MindComet

What are you doing with your Facebook fan page?

Imagine this for a second.

You visit a website and there’s some really good information on the homepage. It’s about a subject matter that interests you. Now imagine there are “photos”, “discussions” and “videos” links in the top nav. And when you click on them, the page that comes up has no content. What would you think? What would be your first impression? If it were me, I’d think that the site’s creator had abandoned the project and published anyways.

Doesn’t sound like a great experience right? Well, that’s the experience provided by a large majority of Facebook fan pages. The title of this blog post asks, “What are you doing with your Facebook fan page?“. On second thought, I think the question should be, ‘What are you not doing with your Facebook fan page?“.

Take a minute and evaluate your fan page. Are there tabs that serve no purpose? Is there a tab (think blue sky here) that would serve a purpose?

Why waste real estate?

If you’re not using the default fan page tabs, why not just remove them? Did you know that you could? Or, better yet, use the Static FBML feature of Facebook to create a custom tab! This forum thread shows you exactly how to achieve this feat.

So what am I really saying?

Apply the same critical eye to your fan page as you would to your main website. In fact, do this with all your social media outlets. As your social presence grows, these outlets will be the first impression your brand makes to new visitors. Make it a good one.

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Posted by Jeremy Hilton on Aug. 05, 2009

Get your S**T together Twitter!

Twitter announced on July 23rd that they were purging spam accounts from the platform. Given the recent homepage changes that are intended to position Twitter as a “conversation search engine”, this move makes sense.

However, I fear that legitimate users are getting caught in the crossfire. My friend over at doterati, Tara Lamberson recently found that her Twitter account had been suspended. The suspension date, according to Twitter Grader, happened on July 24th, one day after Twitter’s announcement. She’s not a spammer and, as far as I know, has always used the platform within the stated terms of service. To compound what is an extremely frustrating issue for her, she can’t get anyone at Twitter support to respond to her request concerning the matter—what a surprise.

Frankly, I am getting sick and tired of writing posts about Twitter not acting grown-up. I’m sick of writing about a platform that doesn’t seem to respect it’s users. Twitter, get your shit together. Offer timely support, especially to those users who were shafted by your mass-suspension! Many people have come to depend on your service, especially those who use it in a professional capacity. If the lack of a monetization strategy is the barrier for your attention, how letting me pay for your service? I’d happily give you $10 a month if it meant you’d lend an ear when I had a problem.

By the way Twitter, if you’re listening, reinstate @taralamberson

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Posted by Jeremy Hilton on Aug. 04, 2009

Facebook privacy directions

I’ve had some requests from friends asking how to prohibit 3rd party applications from accessing your Facebook photos… here they are in screen shot form.

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Posted by Jeremy Hilton on Jul. 24, 2009

Facebook, why aren’t you protecting your greatest asset?

Did you know that Facebook, by default, allows 3rd party applications to access your photos? What’s the harm in that you ask? Well, it turns out that some nefarious application developers are using people’s likenesses in some alarming ways.

Blogger, Cheryl Smith reported this originally on her blog. [At the time I wrote this, her blog is down, no doubt to Digg-effect like traffic…think of all the Adsense revenue she’s missing out on!]. Her husband was browsing Facebook, when he was displayed a “hook up” advertisement letting him know that “Hot singles” were waiting for him…pretty common ad on Facebook, except the face in the ad, was his wife’s. DOH!

Yeah. Fortunately for him, Cheryl wasn’t up to any shenanigans. She was the victim of Facebook’s inadequate protection of user data. A 3rd party ad network, had retrieved her photo and displayed it in ads that we’re presented to her friends. Let me be clear, this is against Facebook’s terms of service (TOS), and the ad network was disabled by Facebook. However, it raises the question about what obligation Facebook has to protect your privacy and in this case your reputation?

Having your likeness displayed in a comprising and possibly damaging context, by an irresponsible 3rd party, could have far reaching impacts to you. Imagine if you’re using Facebook for professional networking and your colleagues saw that ad. What impact would that potentially have to your career? As far as her marital relationship, what if this unnecessarily caused friction between her and her husband? Lets that take argument to the extreme and ask, what if Cheryl’s husband was the jealous type, who had a violent temper and Cheryl had been harmed physically as a result of him seeing the ad? Luckily they realized how and why this happened, took it in stride and found humor in it. However, I wouldn’t expect the average Facebook user to be able to “put the pieces together” and walk away with a chuckle. This is a potentially dangerous situation.

This is against their TOS, and the ad network was punished, isn’t that enough? HELL NO! The fact that Facebook’s developer platform allows programmers to explicitly violate the TOS, without any safeguards, is alarming.

