Jon DiPietro is Domesticating IT

Advertising Age ran a story last week about “How This Author Got 674,716 Facebook Fans (Worth, Uh, $92 Million!).”  Justin Levey was a New York law student who applied for an internship with the Israeli consulate but ended up “in Jerusalem writing speeches for Ariel Sharon during one of the most turbulent times in Israeli history.” He accumulated more than 674,000 fans largely due to misinterpreting the book’s title for a new Facebook meme – Shut Up, I’m Talking. His fans were liking his page because they were making a statement, not necessarily identifying themselves with his book.

The article discussed the obvious questions this situation begs: How much is a follower worth? How much do people really pay attention in social networks? In Levey’s case, this situation has very little downside. However, if you’re a business or non-profit the wrong follower demographic can actually be doing you a disservice.

Negative Optimization

Search engine optimization is the process of maximizing your web site’s visibility to search engines in order to obtain the highest possible organic search ranking. While there are lots of things you can do to have a positive impact on SEO, there are also plenty of actions that can hurt. One example is inadvertently emphasizing keywords that you don’t necessarily want associated with your site.

“Shut Up, I’m Talking” exemplifies a different type of negative optimization; guilt by association. Social search differs from web search because it relies on the demographics of your fan base to determine relevancy. In Levy’s case, his audience demographics don’t differ all that much from Justin Beiber’s. That particular audience probably isn’t heavily weighted by people interested in reading about Middle Eastern foreign policy.

Marketing Takeaway

Levey’s fan page is an extreme case and many could make a reasonable argument that it’s a good problem to have. However, the risk isn’t really that your fan page or website will have and abundance of the wrong kind of attention. The risk is that, on a smaller scale than this example, your website will optimize for the wrong keywords or your fan page will appeal to the wrong demographics and cost you traffic. Search engine optimization must be deliberate and involves examining every aspect of your presence, including the title of your Facebook fan page. You do have a Facebook fan page, right?

Like the Hippocratic Oath, the first rule in search optimization is “Do no harm.”

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Weekly High Five lists the most interesting, compelling, and/or useful links of each week.

This week’s High Five theme is, “Social Media Grab Bag.”

#5: Government websites get the chop

As part of the UK government’s austerity measures to combat rising debt levels, it announced that it will be shuttering over 600 web sites.  But that’s not the interesting statistic. As Chris Rand puts it, “Sadly, like most public sector projects, the cost of running them is eye-watering.” He cites one example in which a UK government web site cost over $7M to build and received just under 400k visitors at a cost of over $15 per visitor.

Link: BMON

#4: Former Facebook Executive Adam D’Angelo Confirms New Google Social Networking Effort

There has been some Buzz (rimshot) about Google’s next move to combat Facebook’s growing threat in the social search space. This article suggests that Google drastically underestimated Facebook’s potential and never made social networking a company priority – until now.

Link: Inside Facebook

#3: How To Rank #1 In Facebook Search In 60 Seconds For Any Term

My reason for highlighting this article isn’t so much for people to learn how to accomplish this feat, but to understand the implications of the 21st Century Land Grab. Whether or not you intend or a ready to fully engage in social media marketing, it’s important to plant a flag to prevent someone else from claiming your territory.

Link: All Facebook

#2: How This Author Got 674,716 Facebook Fans (Worth, Uh, $92 Million!)

Like the previous article, the most important lessons of this story aren’t the most obvious. While the author and columnist question the true value of a Facebook fan, what struck me was the negative impact that such a throng of the wrong fans can have on your brand. Like accidentally optimizing for the wrong keyword, having a fan page populated by the wrong demographic can be just as damaging.

Link: Advertising Age

#1: Clay Shirky: How cognitive surplus will change the world

There are a trillion hours per year of “spare time” that are currently spent watching television. When you think about social media and wonder aloud, “Where do people find the time?” now you know. Shirky wants to start talking about how we should be using this cognitive surplus.

Link: TED: Ideas worth spreading

Feel free to provide your thoughts and/or contributions…

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Weekly High Five lists the most interesting, compelling, and/or useful links of each week.

This week’s High Five is a grab bag of internet marketing topics.

#5: ACTA Draft: No Internet for Copyright Scofflaws

Regular readers of this blog will know that I often talk about net neutrality and copyright issues.  This article discusses efforts by the U.S. to convince other nations to develop protocols for copyright protection that would make it the responsibility of Internet Service Providers to police copyright infringements and immediately suspend internet connectivity  and terminate “in appropriate circumstances.”  In addition to raising costs for ISPs, this will almost certainly result in a “shoot first, ask questions later” policy in order to reduce their risk.

