Facebook’s Subscribe: The Death of Fan Pages, or is it?

1
198 days
by in Social Media

Facebook’s intro­duc­tion of the “sub­scrip­tion” fea­ture for pro­file pages has blurred cer­tain lines between pro­file and fan pages for many indi­vid­u­als seek­ing to lever­age social media to build their own per­sonal brand and on-line pres­ence.  This is par­tic­u­larly true for many sales peo­ple, agents, etc. who are look­ing to use Face­book as a way to com­mu­ni­cate with cus­tomers and prospects.

Face­book fan pages were orig­i­nally cre­ated for brands like Coke or Wal­mart and expanded out to be used by celebri­ties, orga­ni­za­tions, places, and many oth­ers.  Many indi­vid­u­als who wanted to inter­act with fans, prospects, and cus­tomers also began to cre­ate fan pages since it was an effec­tive way of sep­a­rat­ing their per­sonal Face­book activ­ity from their busi­ness or pub­lic Face­book pres­ence.  In addi­tion, fan pages pro­vided lower bar­rier to entry in that it did not require the page to “approve” each fol­lower / fan / friend.

Face­book recently intro­duced their sub­scrip­tion fea­ture as a light­weight way for an indi­vid­ual to share his updates with a larger audi­ence.  Sim­i­lar to fan pages, a fol­lower does not need approval from the page to access updates and the news feed.  To many, this seems like an easy way to cre­ate a fan page like pub­lic news feed with­out the trou­ble of cre­at­ing a fan page.

So, is the sub­scribe func­tion right for you?

Let’s start by com­par­ing the three options:

 

Unless you have 5000+ pri­vate friends, a stan­dard Face­book pro­file page will most likely meet the needs for your per­sonal Face­book activ­i­ties.  You can even start to seg­ment your friends and updates (e.g. friends, fam­ily, work, etc.).  While you should almost always assume that any­thing you post on Face­book could be made pub­lic, it’s the best way to keep your polit­i­cal rants, shop­ping and lis­ten­ing habits, and pic­tures of your kid from being eas­ily accessible.

 

Enable Subscribe

Some issues and thoughts with the sub­scribe functionality.

  • Most indi­vid­u­als pre­fer to con­trol who can view their per­sonal updates and infor­ma­tion.  If you are using the “pub­lic” news feed on top of your per­sonal pro­file to com­mu­ni­cate with friends, you need to be con­tin­u­ally think­ing whether the post is for pub­lic or “friend” consumption.

Facebook Status Update

 

  • For those that are using it to build their per­sonal brand, you’re miss­ing out on all the ben­e­fits that come from a Face­book fan page – most notably report­ing, tar­get­ing, and the abil­ity to pro­mote and adver­tise your page.  If you DO decide at a later time to cre­ate a Fan page, you’ve now got to go through the process of try­ing to get your sub­scribers to like your new fan page.
  • Some die-hards have taken the approach of man­ag­ing both a sub­scrip­tion page AND a fan page.  See Mari Smith’s Fan Page and Pro­file Page for an example.

 

MariSmith1

Mari’s Fan Page

Mari2

Mari’s Pro­file Page

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  • The biggest chal­lenge this cre­ates is the need to cre­ate yet another stream of con­tent for your fans.  Do you post the same con­tent to both?  You may already be man­ag­ing your Face­book, Twit­ter, LinkedIn, Google+, Tum­blr, Blog, etc. feeds.  Ask your­self what the incre­men­tal value will be for yet another feed.

Finally, there is a grow­ing group of indi­vid­u­als – sales peo­ple, agents, employ­ees, cus­tomer ser­vice rep­re­sen­ta­tives – who are look­ing to Face­book as a way to com­mu­ni­cate with prospects and cus­tomers.  These peo­ple are par­tic­u­larly con­cerned with sep­a­rat­ing their work and home social streams and some may look to the sub­scribe func­tion­al­ity to meet that need.  There is an argu­ment to be made how­ever, that the dan­gers to be caused by pos­si­bly over­lap­ping per­sonal and work news­feeds is even greater and could end up dam­ag­ing either the employee or the com­pany they rep­re­sent.  Fan pages for each employee in con­junc­tion with a well designed social media man­age­ment plat­form (SMMP) such as One To One Global’s Mes­sage­Maker solu­tion can pro­vide a vari­ety of ben­e­fits both for the employee as well as the brand or organization.

As you’re look­ing to lever­age the power of social media, like any­thing else you’ll find that the tools and fea­tures avail­able all have their respec­tive pros and cons.  Before you blindly enable a new fea­ture within your Face­book set­tings, be sure you under­stand the pri­vacy impacts as well as your goals and chal­lenges with that pub­lic news feed.

 

 

Social Media: Winning the Popularity Contest (by guest blogger Frank Anderson)

0
219 days
by in Social Media

Like high school, the world of social media can be cruel and quite intim­i­dat­ing for some peo­ple. Here are some insight­ful tips to help find your­self on the top of the social media scale.

Join the issues that will bond your rela­tion­ship with the pop­u­lar forums.

Ask your­self, “What do I want out of Social Media?”, “What activ­i­ties will I ben­e­fit the most from?” If you’re a a small busi­ness, per­haps this means cre­at­ing a blog allow­ing you to com­mu­ni­cate with your customers/clients directly. If you are look­ing to net­work online with peo­ple who share sim­i­lar inter­ests, a niche social net­work like Linkedln can be the right place to start. Above any­thing, it is impor­tant to real­ize that the process of inte­gra­tion may not, and most likely will not, be easy. Pop­u­lar­ity is not some­thing you can do in your spare time or when you feel like it, not in the fiercely com­pet­i­tive envi­ron­ment that social media has proved itself to be. The con­ver­sa­tion has already started and is well under­way. It is your choice to get involved, or not. Just like the first day of school, take a deep breath and go for it.

