Throwing mud at a (Facebook) wall.

Posted: May 31st, 2010

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve heard enough about social media that you have thought about creating a Facebook page or Twitter account for your business. Maybe you heard someone talk about some social media success stories at a conference. Maybe you’re competitors are using it. Regardless, before you start flinging mud at a wall, its critical to have a strategy around social media communication.

We are all so busy at work already, why would we want to add one more thing to the list? Especially something that could be time consuming and might not get immediate results. Why do I need a Facebook Fan Page? What will I use it for? How will that actually help my business and who is going to manage all of this? These are all very valid questions.

Individuals can communicate with other individuals anywhere on the planet in real time. There are a huge number of tools that now allow us to communicate using text and this type of communication requires far less investment than verbal communication ever did. Having a conversation requires me to sent and receive many messages and cost money if it required a phone call to do it (until Skype came along). As a result of this change, we are experiencing huge uptake in social media use (SMS messages, tweets, online chats, forums, blogs, messages and emails).

Once you begin to embrace the changes that have impacted our ability to communicate with other people it’s easy to quickly become overwhelmed. If you’re just getting started, it’s very difficult to determine what is most important to your business because there are so many opportunities. You cannot do it all straight away and blindly mimicking your competitors is never a good choice. Social media is not free. As Charlene Li puts it: “Social Media trades media costs for time costs”. You have to make a decision on how to allocate limited resources.

At Think!, we base all of our clients’ strategy around three phases in a Walk – Run – Fly process. It doesn’t matter what you call it but the important thing to remember is not to try and bite off more than you can chew. Paul Cubbon from the University of British Columbia (who also helps Think! with client strategy and workshops) has a great analogy for this: if you’re going to eat an elephant, you have to start with its tail. Ask yourself; what efforts are going to get me the best results and what is the most effective allocation of my budget and time?

It’s harder to be strategic than it is to just rush in because strategy requires planning. Planning takes time and is more taxing than rushing to begin. Articulating plans also requires a lot of commitment. Planning to measure performance requires a commitment to execute. Effectively executing a plan takes even more time. Despite this, strategic planning for social media use is absolutely essential.

A clear strategy will show how your social media use and aligns with other activities to achieve your business objectives. This stops you from wasting time and money on ineffective activities and helps you to allocate resources to real results. In my next post, I’ll share the process we use when creating a social media strategy for our clients.

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Open your eyes and listen.

Posted: May 29th, 2010

Too often when people think about social media, the first thing we think about are the most popular tools. Facebook is getting publicity in the mainstream media because of some privacy groups. MySpace hit the headlines back when it was acquired by News Corp. Twitter was a success story because of its amazing initial growth. Foursquare’s mobile application is the latest flavor because it marries the physical world with your smart phone. The list goes on. The stories that are most compelling in mainstream media don’t do justice to the opportunity.

If you focus on the tools, you run the risk of missing the opportunities that social media presents to your organization because it becomes too easy to use immediate return on investment as a quick way to dismiss it’s value. Do not focus on the tools. Groundswell’s post method articulated this best: people first, tools last (as determined by objectives and strategy).

There are so many ads begging for our attention that the noise is becoming overwhelming: Facebook pages requesting that we ‘Like’ them, brands asking us to follow them on Twitter, paid search ads and emails filling our inbox (and that’s just online!). With the emergence of mobile technology, this is just the beginning.

Word of mouth advertising has never been so important to your business. We trust messages we receive from real people more than messages from advertisers. It is quick and easy to decode a message that I receive from my friends and colleagues because they are similar to me. It is far more difficult to ignore your friend raving about their last holiday than it is it drive past the latest billboard on the way home from work. It’s even harder to ignore your partner’s latest online post about how frustrated they are with the hotel they’re staying in or their tweet about the hair in the meal at the restaurant around the corner. People I interact with in my life have similar backgrounds and experiences to me. These are things that I’m interested in and can relate to so I take notice. Social media is word of mouth on steroids.

People have always talked about your products, service, staff and your business as part of their daily conversation. Before social media the conversation took place solely in the offline world; in bars and in living rooms, schools, offices and on planes and trains. You couldn’t monitor this very easily.

But social media has made it easy for individuals to communicate. Online communication tools are free and require very little time investment. However, our online conversations are often inherently permanent in nature (which is partly why Facebook is experiencing privacy issues – read my last post for more info). As a result, with effective monitoring you can see the conversation. This is dirt cheap market research for your business. Even more importantly, search engines allow everyone else to see it too. For that reason above all others you must take notice: there are 500 million users talking on Facebook alone, for over half an hour a day on average. (If you still need convincing of the importance of social media, take a few minutes to watch this video.)