Link: Wired

#4: WSJ on iPad for $17.99 a month, magazines to be at or near newsstand prices?

It’s becoming clear that the print publishing industry is looking at the iPad as an opportunity to start with a clean slate <rimshot>.  The horse has already left the barn in terms of providing free content on the internet, and so it seems that they intend not to make that mistake again.  From the outset, several publications are intending to at least begin their subscriptions on the iPad at very near news stand pricing.  Given Apple’s strict control of the content application rules on their platforms, this should not encounter the technical hurdles publishers have faced on the internet.  This time, it’s personal.

Link: engadget

#3: 5 Quick Ways To Improve Your Facebook SEO

Lisa Barone writes one of the best internet marketing blogs on the internet, in my opinion.  She is a frequent guest writer on Small Business Trends and this article provides five simple, yet solid tips for improving the search engine optimization of your Facebook fan page.

Link: Small Business Trends

#2: Are Marketing Dollars Shifting? Exhibit Industry Down 12.5%

There’s not a whole lot to tell for this one.  While the decline of the exhibit industry isn’t shocking, I was a bit surprised at the steep drop from last year.  More evidence that marketing dollars continue to flow from traditional channels like trade shows to inbound marketing.

Link: Hubspot

#1: Facebook Foreshadows New Features With Privacy Policy Tweaks

It’s time for our monthly Facebook privacy policy fire drill!  They are proposing a couple of new (and potentially disturbing to some) tweaks that will be made to their privacy policy.  The first is the integration of automatic geolocation features.  Applications like foursquare provide a fun way to localize social media and meet new friends, but they also broadcast your activities to the world and provide criminals with a possible blueprint for tracking your whereabouts.  The second change is the implementation of the new Facebook Connect policy, which may automatically sign you into sites and share your public information simply based on the presence of a cookie on your computer.  Given the fact that many Facebook users still don’t fully understand the implications of the “Everyone” default sharing mode on their wall, this has the potential to get a little nasty.

Link: TechCrunch

Feel free to provide your thoughts and/or contributions…

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Don't be a social media lemming.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: “Get 300 followers per day on Twitter!”

We all have, and I’ve heard this and other similar enticements in just the last couple of days.  This topic has been covered ad nauseum by every social media and marketing blogger out there, but apparently the message isn’t getting out.

So here is one more shot…

Metric vs. Strategy

Measuring is a good thing – provided, of course, you’re measuring the right metrics.  The number fans on your Facebook fan page, or followers on Twitter, or subscribers to your blog are all important metrics that (indirectly) measure the reach of your message.  But they are not a strategy!

Getting additional followers on the social media channels is relatively easy, but what is the point?  Many businesses hold the mistaken assumption that more followers will somehow equal more business.  All it equals is more opportunity for business, but you need to have a plan to turn those opportunities into customers.  The real question is how many of those fans/friends/followers will convert?  What reason are you giving them to convert?  How are you tracking your conversion rate?  That’s what inbound marketing is all about.

Inbound Marketing

If you combine a large number of followers/friends/fans with an effective inbound marketing infrastructure, then you’re in business.  But building a large following without it is putting the cart before the horse.  Here is a basic outline of what inbound marketing entails:

1. Create compelling content. Which is easier said than done for many people.  Creating remarkable content in the digital age requires some competency in four skills: webapprentice, designer, storyteller, and marketer.
2. Optimize it for search. Inbound links are by far the most important factor for search engine optimization, which is why #1 is extremely important.  But it is also important to understand the basics of on-page optimization in order to maximize the visibility of your content to search engines.
3. Share it with others. This is where your large following can start to pay off.  Once you’re creating compelling content, share it through your social media channels in order to drive traffic back to your web site.
4. Create calls to action. Once the traffic is flowing into your web site, it’s important to have clear, prominent calls to action.  Make the visitor some sort of offer that gives them value in exchange for their contact information.
5. Nurture your leads. Ideally, your leads would be entered into some form of database or customer relationship management system so that you can follow up appropriately and move them through the buying cycle.  Cull them when necessary.
6. Convert your leads. That’s what it’s all about – convert leads to prospects, and prospects to customers.
7. Measure. You need to be measuring all of this activity every step of the way.  Understand where your traffic sources are and which ones are the most/least effective.  Compare those against your conversion rates and use the data to optimize your efficiency and scrap ineffective strategies.

Having 100 extremely engaged followers is far more valuable than 1,000 who are not paying attention.  And even if those 1,000 are paying attention, without an effective strategy for converting that asset into business you’re just wasting your time.