To ensure you make the team, do your research.

Research what exactly? Your com­pe­ti­tion. A rich his­tory of expe­ri­ence has guided us to dis­cover how to for­mu­late vari­ables to pre­dict the win­ners of elec­tions or the out­come of opin­ion polls. Social media inte­gra­tion is no dif­fer­ent. Research­ing past behav­ior and plat­forms that have proven suc­cess­ful can help guide you towards the next fla­vor of online suc­cess. To begin, get a grasp of the land­scape to iden­tify where you need to be look­ing. Think about the dif­fer­ent out­lets -  Face­book, Twit­ter, blogs, the list is end­less… that are most per­ti­nent to your spe­cific space. While the pur­pose of research is to inform action, it is impor­tant to only act in a capac­ity that inevitably proves wor­thy to your ulti­mate goal.  Don’t hypoth­e­size on what the lead­ers in the space would do, expe­ri­ence what they are doing at this moment. Just as you relate to your peers, you must relate to your com­pe­ti­tion. Get to know them. If there is any secret of suc­cess, it’s found in the abil­ity to see things from another’s point of view. Exhibit­ing a healthy inter­est in the action of oth­ers is an essen­tial ingre­di­ent in form­ing a pow­er­ful mar­ket­ing effort. The aver­age crowd proves more inter­ested in his/her own name than in all oth­ers’ com­bined. But who ever strives for average?

Dress for success.

In the world of social inte­gra­tion, your first impres­sion may very well be your last. Social media is no excep­tion. Today’s norm of split-second clicks leaves no room for the face of your com­pany to be any­thing short of utterly fan­tas­tic. When you run a busi­ness online, your web­site should, in the very least, be well-executed, eye-catching, and easy to nav­i­gate. You don’t want to be caught look­ing like an ama­teur. What makes a web­site dynamic? Don’t know where to start? Ask. Rarely do we con­sider the oppor­tu­nity we miss as a result of hid­ing our short­com­ings. Some­times one needs the cre­ativ­ity and skill of a professionally-trained designer to mar­ket and pro­mote suc­cess­fully. Regard­less of what your means of orig­i­nal con­cep­tion might be, a sexy, easy-to-navigate page lay­out com­pli­mented by text markup will win every time against the care­less, cringe-worthy sites we’ve all seen before. Instead, spend the extra effort and if need be, dig a lit­tle fur­ther into your pock­ets, to cre­ate a web­site that pro­motes some­thing new and fresh. You will already be start­ing with the advantage.

Be con­fi­dent.

Sim­i­larly to the shy crowd in the cor­ner, the more intro­verted of online pres­ences are often over­looked. It can be dif­fi­cult to net­work with con­fi­dence when you are new to the social media game. If all you do is dream about the suc­cess you might one day exhibit, you will sadly most likely miss the oppor­tu­ni­ties needed to make them. You can con­tinue to come up with end­less excuses as to why this moment isn’t right, or the time is too soon to be proac­tive. But where will that phi­los­o­phy leave you? Instead, make net­work­ing a pri­or­ity, and con­fi­dence an unwa­ver­ing mind­set. The suc­cess of your busi­ness endeav­ors directly depends on the net­work you form with the rep­u­ta­tion you cre­ate for your­self. Social­ize with every­one! Social­ize every­where! And while at first you might have to “fake it ‘til you make it”, this mantra will one day hope­fully lead to noth­ing short of the real deal.

Don’t lie. False guar­an­tees will find you checked off.

While hold­ing a greater vision for your busi­ness is valu­able, it is more imper­a­tive to know your lim­its and grow in a healthy man­ner.  In social media, com­pa­nies canno longer be fake and get away with it. Peo­ple talk, and with the expanse of com­mu­ni­ca­tion through online forums, liars will not be suc­cess­ful for long. With the fear of being for­got­ten and ignored comes the temp­ta­tion to skew or exag­ger­ate one’s abil­i­ties. While herd­ing fol­low­ers using what­ever means nec­es­sary might appear entic­ing in the moment, this risky tac­tic will no doubt lead to a dev­as­tat­ing down­fall. Worse still, you’ll have only your­self to blame. You don’t have to look very far to see how a liar will inevitably end up in the opin­ion of their peers. Just as in life, nav­i­gat­ing the world of social media starts with respect.

Just as we all nav­i­gated high school at one time or another, we now find our­selves in the dig­i­tal clique oth­er­wise known as social media. If being pop­u­lar is not going to lead you or your busi­ness to the utmost sat­is­fac­tion then for­get it and focus else­where — life is too short to be any­thing but happy. But I think we can all hon­estly admit being on top feels pretty dang good.

 

Frank Ander­son is a social media and tech­nol­ogy writer and blog­ger.  He works with emailexchangehost­ing at the com­pany WebHosting.net.

iphone-video

The Best Mobile Applications For Sharing Video

14
241 days
by in iPhone, Social Media

One of the things I love about my iPhone is the abil­ity to quickly take decent qual­ity video and share it.  The iPhone does a good job at this out of the box, but there are many video shar­ing apps out there that pro­vide more flex­i­bil­ity, ease of use, and lever­age social media sites to share your cre­ations.   To help you select the best one, I’ve cre­ated a seg­mented list of apps based upon how they can be best used.

As part of my research in writ­ing this arti­cle, I cre­ated a good one page table com­par­ing the apps and their key fea­tures.  If you’re inter­ested in down­load­ing this PDF, please CLICK HERE.

