When I speak to groups or am interviewed about Facebook, I am often asked to provide examples of companies that are “doing it right.” With well north of 500 million users who spend over 700 billion minutes per month on Facebook, companies are increasingly interested in how Facebook can be leveraged as part of their marketing campaigns. It’s only natural. Many companies jump in and set up a Facebook Page but aren’t really sure where to go from there. There is no strategy. No goals. No content calendar. Nada. The Facebook Page has been created and viola, all is done. Throw the Facebook logo on your marketing materials and everyone will flock to the Page. While you and I know this isn’t true, this is a consistent issue and one that I’ve run into more times than I can count.

As with any aspect of your marketing, if not done with thoughtfulness and some planning, just setting up your Facebook Page could become disastrous, frustrating and lead to abandoning something that could be a powerful way to build and connect with your community. Over the past couple years of working with clients when I was at New Marketing Labs, researching and writing my book and being an active user on Facebook, I have put together the 9 deadly sins of Facebook Pages (and their administrators). There surely are many other “sins” and many, if not all of them, apply to other social networks as well.

9 Deadly Sins of Facebook Pages and Their Administrators

Not having any goals

One of these days we will be able to stop talking about the need for goals in social media but so many companies are still just jumping in without knowing why they are doing it and what success looks like for them. You need to have goals. Whatever they may be, whatever success looks like for you, you must have goals. It could be that you want to gain 25 “likes” so you can get your custom URL. You could want your Facebook Page to become a top 10 referrer of traffic to your website. It doesn’t matter what the goal is, it matters that you have goals and a timeline for achievement.

Thinking it’s about YOU

It’s never about you. It’s never been about you. Make it about your community and you’ll find that you will reap far more benefits. It’s really that simple.

Page abandonment

I’m just as guilty of this as the next person managing Facebook Pages. It’s very easy to set up a Page, get all excited about it and then not touch for week’s on end. Not only are you missing out on opportunities to engage with your community on a platform where they’re spending an average of 55 minutes per day, you’re also hurting yourself with increasing your chances of appearing in your fans newsfeeds. If you’ve never read about the EdgeRank algorithm and how Facebook decides what appears in the newsfeed, stop reading this and go read this excellent article by TheNextWeb.

Acting like a robot

This is another one of those face palm moments that I have when I see a brand automating their content to Facebook. Twitter and Facebook are two separate platforms. Treat them as such. Do not post your tweets automatically to Facebook as status updates. Take the time to actually engage on Facebook. Create custom content that’s specific for your Facebook community.

Lack of engagement

If your community is taking time out of their schedule to engage with the content that you’re creating on Facebook, you can take the time to engage with them. Sure, every single comment or like doesn’t have to be responded to and sometimes you will have people there just trying to pick an argument with you or your company. You also don’t need to run down a list of comments with “Great, thanks” type comments. Use your best judgment and take the time to be thoughtful in your responses.

Inconsistency

This is the step prior to complete page abandonment. If you’re inconsistent with creating content and engaging in Facebook, then you can’t expect to have an active community. Not only will it hurt your EdgeRank from a technical perspective, your community won’t be used to the rate at which you produce content. You won’t be one of their “must check” Pages just like if you’re not active on your blog or other platforms, they will quickly move on there, as well.

Giving up too quickly

Just because there are 500 million people on Facebook doesn’t mean that within 3 days of launching your Facebook Page you will be reaching Lady Gaga or Justin Bieber levels. Success on Facebook is just like most other aspects of life: it takes hard and sustained work. You will not be cashing bonus checks a week after launching your Facebook Page just because you launched your Facebook Page.

Using too many tabs

Just because you can create multiple customized tabs doesn’t mean you should. Your Facebook Page is not your website, just on Facebook. If your Facebook Page strategy includes 18 custom tabs, slap yourself. Having a custom landing tab for your Facebook Page is an excellent way to carry brand consistency and to engage with your community as soon as they hit your Page. Having other content on another tab that may be relevant if they choose to “like” your Page can be useful to them. But, too many tabs and they will be confused, turned off and annoyed…the ninth deadly sin.

