We are delighted to announce that Hooks for Facebook has placed 3rd in the Constant Contact Developer Challenge. Specifically, Hooks placed in the Social Media category due to our integration with Facebook. The competition was certainly tough and we are very proud to have been honored by the judges. We want to thank Constant Contact for running a great competition and congratulate the other winners in the competition.
In this previous post I discussed how we used Constant Contact's custom fields to create a weekly recommendation newsletter for Hooks containing content that is truly unique for each customer. Since only the content of the custom fields changes from week to week, the rest of the email can just be a static template. Originally I had planned to simply build a nice email using Constant Contact's graphical design tools and resend that same email every week. Unfortunately, Constant Contact does not allow you to send the same campaign to the same subscribers multiple times. The solution we came up with instead was to make an XHTML template and use the Constant Contact API to create a new campaign from this template each week and schedule it to send. The Constant Contact API Java Client that we used to set the custom fields did not include functionality for creating and scheduling campaigns. We could have probably extended the client to implement the missing features, but in this simple case it turned out to be easier to post XML directly to the API REST server. The first piece of the puzzle was an XHTML version of the newsletter template containing all the
One of the greatest challenges with an application like Hooks is to keep users coming back to the site to update their recommendations. Without updated recommendations, the data in Hooks quickly goes stale. To encourage users to log back in to the Hooks for Facebook application on a weekly basis, we are relying on an engaging, personalized newsletter Maintaining an email list, managing subscriptions, and sending out customized emails are certainly features that we could have programmed directly into Hooks. But maintaining IP addresses with good enough of a sending reputation to get delivery into the inbox at the all the major ISPs is a time consuming and ongoing job. If you are a bulk mail sender, you have to really stay on top of your reputation by constantly monitoring black lists and delivery statistics. Since that is not our core business, we found much greater value in outsourcing all that functionality. Constant Contact provides an API that allows programs like Hooks to interact directly with the email lists in our account and to schedule and send emails automatically. Since the email goes out from Constant Contact's servers, we are not stuck with the chore of policing our outbound IP email
Hooks for Facebook can now deliver customized music recommendations straight to your inbox. Once a week Hooks compiles the latest recommendations for every user and sends them out as a customized email to each participating user. In addition to being personalized, the recommendations are genre specific. So users who choose Rock as their preferred genre will only receive rock recommendations. As always, Hooks learns from how you rate music in the application. So if you don't like the recommendations being generated, simply give low ratings to the songs you dislike and Hooks will recalculate your preferences. This personalized email marketing is done through integration with the Constant Contact API. By using the Constant Contact REST API, Hooks can automatically create and schedule email campaigns with personalized custom fields for each recipient. A sample of the Hooks recommended music newsletter is show below.
Hooks for Facebook is designed specifically to recommend music to you based primarily on music that your friends like. After all, aren't we more likely to have common musical interests with our friends than with people we don't know? The newest release of Hooks for Facebook now features a "Friends" tab to make this clearer than ever. This new tab allows you to browse and preview the music that your friends have recently rated. This is a great way to spy on what music your friends like and dislike as well as to get some insight on where your recommendations are coming from. Naturally, not everyone wants their friends snooping around in their music reviews. As always, we respect this and give users an easy way to opt out of this feature with a simple click in the Settings tab.