1. GOAL:  Pri­vately share with a sin­gle per­son or a few people.

If you take quick pri­vate videos that you want to share with only a few peo­ple (e.g. a video e-mail) or per­haps videos that haven’t been edited enough to share to a pub­lic crowd, the eas­i­est thing to do is to use the iPhone’s e-mail client (here’s a quick Life­hacker arti­cle on how to send video if you’re new to this).  You’re lim­ited to less than a minute, but it works across almost all clients and recipients.

Unstreamed Options

If you want to send the phys­i­cal video file to some­one (as opposed to the stream­ing options I’ll show below), I’ve found a few good notable apps to make things sim­pler and more powerful.

Video­Mail (RECOMMENDED) :   A great inex­pen­sive app to fire up, cre­ate an video (or an audio or pic­ture) mes­sage and eas­ily send to peo­ple.  It has qual­ity and length default set­tings and keeps track of the peo­ple you send mes­sages to.

Medi­aSend:  If you’ve got mul­ti­ple pic­tures or videos that you want to send to some­one in one e-mail, Medi­aSend is useful.

 

Stream­ing Options

When you send an e-mail with a phys­i­cal copy of the video attached, you’re always lim­ited to both your e-mail provider, spam fil­ters, and your recipient’s e-mail fil­ter.  That’s why using ser­vices that store your video file on-line and stream it to your recip­i­ents is so ben­e­fi­cial.   It’s also eas­ier to fur­ther share or post mes­sages if you want to at a later time.

KinKast (RECOMMENDED) :   One of the best free video shar­ing apps out there.   The UI is intu­itive  and very well thought out.  It’s one of the few that let’s you eas­ily record and share a video (with no file size or num­ber of mes­sage restric­tions) to an indi­vid­ual (as well as the social media sites).   The free ver­sion only stores mes­sages for 30 days and has ads, but it’s a must have.  For $5/month you can remove the 30 day restric­tion and the ads.

Qik:   I was one of the early users and lovers of Qik – had it run­ning on my Palm Treo years ago.  Qik has gone through many changes since then – most recently being acquired by Skype.  The unique thing about Qik is its abil­ity to share LIVE video as well as video chat (sim­i­lar to Face­time).  The video shar­ing is not as strong as Kincast’s offer­ing – either free or paid.  Qik’s free prod­uct is lim­ited in that you can only store 25 videos of unlim­ited length.  For $5/month, their pre­mium ser­vice allows you to store unlim­ited videos.  I believe that Kin­cast wins this bat­tle unless you like live streaming.

 

Thwapr:  Thwapr is another option for pri­vately shar­ing hosted videos.   The videos are lim­ited to 5 min­utes long, but the ser­vice is free and you can store unlim­ited videos.  While it can share via Twit­ter and Face­book, it’s unique capa­bil­ity is that it can share via SMS (text mes­sages) – with­out using your per­sonal SMS mes­sages.  It doesn’t have an easy way to share via e-mail – one of the product’s big short­com­ings.  I had spo­ken and pro­vided feed­back on the app ear­lier this year to the senior man­age­ment at Thwapr – great group of guys -  but they seem to be cur­rently more focused on their busi­ness offering.

 

2. GOAL:  Share videos directly to Face­book, Twit­ter, & YouTube

One of the eas­i­est ways and most com­mon ways that peo­ple share video is to post them to Face­book or YouTube.   The nice thing about both of these is that you can use pri­vacy set­tings at either these sites to define who can actu­ally view your mes­sage.   For exam­ple, see this arti­cle on how to do this with YouTube.  I’ll also group Twit­ter shar­ing into this sec­tion since it’s the next most estab­lished social media site and peo­ple often use it for video sharing.

To be clear, our objec­tive is to quickly take a video and post it to one or more of these key social media sites.

Shozu (RECOMMENDED):   This inex­pen­sive app ($.99) and web based ser­vice allows you to very eas­ily post pho­tos, videos, and text to all your favorite sites with one click.    Han­dles Face­book, YouTube, Twit­ter, and MANY more.    A very easy to use and flex­i­ble app.

Pix­elPipe:  Very sim­i­lar to Shozu, but their iPhone app that I have been using for a long time has mys­te­ri­ously dis­ap­peared from the App­Store as of 8/2011.  Sup­pos­edly, they’re com­ing out with some­thing new, but there isn’t any detailed infor­ma­tion on what they’re doing.

TwitVid: (RECOMMENDED):   An excel­lent free app to eas­ily post videos to both Twit­ter and Face­book.   I wish this app would give you the link to the video it cre­ated so you could send the video via e-mail or text – but you have to go to the web site to find that iink.

qTweeter (RECOMMENDED):  For those with Jail­bro­ken iPhones, I’d rec­om­mended tak­ing a look at qTweeter.  It’s a great appli­ca­tion that you can quickly open, write an update/tweet or record and send a video to Face­book or Twitter.

 

3. GOAL:  Share videos to A Spe­cific Group Of Peo­ple (pri­vate or public)

Beyond Face­book, there are many appli­ca­tions and net­works that have been specif­i­cally designed to allow you to host and share video with a group of peo­ple — often with bet­ter track­ing, qual­ity, and a video blog look and feel.

Pos­ter­ous (RECOMMENDED):   Pos­ter­ous and Tum­blr (see next) are very sim­i­lar.  Both allow you to cre­ate a pub­lic or a pri­vate stream/blog that includes video (as well as audio, pics, text, etc.).  Between the two, I like Pos­ter­ous’ UI more and the fact that you’re not lim­ited to video length.  In addi­tion, Pos­ter­ous seems to inte­grate bet­ter with Twit­ter and Facebook.