Annoying your fans

Just as you shouldn’t be inconsistent in your rate of posting content to your Facebook Page, you also shouldn’t post so much content that you annoy your fans. The fact that they clicked the “like” button doesn’t mean that they’re telling you “pummel me with updates and messages.” The fact that you can message your fans doesn’t mean that you should do it so much that it becomes annoying to you. Multiple times I have un-liked a Page or un-friended someone for too frequent of updates. This is your community and it can be a vibrant and successful community if you nurture them well. Always remember that.

There you have it, these are the 9 deadly sins of Facebook Pages. What are other “sins” that you see on the Facebook Pages that you visit?

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Photo Credit: Thomas Hawk

We were interested by some of the data including the prediction that social media will drive more business value than SEO by 2013 and that over the next 3 years Google and Facebook will decline in importance while something new (and currently unknown) will emerge as the most important website or service.

Want to see what else these experts had to say? Here is the complete ebook as a presentation. If you want your own copy, you can download it.

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Recently Mike Volpe, VP of Marketing at HubSpot spoke at Atlassian Starter Day in San Francisco about startup marketing.  Mike used his experiences over the past 3 years of spearheading marketing for HubSpot while it grew from 5 to 160 employees and from a few customers to over 3,000.

I think you’ll find this presentation really useful as it has all sorts of actionable nuggets hiding inside of it. I know I took down a few notes and already shot off a couple of ideas to my team at New Marketing Labs. I would encourage you to sit back, relax, and hit play because I think you’ll do the same thing.

In case you missed it during the presentation, Mike broke down the ABCs of startup marketing into the following:

-Avoid Addiction
-Blog Beforehand
-Create Convenience
-Data Drives Decision
-Employ the Exceptional

You can read a short description of each of these over on the OnStartups blog.

If you don’t already know Mike, you should get to know him. As any good marketer would be, Mike can be found all over the web on his personal blog, the HubSpot blog, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, just to name a few. He’s works for an awesome company and is a good friend of mine that I think you would enjoy following.

Were there any letters in the alphabet that you think Mike was missing? List them in the comments below along with a short description.

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Check out my video review of Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media, and Blogs
(affiliate link).  If you can’t view the video, check it out over on YouTube.

Click here to view the embedded video.

If you’ve already picked up a copy of the book, what did you think of it?  Did it give you a list of things to go do?

Disclosure: HubSpot provided me with a review copy of this book.  HubSpot is a sponsor of many events run by New Marketing Labs and Chris Brogan, President of New Marketing Labs, is a member of the HubSpot Board of Advisors.

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Outside of this conversation I had been bugging Chris to analyze my restaurant, Caminito Argentinean Steakhouse, for some time now.  Other case studies have focused on what we’ve done but not tearing apart the metrics.  Chris is a genuis at analysis and analytics.  So, I really wanted him to expand my knowledge and ability Google Analytics and other tools to properly analyze our efforts at the steakhouse and determine our ROI.  For those that don’t know, approximately 1.5 years ago we cut out 80% of our traditional marketing budget and turned our focus to our website, SEO, social media and other digital initiatives as a way to drive sales.  Surprise, surprise, it worked.  Since then we have seen a minimum of 20% increase in sales when comparing the same month the previous year.  But, one thing we never did was break out and track those individual efforts between the website, social media, and other areas we were spending our time online.

As part of his presentation Chris asked if he could use the restaurant as an example and do an analysis of our ROI.  What Chris found, in terms of hard dollars, surprised me and I think it will surprise you too.

You can check out Chris’ presentation, both slides and videos below:

Video

Click here to view the embedded video.

Slides

As I said, I was surprised at the actual dollar values but I wasn’t surprised at the result that Chris found.  For us, our entire focus has been on SEO.  We have used social media as a tool to augment that but not as a primary vehicle to drive revenue for the restaurant.  For instance, we have made a conscious decision to not set up a Twitter account where offer discounts.  It is something we’re considering doing in the future, but right now we aren’t utilizing social media in that way.