Find out what tools are relevant to your target market, learn how to use them and at very least, listen to what people are saying. Learn what people are saying about your business. Prepare a response plan in case things get ugly. William Bakker from Tourism BC always reinforces that you don’t have any business being in social media until you have a solid product. In the good old days, you could create a business by marketing mediocrity to many people before negative word of mouth spread. Now, one person can tell the entire world about poor service or a flawed product in an instant. I would add only one disclaimer: you can learn a lot about what you offer (for free) through listening. Once you’ve learned to listen, you’ll find it easier to start to talk back.

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The future of Facebook…

Posted: May 20th, 2010

There have been very interesting developments at Facebook in the last few weeks. It wasn’t until today that I felt compelled to write about them.

At F8 in April, Facebook released the highly-anticipated Opengraph platform. This turned out to be a series of somewhat underwhelming additions to the plug-ins already available to websites through Facebook Connect. We spent some time at Think! on determining the relevance of Facebook Fan Pages as Opengraph gets rolled out and concluded that Fan Pages were more relevant to facebook users as a platform for building a community. While Opengraph would help to boost Facebook traffic by connecting websites to the social graph, Fan Pages are still an absolute essential component to marketing through social media.

Many people have discussed the corresponding changes to Facebook’s privacy policy and the mainstream media has played its part in sensationalizing these changes. Here’s one article that claims that 5000 people commiting to ‘Quit Facebook Day’ is significant in comparison to the millions of users flocking to Facebook each month…

For Opengraph to succeed, Facebook needs user’s profiles to become more open. No longer is everything hidden behind your personal network. At the moment, some trivial personal information is now publicly available, eg what you ‘Like’ and your friend list. However, its clear that this could be just the beginning and that’s why some government privacy regulators are pricking up their ears. Facebook (or whatever network replaces it) is an online reflection of our real life. People are mainly concerned about privacy when they have something to hide. If you don’t want people to know something, you have to question whether you should be doing it in the first place… Although, nobody wants everything broadcast to their entire personal network. That’s where the awareness problem comes into it. Facebook want you to forget to log out after each session so that you’re logged in to the rest of the web through Connect and Opengraph. That’s why Facebook buried the log out button within a menu. Facebook also have a vested interest in users not fully understanding the customizable privacy settings, especially for what information gets blasted into newsfeeds. For example, many people agonize over changing their relationship settings on Facebook after a break-up because of that dreaded news feed. That’s only because they don’t understand that they can turn off news feeds for their relationship setting.

As a user, I’m heavily invested in Facebook. All of my friends are there and I’m tagged in many photos I otherwise wouldn’t have seen. I’ve reconnected with people who would have been lost. That’s why Facebook has the gravity and somewhere in the vicinity of half a billion users. Part of Facebook’s success is attributable to the fact that users enter their real name. For much of the internets history, we’ve been anonymous when browsing the web. Anonymity won’t be the case forever. Multiple account logins are hard to remember and most importantly, our social graph provides amazing context for what we do online. Thus far, our Facebook profiles the closest thing we have to an online representation. Facebook have decided that they’re going to make a play to be our online profile, through Opengraph. This is a change in direction from where they started and what users and application developers thought they were signing up for.

Some commentators are calling for an open alternative to Facebook.

Many application developers are diversifying rather than operating exclusively on Facebook (including Think!). Zynga, the largest app developer on Facebook, are rumoured to have run out of steam with negotiations and are considering starting their own competing platform. It is important to keep in mind that half of Facebook’s users also use Zynga’s applications.

Facebook is not the best suited company to represent our online profile but they have the gravity. In theory, no company is best suited to this task. It should be something coordinated by the people, for the people, etc. In the real world, this is called a democratically elected government. The problem here is that governments are inherently limited to national boundaries, whereas the online sphere is not. The closest thing we have is open source.

Next, Facebook introduced the community page. Many large brands were angry that they weren’t notified. Here’s an interesting take on community management without control.

Facebook have now announced that Facebook Fan Pages with under 10,000 Fans (not a small number) cannot set their default landing tab to a custom application. Every small business who’s invested time and money to develop a custom landing page is no longer able to promote their brand how they intended on Facebook (because they’ve logically put their small marketing of eggs in Facebook’s basket).

Facebook is a very immature platform. So too is social networking as a marketing platform. Constant changes without notification will continue to alienate both individual and business users. Rather than opportunism, Facebook needs to manage user expectations more clearly. Online social networking is in its infancy and we will witness an amazing transformation in our lifetimes. Until today, I was almost convinced that Facebook would be the key player. Perhaps Facebook have made enough mistakes to create a real opportunity for competitors. (I wrote an old blog about Facebook having to make a big mistake to lose out now). Users want a platform where they can control their privacy. Diaspora is one company who see this opportunity very clearly. In a familiar setting, a group of college students asked for $10,000 in donations to get started and set a deadline of June 1, 2010. They’ve already smashed this goal, having raised over $175,000.

The upside; Facebook has the gravity but it will be interesting to see how this plays out. They could easily reverse any of these changes if the user-base revolts.

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