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

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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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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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.

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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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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This “ideal customer profile”, as I refer to it, is actually called a “buyer persona”.  A buyer persona is a detailed profile of an example buyer that represents your audience – an archetype of the ideal customer.  The word “buyer” actually represents whoever your target customer is.  As Adele Revella explains:

The goal for buyer personas is to make them so real and persuasive that the company will be willing to take direction from them…Their [the buyer persona] purpose is to tell a story to internal audiences about how a particular type of buyer views the decision to buy the company’s product, service or idea.  The story must be real, even though the persona is not.  Persona developers need to continously interact with buyers to keep the story real, reiterating the buyers’ perspective whenever an internal decision loses its focus.

Want to see what a buyer persona looks like?

David Meerman Scott highlights Kadient, a SaaS application provider, who have successfully implemented buyer personas.  To check out a couple of the buyer personas they have developed, check out David’s post.

How can you develop your own buyer persona(s)?

While there are a bunch of ways to develop your buyer personas, here are just 3 that I think will keep you pretty busy for a little while and will help you to start to gain a better detailed picture of your ideal customer.

1. Analyze you current customer data – If you collect any demographic or user data, analyze to see what your average customer looks like.  Of course, the more information you collect during the customer acquisition phase of your sales cycle, the easier this will be to develop a complete picture.

2. Listen to your team – Listen to what your internal sales and marketing team tell you about interactions they have with people about your company’s products or services.  Are consistently noticing that they’re talking to a middle-aged woman with kids yelling in the background and who always seems to be in a rush?  That’s important to note.  You have a lot less time to get your message across with that person then you might with others.  Maybe your marketing team runs into the same type of people at every conference you set up a booth at.  Again, important to note, analyze and target your messaging towards.

3. Ask for feedback – Ask your customers for feedback on what they would like to see.  Did they really like that last website refresh because it made their life easier to find some information because of how busy they are in meetings all day?  That’s important to know.  Then you need to make your messaging snackable.  Marketing delivered to that persona in any other manner will crash and burn because they’re too busy to read it and just delete it or never get around to it.

Have you developed buyer personas at your company?  If so, have they been successful?  If you’re not using buyer personas at your company, what are you waiting for?

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Photo by: emery.josh

Do you think Nylabone or any other dog food/treat company would be highly successful running a television, radio, or email marketing campaign just before AM rush hour or just after PM rush hour?  My guess would be that they would have marginal success.  Why?  Because just before leaving for work and just after coming home is when people usually walk their dogs.  So, they have to think differently.  Come up with new methods.  I know my dog would love a treat if there was a little station that had a trial of the newest Nylabone flavor near where I walk her.  Catch my drift?

When it comes to marketing campaigns, everyone has an opinion and a stat to back it up.  Whether it’s that 100,000 people drive past a particular billboard or Mondays suck for sending email campaigns or this radio spot is targeted right at 7:56a because that’s when the radio has determined the most listeners are tuned in…there is a stat for everything.  Don’t get me wrong, stats matter a lot and I rely on them all the time.  But, what if, in addition to stats, we just used some common sense or talked to our friends, family or colleagues and got their opinion?  What if we experimented and then analyzed the results afterward thus creating our own stats?

I’m not sure if this all makes much sense but it’s at least what I’m thinking about right now.  What are your thoughts?  What do you use to decide what marketing campaigns to run with and when to launch them?

A few weeks later your company launches the product and your inbound marketing plan is working perfectly.  People are subscribing to your opt-in newsletter, signing up for demos, tweeting, commenting and digging everything they can find about your company and this new product.  The phones are ringing constantly.  But, then you find out something pretty disturbing.  The sales team is having a hard time converting all of these leads to customers.  Immediately you begin to blame them.  I mean, they’re wasting the leads that you worked so hard to get for them!  Finally, one night you’re out for drinks with a friend of yours who is on the sales team.  You ask them why can’t the sales team convert any of these leads and they tell you it’s because they never received any training on the product, they didn’t know about the timing of any of the marketing campaigns, and that made them unprepared.  So, when they’re talking to leads, they’re fumbling through the call because they’re learning as they go.

This little story highlights something very important but often overlooked.  As marketers we sometimes get so wrapped up in planning and executing our marketing plan to the rest of the world that we forget that we also need a marketing and communications plan for our staff.  We can’t just assume that they know everything that’s going on just because we do.  It is important that we are constantly aware of this so that we avoid operating in a silo or out on an island.

As I was thinking about this stuff over the past couple days, I came across a post by Douglas Karr on this very same topic.  Thanks to him, I found this funny video on the topic of internal marketing and communication plans.

If you have problems viewing this video in your RSS reader, you can view the video here.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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Photo by: hulksjedi

This week I sat down with several clients to talk Twitter. Their questions ranged from “how to?”, “what’s this?”, and “how much time do you spend”? Developing a great buzz strategy begins with the greatest questions of WHY and WHO/WHOM.

• Who do you want to be seen and know as?

This is the beginning necessary for an effective BUZZ STRATEGY. WHOM is it important for you to interact with? WHO needs to see more of you to get to know you? WHO needs to know what you do and how you save the day? WHOM can you engage to speak positively on your behalf? WHO can do business with you or refer business with you? WHO would be a good contact for you?