While this presentation gives you some information about my brick and mortar and the decisions that we face and have to make, have you taken these steps to determine the ROI of your efforts on your website, blog, or social media profiles?  If you have done this exercise, did you change anything about the way you spend your time post-analysis?

Note: This is the first post of many highlighting videos from the Inbound Marketing Summit that was held at Gillette Stadium on October 7-8, 2009.  All posts will be tagged ims09 for aggregation purposes.

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Don’t worry, over the next few weeks my blog won’t only be dedicated to the Inbound Marketing Summit.  I will still be yapping away on all sorts of other fun stuff.  I hope you enjoy these videos as much as I do.

All videos will be tagged as ims09 so that you can keep track of ‘em….

First up is Louis Gray who spoke at the end of Day 2 in San Francisco.  When Louis and I talked about what topic he should speak on, I asked him to talk about information overload.  In social media everyone expects you to be “on” all the time everywhere you are.  Couple that with reading hundreds of blogs, writing, holding down a day job and family, it can seem intimidating and become stressful.  In Louis’ presentation he discusses how he successfully accomplishes finding a signal amongst the noise.

For those that don’t know Louis, you’re missing out on some great content over on LouisGray.com.  You can also find him on FriendFeed more often than not.

Click here to view the embedded video.

If you can’t see this video in your RSS reader, you can view it here.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Are you marketing to different buyer personas?  What are some of the ways that you are executing an inbound marketing campaign?  I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.

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Today I wanted to bring you a video which was released while I was in Manila from my friends over at HubSpot.  It’s a funny video on inbound marketing vs. outbound marketing.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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On a daily basis we receive various forms of interruption marketing. While not wanted, I have grown accustomed to many of these forms of marketing and thus simply tune out when confronted with them. However, on Labor Day it was a different situation…one which I couldn’t tune out.

<rant>
I had traveled down to Watch Hill, Rhode Island with my fiancee, her family and we brought along our dog for her first adventure in the ocean. There I was, a perfect day to be at the ocean….approximately 85 degrees, slight breeze, no humidity and not a cloud in sight. “What a great day to relax and enjoy some time away from my hyperconnected life” I thought to myself. I had been doing some reading as waves crashed into the shoreline with my dog thoroughly confused at why the water kept “attacking” her as she tried to lay in the sand. Just when it seemed that all was perfect I begin to hear the roar of a small airplane. I looked up in the sky and guess what I saw? A small airplane trailing a long banner for Cox cable service. At first I didn’t think anything of it because we’ve all had similar experiences when relaxing on the beach. But, throughout the course of the afternoon I saw a plane probably another 3-4 times, each time with a new banner. Since there aren’t big billboards in the ocean or along the beach, companies turn to banners flown by plane as a way to interrupt people relaxing with their friends and family. I mean, really, do you think I’m going to run out to my local dealership to purchase the car you have a special on this weekend or a great deal on local cable service because of a banner that I had to stare up into the sun and squint to try to read….which is of course after I had to put down my book and have the nice silence I was enjoying disturbed?!?!
</rant>

While my rant is only one example of many different forms of interruption marketing, I think it is one that highlights why inbound marketing is so important. The potential customer is giving you permission to tell them about your services instead of interrupting them when they’re trying to concentrate at work, spend time with their family, etc.

Click here to view the embedded video.

For those not able to attend the Inbound Marketing Summit, it is being streamed live.

You can also keep up with all the chatter on Twitter about the Inbound Marketing Summit.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Mike will be a part of a top-notch group of presenters at the upcoming Inbound Marketing Summit on September 8th in Cambridge, MA.  As of the last time I checked in with Mike, there were only about 20 tickets left so get over to their site and sign-up.  Let me know if you’re going to be attending as I’ll be there as well.