big office, working around one big desk, so that strategies and briefs can be thrashed around within the department. And we are creating a large comfortable lounge where briefings can take place and strategies can be collectively debated and refined, away from everyone’s individual distractions.

Yesterday, IT asked me what we were going to call that lounge. I’m thinking of dubbing it “The Argument Room”.