Answering these questions provides direction as to what methods to use to connect with the WHO, and even how often to connect with them. Identify WHO they really are and include their likes, dislikes, and activities, along with the standard demographic stuff. Then, go out and find groups of them. Where do bunches of them hangout? Is it online? In Twitter, in a forum, or in a chat room? Is it in LinkedIn groups, Rotary, Mother’s Day Out? Where you find many of them congregating is where YOU want to be.

• Why do you want to be seen and known by them, and interact with them?

Every English paper that reviews stories always starts with questions like “what’s the purpose?” or “what’s the plot?” These are the same questions you need to ask yourself, and then you can craft your success story on interacting with the WHO. What’s the overall outcome you want from this? Envision the happily ever after of this. And ponder on whether the tools you’re using to get there are actually getting you there or whether they are just interesting.

Do not go any further until you, quite in detail, answer the first two questions of WHO/WHOM and WHY. Doing anything else without answering those questions is merely a waste of time.

Visibility is first so that people will get to see you or even know that you exist. Next comes developing credibility.

• What can you do to create visibility with whom you want to interact with?

Easiest answer is to hang out where they hang out. Frequent their hangout spots! Watch and identify how often people need to hang out there to be noticed. For example, if you’re considering Twitter as one of your visibility tools, then check how often people that you know (who mirror the people you want to know) are Twittering. Now, if they’re not Twittering, why are you there? If it’s interesting research, recognize that it is and move on. It’s not a visibility tool – it’s something you’re checking out, that’s it. As you choose visibility tools, it’s important to remember not to confuse “activity” with “accomplishment”. Where do you really need to be to be seen? Pick TWO and get really good at being seen on those. Think of things that you want people to know about you and that you wouldn’t mind repeated.

• How do you develop credibility?

Credibility comes from interaction. People need to sample your character and competence. There’s an old saying that states, “People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.” How do you show you care? You interact. Let’s say someone sends out a great link to a site that’s very helpful for you? Then, let the person who sent it to you know. Give them feedback. Be lavish with gratitude. Be helpful. If someone is seeking resources, has a question or a need, help them. Send links or articles or another connection you have that would be able to help them. Refer them to books. Recommend sites. Be helpful. There’s a myth that “You give – then you get” in networking. And, while I think “Givers gain” is a catchy little phrase, I believe it leaves the impression that if you give to someone then you can expect to get something from them. That expectation may taint the interaction and actually keep you from gaining anything. It can leave someone with the taste that you’re not helping sincerely.

Better to think “give, give, give, give, give, and you will get from the great feeling of giving”. Then, when you get something directly from that, it’s a delightful extra! The goal in building credibility is creating relationships. Relationships, whether online or offline, still take time. In our instant gratification microwave society, relationships still take time, yet they are solid when built. People speak positively about people they know, like and trust. It’s important to find a few that you feel compelled to help and connect with, and develop, know and like – trust will come.

The object is to help people learn how to carry the message of you to people they know – that’s what BUZZ STRATEGY is about. Write down the WHO/WHOM and WHY. Then, find TWO avenues that you will use to connect with them. Then, find TEN people that you’ll interact with and watch the BUZZ grow. Establish this first – then we can talk more about EXPONENTIAL BUZZ GROWTH!

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Photo by: Unhindered by Talent

Network Solutions is hosting the Solutions Stars Video Conference to explain to small business and entrepreneurs how the Internet can benefit their businesses.  This conference will focus on nine content areas:

• Building Web Presence
• The Social Opportunity
• Start with Listening
• Strategy Drives Outreach
• You Need Social Networks
• To Blog or Not to Blog
• Visibility Through Search
• Rising Above the Noise
• Time Demands

While the fact that there is a free conference which you can watch from the comfort of your office chair or couch is cool enough, take a look at a short list of some of the presenters:

• Tim Ferriss, Best Selling Author of Four Hour Work Week
• Darren Rowse, Author, ProBlogger
• Chris Brogan, Vice President of Strategy, CrossTech Media
• Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos
• Brian Solis, Author of PR 2.0, CEO of FutureWorks
• Lee Odden, CEO of TopRankMarketing.com
• Jason Falls, Blogger, Social Media Explorer
• David Alston, Vice President of Marketing, Radian6
• Scott Monty, Global Digital and Multimedia Communications Manager, Ford Motor Company
• Rohit Bhargava, Author of Personality Not Included
• Guy Kawasaki, Co-Founder, All-Top

If you don’t know who any of these guys are then spend some time going through each of the above links.  Every single person on the list of 32 is someone who you should be familiar with!

What makes this so interesting for me is that the format reminds me of the Pixelated Conference Series that I participated in at the beginning of the month, thanks to Chris Brogan, Mitch Joel and Bryan Eisenberg.  I will definitely be tuning in on Wednesday, will you?  If not then you’ll be missing out a great opportunity to learn a lot about business, marketing and social media in just a couple of hours.  Did I forget to mention that it’s FREE?!?!

To attend all you have to do is return to the Solutions Stars Video Conference site at 1p EST on Wednesday.

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