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If Facebook were a spy novel, the terms of service would be enigmatic documents stored on microfilm and hidden in plain sight in some local library.  The features are like James Bond’s clever gadgets, but are never at hand when needed and lack any meaningful instructions.  How is one to unlock these mysteries and reach that magical transmitter that can carry your message to those 360 million users?  Facebook fan pages are incredibly useful and effective marketing mechanisms, but it can be frustratingly unapparent where to start, what to do, and how to do it.  Lucky for you, I have the secret decoder ring you’ve been looking for.

Why Bother?

Before decoding these mysteries, let’s talk about why anyone should bother in the first place.  I already mentioned fan pages specifically, and there are three major advantages to implementing fan pages over groups and personal pages:

1. Link Juice – Fan pages are public, whereas your personal profile and its updates are protected, unless you’ve made everything public in your privacy settings.  But even if you’ve done this, the interactions with others is mostly protected, which means that none of the content is indexed by search engines.  The pages contain links back to your site, which create link juice.
2. Branding – Anyone can create a fan page in your name, whether it’s an employee, a customer, or a competitor.  Even if your company name is a registered trademark, you do not want to be spending your time firing bow-shots and dealing with Facebook support.  Grab your company’s identity so you are in control and do it today.
3. Analytics – Facebook calls them “Insights” and you can only get them with fan pages.  They give some basic data to do some trending and metric measurement.

In addition to these benefits over Facebook groups and personal pages, I wrote another blog post that contains “7 Reasons to Include Facebook In Your Marketing.”

The Ownership Dilemma

In order to create a fan page, you need to be logged in to a Facebook account.  But whose account and what kind?  Well, that’s the dilemma.  The account that creates the fan page becomes the de facto owner.  Worse yet, the owner of a fan page cannot be changed (at least not right now).  Therefore, it’s not really desirable to create a fan page using your own personal Facebook account.  Therefore, Facebook does offer the option of creating a “business account” which has a number of limitations when compared to a standard, personal account.  Problem solved, right?  As it turns out, not so much if you read the dreaded Terms of Service for business accounts:

You may create a business account if you don’t already have a standard Facebook account.
…
Please be aware that managing multiple accounts is a serious violation of Facebook’s Terms of Use. If we determine that an individual has more than one account, we reserve the right to terminate all of their accounts.
…
Maintaining multiple accounts, regardless of the purpose, is a violation of Facebook’s Terms of Use. If you already have a personal account, then we cannot allow you to create business accounts for any reason. You can manage all the Pages and Socials Ads that you create on your personal account.

Please keep in mind that the fans of any of the Pages you administer will not have visibility or access to your personal account or profile. Any actions that you take as a Page administrator on your Page will show the Page’s name as the actor and not your personal name.

Despite the fact that “we reserve the right” does not necessarily mean they will, these warnings are pretty stark and I am therefore reluctant to advise anything other than creating your fan page from your own personal account, as undesirable as that is.  It’s a bit of a mystery why Facebook would offer such a thing as a business account and then virtually assure there is no way to use it without violating their terms of service, but such is life for the time being.

Getting Started

Facebook makes it a little tricky to get the ball rolling, so here’s a quick start guide to get you going:

1. Go to the Create New Facebook Page link (http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php).
2. Select the type of page you want to create and give it a name.  You can choose to keep it private if you’re not quite ready to make it visible to the world.  This is a good option if you’re just trying to protect your brand.
   
3. Set up the basic information.  Upload a picture (hover your cursor over the picture area and click “change picture”), and make sure it’s square so that Facebook doesn’t auto-crop it.  Click the link under the picture that says “Write something about …” and put in a brief description of your page.
   
4. Click on the “Info” tab and then the “Edit Information” link.  Be sure to enter a web site and company description at the very least!
   
5. Click on the “Share” button in the left margin and invite all of your friends who may be interested.
6. Promote your fan page on other web sites by creating a Fan Box.  This is another frustratingly difficult link to find.  You can begin from the Facebook Widgets page.  There are two options; Fan Boxes and Page Badges.  You can play around the settings for each to configure it as you like.  When you’re done, save it and then you can copy and paste the code in to your web page.
   

Then, go forth and update!  One word of advice; don’t turn your fan page into a content Doppelgänger.  Try to understand how your Facebook audience wants to interact with you and what sort of content and update frequency is palatable to them.  If you’re not sure, ask them.  If they became a fan, they should be happy to offer their opinion on what they want to see from you.  Don’t simply redistribute press releases or link your Twitter stream to your fan page.  Each social media channel has its own character and user preferences and you need to understand and respect them.

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