Tum­blr:  Very pop­u­lar self-blogging site with strong video shar­ing capa­bil­i­ties.   I do like that it allows a sin­gle pass­word pro­tected blog (instead of forc­ing peo­ple to sign-up to view a pri­vate stream).

Social­Cam (RECOMMENDED):  Next to Kin­cast, I think Social­Cam has one of the best user inter­faces for video record­ing and shar­ing.  In addi­tion to being able to host and share videos via the Social­Cam site, it eas­ily allows you to share the videos to Face­book, Twit­ter, Pos­ter­ous, Tum­blr, Drop­Box, e-mail, and SMS.  My only com­plaint is that it doesn’t address the need for pri­vate shar­ing very well – if some­one is fol­low­ing you, they can see all your videos.  With a minor change to sim­ply allow for videos not to auto­mat­i­cally show up in your ‘stream’ this would be great.

Vlix:  A decent alter­na­tive appli­ca­tion.    While it lim­its you to only 60 sec­onds per video, the shar­ing options are pow­er­ful (Face­book, Twit­ter, YouTube) and it also includes some cool video edit­ing and basic open­ing / clos­ing titles for per­son­al­iza­tion.   Allows for pub­lic and pri­vate video feeds as well.

Tout:  Think of Tout as Twit­ter for video.   It’s sim­i­lar to Vlix, except now the videos are lim­ited to only 15 sec­onds.   What makes Tout inter­est­ing is that they have some celebri­ties using it includ­ing Jeff Probst, Mitt Rom­ney, Dana White, and oth­ers.  The 15 sec­ond lim­i­ta­tion is inter­est­ing, but even lis­ten­ing to Probst’s Tout’s, he was often get­ting cut off mid sentence.

 

Sum­mary

While I’d love to have a sin­gle app to use for all things, it really does vary.  My top favorites from the list are Video­Mail, Kin­cast, qTweeter, Pos­ter­ous, and Social­Cam.  If I had to pick one, I’d go with Kin­cast.   A dis­cus­sion on video edit­ing on the iPhone will have to be addressed another day!

Please down­load and play with them and tell me which ones are your favorites (or why you hate mine).  Please also let me know if I’ve missed great ones that you use.  Happy sharing!

iphone-video

Table Of The Top Video Sharing Applications For The iPhone

4
244 days
by in iPhone, Jailbreak, Social Media

One of the things I love about my iPhone is the abil­ity to quickly take decent qual­ity video and share it.  The iPhone does a good job at this out of the box, but there are many video shar­ing apps out there that pro­vide more flex­i­bil­ity, ease of use, and lever­ag­ing social media sites to share your cre­ations.   To help you select the best one, I’m writ­ing an arti­cle for either SocialMediaToday.com or Tech­no­rati with a seg­mented list of the top new video apps.

As part of my research in writ­ing this arti­cle, I cre­ated a good one page table in PDF for­mat com­par­ing the apps and their key fea­tures.  These appli­ca­tions include KinKast, Video­Mail, Qik, Thwapr, Social­Cam, Pos­ter­ous, Vlix, Tum­blr, and many oth­ers.  The arti­cle should be live soon, but I thought I’d go ahead and post the one pager PDF to my blog for those that have asked for it.

Please let me know if there are any addi­tions or cor­rec­tions to the table and I’ll update it.

Feel free to down­load the PDF by click­ing this link or the image below:.

 

 

 

People Yelling

How To Repair the Social Media Disconnect Between Brands and Consumers

0
263 days
by in Social Media

Look at your Face­book, Twit­ter, Google+, etc. news feed.   Does it increas­ingly feel like you’re sit­ting in mul­ti­ple rooms with hun­dreds, if not thou­sands, of peo­ple yelling at you to read their update, click their link, or play their video?  The con­tent that you want to read and engage with is usu­ally mixed in spam and unre­lated con­tent – often from the same brand or person.

Brands have many chal­lenges to over­come when it comes to social media.   They first must con­vince you to visit, like or fol­low them and then must deliver a steady stream of valu­able con­tent.    Socially irrel­e­vant con­tent will most likely result in either a brand’s con­tent being ignored or unliked.   At worst, that invest­ment in social media could result in dam­age to a brand or even a lost customer.

The sim­ple answer to this chal­lenge is seg­men­ta­tion and tar­get­ing – a con­cept which is far from new for mar­keters.   (more…)

MM Social Smaller Logo

Press Release: One to One Global Launches MessageMaker Social, A Social Media Management System For Deploying Large-Scale Social Marketing

0
298 days
by in Social Media

Boston, Mass.—July 27, 2011 – One to One Global, an inter­ac­tive mar­ket­ing and social tech­nol­ogy firm, today announced the avail­abil­ity of Mes­sage­Maker Social™, a social media man­age­ment sys­tem that allows com­pa­nies to fully lever­age the power of social media. Mes­sage­Maker Social enables brands to pub­lish, man­age and mea­sure highly seg­mented, local­ized and tar­geted con­tent to fans and fol­lowers across many social networks.

“As we all spend more and more time on social net­works and mobile devices, it is essen­tial for com­pa­nies to con­nect with cus­tomers through the peo­ple, brands and local voices they already know and trust,” said Chris Heit­mann, man­ag­ing direc­tor of One to One’s Con­nect divi­sion. “To do so, they need the right infra­struc­ture to man­age a large-scale social presence–one that allows them to deliver highly rel­e­vant, per­son­al­ized and local­ized content.”

Mar­keters today are fac­ing an enor­mous prob­lem imple­ment­ing their social media strate­gies. Most have learned the value of seg­ment­ing their mes­sages across e-mail, print and broad­cast but have yet to learn how to local­ize and seg­ment con­tent across social media net­works and as a result are not max­i­miz­ing their invest­ment in social.

