The 9 Deadly Sins of Facebook Pages and Their Administrators

May 30, 2011 By 4 Comments

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

Filed Under: Facebook, Inbound Marketing, Social Media, Social Media Strategy Tagged With: , , ,

Realizing the Value of Time

October 17, 2010 By 2 Comments

An underlying theme of some of my recent posts have been the value of time. One of the main reasons why meetings are broken are because they take too much time and distract you from what is important. The reason why I was able to say “I love you” to my mom before she passed away was because my friend was a few minutes late picking me up. Both of these examples rely on the difference of a few minutes. If you could regain 15 minutes back from every meeting, you’d save hours per week (or more!) into your schedule. If my friend had been on time to pick me up, I would’ve regretted my last words to my mom.

Have you ever taken the time to break down time and realize how valuable time really is, even down to a millisecond? This Tungle video, produced by my friend Scott Stratten, breaks down time by providing powerful examples that will cause you to look at time in a new light after watching it.

If you can’t view this video, you can watch it over here.

A powerful underlying concept, eh? “Stop wasting time on things you can’t control, and focus on the things you can.”

Now, if I didn’t tell you earlier that the video was created for Tungle or if you didn’t watch the last couple seconds of the video, you would’ve thought it was just a motivational and inspirational video. One of thousands available across the internet.

But, go deeper than that and realize what Tungle and Scott Stratten have done by publishing this video. They have created emotionally compelling content based around the subject of time, the very issue that Tungle helps us to manage.

If you’ve never heard of Tungle, they are:

“…a calendar accelerator that let’s you easily schedule meetings and share with people inside or outside your business, even if you use different calendars. Tungle is not a calendar – it integrates with your current calendar, giving you the flexibility and control to connect, collaborate and get more done.”

Instead of a video about how to use their service, Tungle has created a video that illicit emotion thus causing you to want to share the video with your social graph. Think you’d have the same feeling if it was a video about how great Tungle is and how much time their tool will save you? Probably not.

The 71 videos that Tungle currently has uploaded to their YouTube channel, they have received a total of 83,428 views. Of those 83,000+ views, the above video has 25,132 views or 30% of all views and it has only been live for 2 weeks, as of this writing.

Looking for the underlying lesson here? Find ways to create compelling content that don’t just pimp your product. Tell a story, illicit emotion and give your community a reason to share your content.

Oh, and if you haven’t tried Tungle yet, go try it because not only does the tool rock, they’re team is pretty awesome, too. I f you want some more info about Tungle, I interviewed Tungle’s CEO Marc Gingras earlier this year.

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Filed Under: Marketing, Marketing Strategy, Motivation, Productivity, Social Media Strategy, Videos Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

The ABCs of Startup Marketing

July 10, 2010 By 7 Comments

Anyone that has worked the startup life before knows how different and difficult it can be and how important marketing and lead generation is to the survival of the company.  Especially when you’re first starting out, the win of a single customer could be what pays the light bill for the month or the loss of a single customer could be enough to put the company on life support.  For those of you reading this who work at a startup, if there were a set of tips from a successful startup that would help you be a better marketer at your company, you’d want to know about it, right?

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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Filed Under: Hubspot, Inbound Marketing, Marketing Strategy, Social Media, Videos Tagged With: , , , , ,

The Growth of Demand Discovery

July 1, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Today David Baeza, the Vice President of pretty much everything marketing-related at Citrix Online (client), stopped by to explain the growth and importance of demand generation, discovery and capture. You can catch up with David on Twitter.

Marketing has changed dramatically since the adoption of social media.  How consumers digest advertising and make buying decisions has forever been altered by the likes of Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and LinkedIn.

demand

I lead the Demand Generation team at my organization.  However, the teams name, as well as my title, only tell a small fraction of the story.  Demand, or the creation of it, can be broken down into three distinct, yet dependent parts:

Demand Generation

Commonly referred to as Awareness, encompasses traditional media such as Television, Radio, Print, Billboards, and so on.  These are the bullhorns of advertising.  In many cases this is a customer’s first interaction with a brand; consciously or subconsciously.  I read a lot of nonsense in pop media that suggests traditional advertising is dead.  I believe what is dead is the asynchronous nature of advertising.  It is evolving to become bidirectional.  We have social media and the broader social web to thank for the phenomenon.  Considering that the business models of Facebook and Twitter are predominantly ad based, we better hope that advertising isn’t dead.