Why hasn’t Facebook taken the job of protecting it’s users reputations seriously?

At the end of the day, we’re their greatest asset. Without us, their $10 billion valuation goes right into the toilet.

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Posted by Jeremy Hilton on Jul. 21, 2009

Brand Terrorists

Watch out, there are brand terrorists on the loose!

And yes brands, you should be really really scared of them.

Some of you might be wondering, what are they?

Brand terrorists infect online channels with negative information and perceptions about a product. In many cases, that negative chatter is well deserved by the brand. Brand terrorists are often created through poor customer service.

So what can you do?

For one, make top-notch customer service part of your DNA. Look at Zappos, as an organization they are hyper-focused on customer service. EVERY single employee, not matter what your role or expected level of interaction with the customer, must attend customer service training. That’s hard core.

So how many Zappos brand terrorists are there? I don’t know for sure, but a recent search on Twitter assured me it’s probably pretty low and confirmed that they have lots of “brand advocates”. Yes, brand advocates, the people who happily praise your brand in public forums and HELP brands sell products..no commission required.

What else can you do?

Extend your customer service through social media channels. Proactively mine actionable customer service situations, take care of the customer and transform a brand terrorist into a brand advocate. Relative to normal customer service overhead, it’s a scalable, low cost approach.

If you haven’t read my post, Twitter kicks ass…and so does Boingo, click on over and see a real world terrorist to advocate transformation.

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Posted by Jeremy Hilton on Jul. 15, 2009

Facebook is dead. And so is Twitter.

An interesting argument was made by Dustin Clingman, a local game designer, at the DMAF’s “State-of-the-Digital Media-Industry” event in Orlando.

He makes the point that Twitter, unlike Facebook, has positioned itself as an extremely efficient method for spreading out information with global context. He makes his point by asking the question, “Who found out about Michael Jackson being dead on Facebook?“

In his comparison of the two platforms, from a mass-communications standpoint, I totally agree with his point that “Facebook is dead”.

However, I think his comparison is short-sighted in a couple of regards and is clearly from the stand point of a non-marketer.

For one, Twitter has lost alot of it’s trust factor. It’s becoming a very noisy platform that’s been infiltrated by unscrupulous marketers, get rich quick schemes, hackers, hoaxsters and hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of bots (no one, not even Twitter knows the extent of this problem). Following the death of Michael Jackson, who found out that Jeff Goldblum, Ellen Degeneres, and Britney Spears had died on Facebook? These claims were all over Twitter, yet were all completely false.

Secondly, Dustin has failed to factor in the huge marketing potential that Facebook provides—the potential for word of mouth marketing in groups of friends with an implicit level of trust that’s unparalleled on other social platforms. According to a recent study by eMarketer, 34% of US Internet users bought a product based on a recommendation from a friend or relative. Compare this to a mere 5% who were influenced by a blogger (or micro-blogger).

So while were doing comparisons, from a social media trust and WOM standpoint, I believe that “Twitter is dead”.

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Posted by Jeremy Hilton on Jul. 02, 2009

Market with your four walls

It’s no secret, MindComet sells social media strategy as a service. Organizations come to us, not knowing where and how to start using social marketing effectively. We educate and help them, generally in exchange for money. But today, we’re giving away a freebie. It’s a very basic, two-fold strategy that, in my opinion, is one of the most effective strategies a business can employ.

Part one: Market with your four walls.

Four-walls marketing is not a new concept, yet it is really simple. If you can consistently deliver a unique and memorable experience to your customers, they WILL market for you. Top restaurants have been doing this for years. Do you think that the Cleveland-based chef and restauranteur, Michael Symon, spends significant amounts of money advertising his flagship restaurant Lola? No, his guests do his marketing for him - By the way, if you’re ever in Cleveland you MUST dine there. It is amazing - see what I mean?

So ask yourself, is your customer experience unique? Are you delivering something, whether it be a product, experience, or customer service, that you can reliably say you’re doing better, and not just marginally better, than your competition? Work on this until you can emphatically say yes, then move on to part two.

Part two: Encourage or ask your customers to talk about you on social media channels.

If you’re doing part one right, then you’re guests will already be talking about you to their friends. However, you’re goal is to have them talking about you in a public forum, like social media. Don’t be bashful, strike up conversations with your happy customers and see if they use social media. If so, ask them to post reviews on sites like Yelp, Urbanspoon, Twitter, Facebook, and their blogs. Sometimes people just need a little nudge and I guarantee that a good number of them will be happy to do it.

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Posted by Jeremy Hilton on Jun. 26, 2009