The Mes­sage­Maker Social SaaS plat­form allows com­pa­nies to:

  • ENGAGE WITH RELEVANT CONTENT – Mes­sage­Maker Social helps grow fans and fol­low­ers while increas­ing engage­ment by let­ting mar­keters tar­get con­tent to spe­cific social inter­ac­tion points based on geo­graph­i­cal, sales rep or prod­uct interest.
  • ENSURE BRAND INTEGRITY – Mes­sage­Maker Social ensures brand com­pli­ance and con­sis­tency across all your company’s Pages and accounts, while also allow­ing for dynamic and per­son­al­ized elements.
  • UNDERSTAND ACTIVITY AND ENGAGEMENT – Mes­sage­Maker Social’s ana­lyt­ics and report­ing capa­bil­i­ties facil­i­tate greater insight into cus­tomer and employee activ­i­ties and pro­vides vis­i­bil­ity across all social media chan­nels help­ing to max­i­mize con­tent, cam­paigns and connections.

The most recent cat­e­gory to emerge in the social media busi­ness soft­ware indus­try is social media man­age­ment sys­tems (SMMS) and demand for SMMS solu­tions is explod­ing. This is due in part to many mar­keters real­iz­ing the need for broad and long-term social media strate­gies. In fact, nearly four in 10 inter­ac­tive mar­keters have already devel­oped a long-term plan, while another 36% plan to in the next 12 months.*

“To remain com­pet­i­tive, it is imper­a­tive for today’s enter­prise mar­keters to engage in social at every stage of the cus­tomer life­cy­cle,” Chris added. “Suc­cess­ful social media mar­ket­ing requires the right mes­sage, at the right time, in the right brand voice–to con­nect with thou­sands of social end­points includ­ing employees.”

For addi­tional infor­ma­tion please visit www.messagemaker.com/social or fol­low us on Twit­ter @msgmkrsocial.

About One to One
Mes­sage­Maker Social is a web-based social media man­age­ment sys­tem (SMMS) from One to One Con­nect, a divi­sion of One to One Global. One to One Con­nect has over 10 years of expe­ri­ence work­ing with com­pa­nies such as UPS, Sun­Trust, and Gap Inc., strength­en­ing brand rela­tion­ships by deliv­er­ing mea­sur­able con­tent, mes­sages and ROI across a broad spec­trum of per­mis­sion mar­ket­ing chan­nels includ­ing social, email, mobile and apps.

One to One Global is an inde­pen­dent inter­ac­tive mar­ket­ing and social tech­nol­ogy firm with offices in Boston, Lon­don, Sin­ga­pore and Sao Paulo. Founded in 1997, the firm cre­atively employs dig­i­tal, mobile and social media along with advanced research ser­vices to cre­ate mean­ing­ful con­nec­tions between con­sumers and brands. One to One’s vision is to be the lead­ing Human Expe­ri­ence mar­ket­ing firm. For more infor­ma­tion please visit www.onetooneglobal.com or fol­low us on Twit­ter @onetooneglobal53.

Mes­sage­Maker Social is a reg­is­tered trade­mark of One to One Global, Inc.
*“Accel­er­at­ing your Social Matu­rity” For­rester Research Inc., June 2011

Donut-Maker-Fail

How The Entenmann’s / Casey Anthony Twitter Debacle Was Actually A Success

0
314 days
by in Social Media

For those that missed the HUGE news, Like­able Media issued a sin­gle tweet on behalf of their client Entenmann’s that make a tongue in cheek joke about the Casey Anthony Trial.

Cue online right­eous indig­na­tion by peo­ple with too much time on their hands.  Boy­cott Like­able Media!  Boy­cott Entenmann’s!  How DARE they Hash­tag surf across such an impor­tant topic!  How could they be so stu­pid?  The dam­age that will be done to Entenman’s is irreparable!

Seri­ously?   It’s a tweet, not a tat­too.   If you don’t like it, move on to the next one.

Regard­less, despite the fact that the tweet was almost imme­di­ately taken down along with a twit­ter update, this resulted in a flood of apolo­gies from Entenmann’s and Like­able Media.

Here’s Entenmann’s statement:

“We are sad­dened and dis­ap­pointed that an out­side agency han­dling our social media posted a com­ment on Twit­ter asso­ci­at­ing the Entenmann’s brand with the not guilty ver­dict in the Casey Anthony trial. This Tweet does not reflect the val­ues of our com­pany, our asso­ciates or the Entenmann’s brand. We have taken imme­di­ate steps to make sure the indi­vid­u­als that cre­ated this post will not work on our account again. Addi­tion­ally, we are tak­ing steps to ensure that future tweets reflect our company’s val­ues. We sin­cerely apol­o­gize for this incident.”

And here’s a part of the Like­able Media apol­ogy:

We apol­o­gized on behalf of the Entenmann’s brand right away, how­ever, as the leader of Entenmann’s social media agency, I would like to per­son­ally say I’m sorry if the tweet offended any­one. The truth is, our team was lever­ag­ing the trend­ing top­ics and mov­ing so fast they neglected to see what the hash­tag was related to. It was obvi­ously insen­si­tive, and on behalf of the entire Like­able team and our client, Entenmann’s, I’m sorry. Please know that I am work­ing on refin­ing our process to ensure that this does not hap­pen again.