While many people think they are immune to advertising, it’s simply not the case.  Many companies use traditional media to imprint or introduce a brand to the target market.  The introduction does not mean there is an expectation (in most cases), to buy now!  The advertising is designed to elicit an emotional response in terms of awareness or association with the product or service.  I’m speaking in generalities because there are many different approaches and theories, such as Direct Response marketing, Branded Response, Content Marketing, Branding, etc.  One of the primary objectives of Demand Generation is to have the prospect take their brand impression and move it onto web.  This is the first step toward Demand Discovery.

Demand Discovery

In this phase, an interested consumer would use the web to inquire about the product.  Such as going onto Twitter to ask about peoples experience with the brand, or engaging with the brand directly and asking questions.  They may look on Facebook or LinkedIn for more content and recommendations, or they may search on YouTube for a product demo.  They will also use the social web to seek out brand alternatives to evaluate what type of service or product best fits their needs.  During this phase customers seek out what is commonly referred to as word-of-mouth.  They are asking their friends both online and offline, about what they use and what they prefer.  During the Discovery phase the brand lets go of the conversation and hands it to the community.  Not literally, but figuratively.

This is the true test of the brands health.  If the product and the value proposition don’t delivery, you’re toast.  The brand can’t use the social web to suddenly make an inferior product sound superior.  This is also where happy customers along with not so happy customers do the marketing on behalf of the brand.  They will influence the buying decision more than any form of traditional media.

Let’s use the iPod as an example.  Everyone remembers the TV ad featuring the dancer with white ear phones playing Are You Gonna be My Girl!.  The ad could have promoted speed and ease of use, but it didn’t.  It turned a stale functional music player into a fashion brand.  In turn, it created an impression that this was more than a music player, it was a must have fashion accessory if you want to be one of the cool kids.  Their legions of fans carried the message from that point forward.  This leads to the final phase, which is Demand Capture.

Demand Capture

This is the sale.  Demand Capture, in my view, happens in one of two areas; search (Google, Bing, etc.), and direct traffic to the brand’s web site or retail store.  Frequently a prospective customer will use a search engine to navigate the web.  During this process they will be exposed to a brand via paid advertising (pay-per-click) or they will find the brand in the natural/organic rankings which leads to the web site.  The primary distinction between Discovery versus Capture, is the transaction.  The Demand is effectively captured by a search landing page and/or directly by the website.  The website can also be substituted or in conjunction with a retail outlet.

Admittedly, there is more than a little commingling between Demand Generation, Discovery and Capture.  The Demand sandwich, for lack of a better visual, now has a tasty slice of Discovery sitting in the middle.  The sandwich was bland and predictable, kind of link bologna.  Now it’s full of flavor and stacked high with choices.  I’ll take rich flavor over bland any day.  As a marketer and a consumer, I prefer choice.  I love the transfer of power and the infinite choices a customer has to aid in their buying decision.  This makes for an informed customer.

An informed customer has a higher lifetime value and is likely to become an advocate of the brand on the social web.  Another benefit is transparency.  The brand promise is clear, thus discouraging detractors or those that are not right for the product or service.  If you can prevent detractors from purchasing your product in the first place, better for them, better for your brand.

Marketing’s success does not hinge on traditional media.  The price of entry is a stellar product and an amazing customer experience.  If you have a small budget and a big dream, spend all your waking hours making it a reality.  Talk about your progress, what your creating, create a community of believers.  Those believers will turn into customers, customers become fans, fans become your marketing engine.

This is my view.  What’s yours?

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Filed Under: Guest Post, Marketing, Marketing Strategy Tagged With: , , , ,

Determining Social Media ROI

October 12, 2009 By 20 Comments

A few weeks before the Inbound Marketing Summit took place, Chris Penn and I were discussing what he should speak about.  Of that discussion came the decision to do the presentation on how to determine the ROI of social media.  Figuring out social media ROI continues to be a very hot topic not only for the social media geeks but also for big brands that want to determine success measurements of their investment into the space.

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

Please enable Javascript and Flash to view this Blip.tv 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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Filed Under: Business, Business strategy, Inbound Marketing, Marketing, Marketing Strategy, Social Media, Social Media Strategy, Videos Tagged With: , , , , , ,
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