Facebook's Curated Timeline: Imagine the Possibilities

When Facebook announced Timeline, its new design to expand the user profile into an interactive archive, on Sept. 22nd, it set Facebook users (individuals and companies alike) abuzz with what the implications might be.

As Interbrand's Nora Geiss comments, "every Facebook user will be more of a souped-up, super specific, hyper-textural psychographic profile than ever before. This will create better ways for brands to provide customer-centric products and services to the people who actually want them." Already, smart brands such as Volkswagen are getting a jump by offering branded photos (touting the new Beetle, at top) that users can display, blog-style, at the top of their user profile pages to declare their love for the brand. 

Curating online exhibits so consumers can engage with high-profile brands and marketing campaigns via Facebook’s Timeline is ideally suited “for generating intimate engagement with brands,” says the Ayzenberg Group.

With Timeline, Ayzenberg sees a huge opportunity for turnkey engagement that goes beyond product/brand conversations to storytelling, behind-the-scenes access and creating buzz around campaigns as they’re running and/or prior to launch.

The California-based indie agency honed its digital chops with interactive campaigns promoting such video games as World of Warcraft and Resident Evil, and has created their ad campaigns that lived partially on Facebook but also leveraged dedicated landing sites.

 Their curated Timeline is presently in beta as a FB soft launch. We asked Ayzenberg’s Meelad Sadat when it will be public. “We’re on Facebook’s schedule.  Right now expectations are that they will take Timeline out of user testing before the end of the month.  As soon as it launches, we’ll have our Timeline page live and showcasing select campaigns.  

“Our agency page will be a living exhibit, and we’ll be curating it with more content from our body of work on an ongoing basis," he added. "We expect to create dedicated Timelines for the brands we work with based on client interest.”

For an upcoming Super Bowl ad, suggests Sadat, create a Timeline of your brand’s previous Super Bowl ads. Changing your look/logo? Show the evolution step-by-step behind the latest transformation.  

As for brands in its Beta test, Sadat told us, “Facebook created Timeline for individual users.  Therefore it’s modeled on a calendar of life events, starting with birth. For our agency “beta,” we’ve created a Timeline of our most recent work showcasing seven very popular video game brands and their campaign elements – print creative, TV spots, trailers, interactive and social programs.  We’re going to continue populating this until it’s an exhibit of our best and brightest work, quite possibly reaching back to our own birth.”

Marketing opportunities intrinsic to FB’s Timeline which chronicle identity and life-span, a digital deep dive of two magnitudes, makes the world’s largest social network brand friendlier in a timeless and timely way.