I per­son­ally found two things inter­est­ing about this whole story:

First, Dave Ker­pen from Like­able Media (who hon­estly did an amaz­ing job respond­ing to all com­ments and gripes) was basi­cally stat­ing that this was some sort of “mis­take” — like a typo that should have been caught or acci­den­tally send­ing a pub­lic tweet vs. a DM.  This, as opposed to say­ing some­thing like, “I’m sorry if some took our tweet the wrong way, we obvi­ously failed to echo the value of the brand and will do bet­ter in the future”.

I don’t believe this was a “mis­take”.  I’m con­fi­dent that the per­son that sent this tweet out knew exactly what it was refer­ring to and thought it was cre­ative and clever.  Would it have been sent if it required approval by Like­able senior man­age­ment?  By Entenmann’s mar­ket­ing team?  Maybe not.  Good mar­keters should be seek­ing unique ways to get peo­ple excited and read our stuff.   I hope that the per­son respon­si­ble for the tweet did not lose their job and was actu­ally given a pri­vate “attaboy” for think­ing out­side the box.  Twit­ter can be a test­ing ground for con­cepts and ideas (ide­ally with client’s approval) — before you spend mil­lions on more expen­sive wider reach­ing campaigns.

Sec­ond, let’s talk results.  This may actu­ally be a case where “Even ‘bad’ press is good press”.  A few months ago, there was a sim­i­lar “scan­dal”, when Ken­neth Cole tweeted, “Mil­lions are in uproar in #Cairo. Rumor is they heard our new Spring Col­lec­tion is avail­able online at http://bit.ly/KCairo-KC”.  This arguably more offen­sive tweet resulted in thou­sands of new fol­low­ers in the first few hours — and a great deal of buzz.

Sim­i­larly, Entenmann’s Twit­ter fol­low­ers were rel­a­tively flat for months and amaz­ingly “suf­fered” a 35% spike in fol­low­ers after this dis­as­ter.   Ter­ri­ble, huh?

Entenmann's Twittercounter Chart

There may actu­ally be some peo­ple that were so hor­ri­bly offended by this sin­gle tweet that they will illog­i­cally black­mail the brand.

How­ever, I real­ized that all this talk about Entenmann’s made me remem­ber how much I missed their donuts and will be going out of my way to find them the next time I’m at the gro­cery store.  Since I’m still rel­a­tively upset since the jury couldn’t find Casey Anthony guilty, a lit­tle com­fort food might help.

 

Jada And Young Caesar

A Tribute To My Dog and Friend For 10 Years

6
319 days
by in Personal

While I typ­i­cally try not to use my blog as a “diary”, I felt it was cleans­ing for me to jot down a quick trib­ute to my dog Jada whom I painfully had to say good­bye to this past week­end after a 4–5 month bat­tle with cancer.

It’s kind of scary, but next to my wife, par­ents, and my broth­ers, I prob­a­bly spent more time with that dog than any­one else in my entire life.   She was always there to play with, take a walk, or just sleep on my armpit on the couch.  So, if my read­ers will indulge me, I wanted to pro­vide a quick trib­ute list to Jada.

  • For affec­tion­ately lean­ing against my leg so hard the first time we met that you almost knocked me over.
  • For break­ing down a door that first night (when we tried to put you in the base­ment) because you weren’t going to be left alone when you knew there were peo­ple in the house.
  • For your abil­ity to spin while hold­ing a stick by your teeth.

  • For your blood­hound like incred­i­ble hide and go seek skills.
  • For accept­ing your fall in pri­or­ity from #1 to #2 (after my mar­riage) and then #3 (with the entrance of my son Kyle).
  • For shak­ing in a way that always made me feel guilty when I screamed at the com­puter after los­ing big hands when I played poker on-line.
  • For putting up with our new dog, Cae­sar, as well as my son who both man­aged to sleep on you, wres­tle with you, and drive you crazy in a way I know you loved
    Jada, Caesar, and Kyle Sleeping On Couch
  • Despite the fact that you were part pit bull, for being prob­a­bly the worst watch dog that ever lived — even hap­pily jump­ing in the car of the pizza deliv­ery guy.
  • For always being there with a spin and a smile regard­less of whether we were gone for 1 hour or 10 days.
  • For prepar­ing me to be a father (as far as sac­ri­fice, respon­si­bil­ity, and the ulti­mate rewards of hav­ing some­one that relies 100% on you)
  • And finally, for never com­plain­ing or whin­ing– not once – as you got sicker and sicker to the point where you couldn’t walk or eat.

Rest in peace my puppy.

this_badge_intentionally_left_blank

Badges?? We don’t need no stinkin’ social badges!

2
325 days
by in Social Media

In a clas­sic scene from Blaz­ing Sad­dles, a ban­dit says, “BADGES?? We don’t need no stink­ing badges!” Lately, I feel like I’m being “badged to death” as com­pa­nies and brands play­ing off my desire to com­pete are offer­ing me seem­ingly use­less online badges if I’ll do exactly what they want.

On-line gam­ing com­pa­nies like Zynga, MSN Games, and Kon­gre­gate have pushed the con­cept of on-line badges and rib­bons to encour­age play­ers to play their games.  This con­cept was extended into loca­tion based social media sites like Foursquare where you can become a “vir­tual mayor”.  While Foursquare offers net­work­ing and dis­count­ing ben­e­fits, the may­or­ship badges again seem to be play­ing on our desire to com­pete and win awards.  It’s almost less about the dis­count and more about the brag­ging rights and recognition.

Many com­pa­nies are now apply­ing this same con­cept in other ways:

  • Badgeville is lead­ing the way hav­ing cre­ated a vari­ety of pro­grams for many ver­ti­cals includ­ing music (Uni­ver­sal Music Group), cloth­ing (Blue­fly), sports fans (Chime.in), and fit­ness (Active.com).
  • TripAdvisor.com noti­fied me of a new pro­gram this past week where I can get a new stars next to my pro­file if I write more travel reviews.
  • Klout (an inter­est­ing social media rat­ing sys­tem into itself) has a vari­ety of badges and achieve­ments that you can aspire to achieve.
  • Osnapz.com will sim­il­iarly pro­vide achieve­ment badges for social activ­ity by mea­sur­ing social media expe­ri­ence via points and levels.
  • Even pol­i­tics is not immune to this phe­nom­e­non. Tim Paw­lenty just launched a new pro­gram called Paw­lenty­Ac­tion as part of his Pres­i­den­tial bid where you can earn badges and points for con­nect­ing via Facebook/Twitter, vol­un­teer­ing, shar­ing, donat­ing, etc..

These pro­grams all seem to make per­fect sense. Com­pa­nies and brands get unique engage­ment ana­lyt­ics and insights into iden­ti­fy­ing their top cus­tomer advo­cates.  Ide­ally, cus­tomers are moti­vated to do what you want them to do (e.g. write reviews, spend time on their site, buy things, and talk up their brand).  In addi­tion, as Badgeville argues, “Gam­i­fi­ca­tion increases user loy­alty” — tak­ing your fans beyond the “like” to a truly engaged advo­cate.  For the con­sumer, it can turn even mun­dane activ­i­ties into a fun game and a way to socially inter­act and com­pete with other people.

How­ever, a word of cau­tion.  Fans of SocialMediaToday.com may have noticed a sim­i­lar badge and reward pro­gram on their site that was released a few months back. You received points which trans­lated into lev­els for read­ing arti­cles, mak­ing com­ments, etc..  As I was think­ing about writ­ing this arti­cle, I noticed that the pro­gram mys­te­ri­ously dis­ap­peared so I reached out to them to find out what hap­pened.  While they still believe that these reward based sys­tems hold a great deal of value, they shared a few of the major chal­lenges in their par­tic­u­lar imple­men­ta­tion and why they took it down.

  • Time to Imple­ment:  It took almost 8 months to define the mea­sur­able actions and imple­ment the solu­tion.  Cap­tur­ing some of the point dri­vers also turned out to be more dif­fi­cult than orig­i­nally expected.  It might have been done faster if it was a core pri­or­ity, but rolling out pro­grams like this takes a good deal of plan­ning, pro­gram­ming, and testing.
  • Web Site Real Estate:  As tight as they tried to make the score­board, it still seemed to eat up a lot of valu­able space — par­tic­u­larly for read­ers that didn’t find the pro­gram  interesting.
  • Scor­ing Issues:  There were com­plaints by engaged par­tic­i­pants who felt that the sys­tem often did not give them proper credit.  The score­board was also con­fus­ing — as it showed your weekly score and rank, but your over­all “level” was based upon your total num­ber of points.
  • Value For Read­ers:  While there were some that got into the game, the major­ity of peo­ple did not.  As a site pri­mar­ily tar­geted toward busy over­whelmed pro­fes­sion­als look­ing to read good con­tent, it was ques­tion­able as to whether peo­ple really cared about their level or the num­ber of points they had.
  • Fake Behav­ior: Although the trial didn’t seem to show this, I won­dered if the sys­tem caused peo­ple to do “fake things” to get points.   You could leave short com­ments or bounce around the site with­out really read­ing an arti­cle to help your­self level up.

In the end, SocialMediaToday.com did not see more engage­ment, more read­ers, or more com­ments and decided to stop it.

Per­son­ally, I think it’s absolutely worth look­ing at these pro­grams if you’ve got the right audi­ence and time to prop­erly define and imple­ment one.  I rec­om­mend this arti­cle by Shane Snow that was writ­ten for Mash­able.  In it, he high­lights four key things to help use game mechan­ics to power your busi­ness (read his post for the details).

  1. Start with your vision and work backwards
  2. Make a list of required user actions
  3. Moti­vate the most impor­tant behaviors
  4. Eval­u­ate and adapt

Good advice to follow.

If you sub­scribe to my blog and like my Face­book page, per­haps I’ll reward you with a golden badge of your very own.


Orig­i­nally pub­lished at SocialMediaToday.com under the title “Badges?? We don’t need no stinkin’ social badges!”.
No Means No

Killer Social Media Sales Advice (Acquired From An Customer Insider)

1
337 days
by in Social Media

Here’s the per­fect world for today’s B2B sales guy:No Means No

  • You have a rolodex of thou­sands of C level exec­u­tives who all know you by name and reputation.
  • Your mar­ket­ing team is churn­ing out qual­ity leads dying to buy your prod­uct tomorrow.
  • Your prod­uct / solu­tion is very unique and differentiable.
  • Every time you call some­one to dis­cuss your solu­tion, they instantly call you back — upset that they missed your call in the first place.
  • Prospects imme­di­ately see the value in your pitch and are rush­ing to get their check­books out before you hang up the phone.

Is this the world you live in?  If so, please let me join you.

Real­is­ti­cally, sales can be painful. Cold call­ing involves both­er­ing peo­ple that receive hun­dreds of sim­i­lar calls sell­ing sim­i­lar prod­ucts and solu­tions.  Your prod­uct, mar­ket­ing mate­ri­als, sup­port team, etc. is never per­fect and you’re always look­ing for ways to max­i­mize our effec­tive­ness — reach more peo­ple, find more leads, close more busi­ness.  We are all look­ing to rise above the noise and get peo­ple excited about what we’re selling.

As I was work­ing to enhance my cold call­ing efforts, I came across the fol­low­ing excel­lent post by Kevin Doohan from Red Bull.   Kevin was kind enough to allow me to share it word for word on my blog.  I sim­ply thought it was excel­lent advice that would be appre­ci­ated both by prospects, cus­tomers, and sales peo­ple (well, my com­pe­ti­tion can ignore this).

Give it a read and let me know your thoughts:

I appre­ci­ate it when a sales per­son is aggres­sive and wants to win. I appre­ci­ate it when a sales per­son is con­fi­dent in their prod­uct and wants to be sure I get the oppor­tu­nity to see it. I still feel there is PLENTY of room for improve­ment for most of the reps I hear from though. I decided to draft some thoughts on what works and what doesn’t here on the blog. Enjoy it! Much of this derived from actual email exchanges with iden­ti­ties with­held to pro­tect the guilty.What doesn’t work are email exchanges like this:

Rep (who I’ve never met or spo­ken with before) email: I sent you some info last week that details how our 3 step plat­form can cre­ate mil­lions of social media con­ver­sa­tions for your brand…Did you have a chance to look at it? I know it was a lot of info so I wanted to review it with you per­son­ally. If you have 5 min­utes this after­noon, I’d be happy to speak with you and answer any questions.…If not, I’d love to set up time next week so speak for 15 minutes.

Me: thinking…This dude doesn’t know any­thing about Red Bull. This is the same email he would send Acme wid­gets and social media “experts” are pretty easy to find these days. No thanks.  my email response: Thanks for the email. No inter­est right now. All of our social media needs are being met.

Rep’s email response (canned again): Thanks for the quick reply. I under­stand. Lots of peo­ple say that but once they see our solu­tion they say: “Wow, why didn’t my cur­rent agency tell me I could do that?” or “I didn’t even know that was pos­si­ble to achieve.”. I’d love to set up just 15 min­utes to review our solu­tion so that you can see the dif­fer­ence it can make for your organization.

Me: (No response. I’m done.)

How frustrating.I cur­rently have 800 unread emails in my inbox. I give this guy, who writes the lamest prospect­ing email ever, the cour­tesy of respond­ing and he per­sists with the emails ask­ing for an appoint­ment. Not only is it not going to hap­pen next week. It’s not going to hap­pen ever. No means no. Find a bet­ter way to win clients. Do your home­work.  BTW, you would not believe the firms that I get vari­a­tions of this approach from. Major agen­cies and pub­lish­ers look­ing for brand $$$ just do not put the work in. It’s super lame and I’m fed up with it.

The email below is an exam­ple of an approach that could work. I share it at the risk of get­ting 100 of these this week but I think the sales uni­verse des­per­ately needs some feed­back from a brand.

Rep: Hi Kevin, <insert mutual friend’s name> sug­gested I drop you a line and ask if you would be inter­ested in check­ing out our new social media plat­form.  I know Red Bull is doing a great job in the space with over 3.6m face­book fans and a quickly grow­ing twit­ter fol­low­ing but are you engag­ing your fans as well as you could be? The recent <insert awe­some Red Bull video name here> video is a great exam­ple of amaz­ing con­tent Red Bull has that could have a greater impact with through your social chan­nels. I saw the video on the Red Bull YouTube chan­nel and was BLOWN away. I won­dered why it was not posted to your social chan­nels and to the RedBullUSA.com web­site. Maybe you didn’t have time. Maybe you didn’t under­stand or see the oppor­tu­nity. Maybe roles need greater clar­ity within your orga­ni­za­tion. I don’t pre­tend know what the chal­lenge is but I’ve encoun­tered them all.  I bet we can help and we would love the oppor­tu­nity to do it.  If you can spare 30 min­utes, I’d love to walk you through a solu­tion that I think could be per­fect for Red Bull in help­ing you max­i­mize the impact of the con­tent you gen­er­ate from the amaz­ing events you pro­duce worldwide.

me: I’m likely to respond to this one. No guar­an­tees… but the above is much bet­ter than the “I have no idea who you are but I want to show you my 3 step solu­tion.” email.

I may or may not respond to the note above but it IS doing some impor­tant things. It is demon­strat­ing that the seller knows some­thing about Red Bull and/or me. It shows that the writer has engaged with and enjoyed our con­tent. It admits igno­rance of Red Bull’s spe­cific strat­egy but con­fi­dence in the firms abil­ity to grow our busi­ness.  The per­sonal ref­er­ence is espe­cially impor­tant. I know every­one doesn’t know every­one but find a way. There is NO sub­sti­tute for a refer­ral from some­one I trust.

Good luck reps. I guar­an­tee from this point for­ward that if you send me some­thing lame via email, you won’t even get a deliv­ery con­fir­ma­tion receipt. BUT, if you share some awesomeness…maybe we can cre­ate some mar­ket­ing magic together. I look for­ward to the opportunity!

Orig­i­nally posted as “no means no — sales reps need to get a clue by Kevin Doohan”

Great blunt advice from some­one on the other end of the phone, wouldn’t you agree?

A few of my take­aways (at least for B2B Sales):

  • Work a tar­geted list that you can man­age vs. a list of thou­sands of leads.
  • If pos­si­ble, become an expert on the indus­try you’re call­ing into.
  • Under­stand as much of your prospect’s busi­ness and how you can help them BEFORE you call or e-mail them.
  • Real­iz­ing real­is­ti­cally it’s impos­si­ble to become a com­plete expert on their indus­try or every­thing that prospect is doing, admit to a degree of igno­rance while demon­strat­ing that you can pro­vide value to their business.
  • Not a bad idea to have a lit­tle sym­pa­thy for your prospects who may seem like he’s ignor­ing you (when he’s prob­a­bly ignor­ing hun­dreds of peo­ple like you)

Back to the trenches.…

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