The tweets and links

Clicking on the promoted trend ‘Red Cross Join Us’ shows up the latest Red Cross tweet with other users’ tweets underneath related to the promoted trend. During the time the ad ran the Red Cross featured the two tweets shown above.

The call to action in the first tweet is a little odd as ‘donating’ tweets will be a new concept to most people but, on the other hand, it sounds like a very easy ask that should have been good for user engagement. I was pretty surprised that they used bit.ly to shorten their link considering that the URL shortening service makes the stats on their short URLs publicly available. Still, it’s helpful for those of us that want to take a look at the effectiveness of their campaign. Taking a look at the stats we can see that the bit.ly link was clicked on, at the time of writing, around 500 times. So far, not so good.

The second tweet was a much more traditional marketing message asking people to sign up for Red Cross Month activity. Although this shortened link seems not to have been done using the bit.ly service, adding a ‘+’ symbol to the tweet reveals that the URL is still using the service which means that we can also get stats on the number of clicks. The data shows that this link was clicked on, at the time of writing, just over 1750 times.

Which is how many conversions?

These figures are, I’m sure you’ll agree, fairly paltry considering the expenditure and exposure but lets drill a little bit deeper. If we aggregate the clicks from these two links and assume a very generous 10% conversion rate for the two calls to action we end up with less than 250 conversions. Assuming a more realistic conversion rate of around 2% we only get around 50 conversions.

So what went wrong and what went right?

If the American Red Cross paid full price for their promoted trend they can’t help but be disappointed with the result. However, one thing they will have got in spades is brand recognition. Sitting on the top of the Twitter trends list for 24 hours is absolutely great for promoting their brand and their campaign.

What I did find a little odd was that the promoted trend was visible to someone who was viewing the top London trends. It seems to me that targeting UK Twitter users with a promoted trend aimed primarily at those in the States would elicit a far lower response rate and deliver a lower return on investment. I did also find that the Red Cross Month landing page left a lot to be desired. There is a lot of dense copy and the calls to action are barely distinguishable from the overwhelming torrent of text which can’t have helped their conversion rates.

Most puzzling of all to me is why they chose to go with such a stale promoted trend: ‘Red Cross Join Us’. The most popular trends are always the ones that demand participation from Twitter users. For example, two popular trends in London today were ‘#thatswhyyourmyex’ [sic] and ‘#thingsthedevilinvented’. Both wouldn’t be mentioned by most Twitter users without adding some of their own thoughts. This is their viral quality.

As you can see in the chart above from trendistic.com, the Red Cross’ trend barely outperformed ‘#thingsthedevilinvented’ and woefully underperformed compared to ‘#thatswhyyourmyex’.

Even if the Red Cross got the promoted trend for free the data still suggests that they squandered an absolutely fantastic opportunity. Not many charities will have the cash to try to do right what the Red Cross did wrong but their failings can and should be learnt from and act as a stark reminder to charities that digital campaigns need to be more than just set and forget. These days our audiences demand interaction, vitality and originality. And so should we.

Update: After I posted this story up on Twitter I was contacted by a member of the American Red Cross' social media team who said that my points were 'well taken' but that they 'did [their] best with 1 hour's notice'.  As I suspected this means that it was a last minute campaign and that they were probably gifted some distress space by Twitter at short notice.  However, I think there are still some valuable lessons to be learnt including optimising trends for user engagement.

Image: smemon87 (Flickr)

We just enabled the new look Facebook pages for Alzheimer's Society and have been playing around with it this morning. I like the new design but there are some issues for charities that are going to have to be overcome. Let’s look at the good and the bad.

The good

1. Post everywhere as the brand

You can post as your Page on other Pages and profiles which means you can now do outreach using your Page and drive engagement by traveling to the mountain instead of waiting for it to come to you. If you have more than one related Page you could also cross-post and cross-promote which will be very useful for organisations that have separate Pages for events or local areas.

2. Notifications for your Page

Once you’ve clicked ‘use Facebook as Page’ you’ll be able to see notifications where people have interacted with you. This will be especially important to monitor now as you can post away from your own wall and this will be the only way of monitoring those external communications.

The bad

1. The photo carousel at the top

Carousel is, unfortunately, the right word. Unlike user profiles, the order of these photos is randomized every time you reload the page. This means you can't do any clever branding with it or use it for any kind of promotion. Bad for us page owners but good for Facebook who will see more advertising revenue as a result.

2. No more chronological posts

At the moment posts on a Page's wall are now ranked using a similar algorithm to the newsfeed. This means that the most recent post by you or a user may not appear at the top. This could lead to a situation where an old post languished at the top of the wall (making your page look stale) or a post promoting something important was pushed out the way for something else.

It's worth noting that you can see a chronological ordering of posts in the 'admin view' option but this won't display for users.

3. Your website's gone

The old page design showed your web address in the info box under the Page's picture. Now the info box has been relegated to a tab only accessible by the left-hand menu. I don't suspect that the URL in it's old place ever drove too much traffic to our website but it'll be driving even less to it now.

The round up

Facebook has a well established history of not rolling back design changes so these are undoubtedly here to stay. I think the design looks a lot fresher but it could definitely do with a few tweaks to make it even more useful for organisations and brands to get their message out there.

Image: Rob Boudon (Flickr)

1. DON'T spam

AwesomeBrand posted ‘Have you seen our new shaver? It’s got 10 blades. That’s 5 more than 5!’ 1 minute ago

AwesomeBrand posted ‘We’re loving the smooth shave of our new smooth shaver. Join us on our Facebook page to tell us how much you love it!’ 2 minutes ago

AwesomeBrand posted ‘Our new shaver has the #XFactor on this #FollowFriday and is almost certainly being used in #EgyptProtests’ 3 minutes ago

DO engage. Social media has to be a two way conversation. One way broadcasting is considered very bad form amongst communities and will only serve to alienate your customers for breaking the unwritten rules of their social media channels.

2. DON’T work against existing communities

AwesomeBrand posted ‘You need to shut this group down right now. No one gave you permission to use our logo and people here are saying our new shaver has nine blades. But it doesn’t, IT HAS TEN! Close the group or you will be hearing from our freshly shaven lawyers!’

DO work with people talking about your brand. If someone has already established a group about your product / service / company, try to work with them and bring their community into your own. You can even try (with permission) to turn their channel into an official one, especially if they have a tasty domain name or unique URL.

3. DON’T harvest personal data

AwesomeBrand sent you a message: ‘Dear future valued customer! We noticed that you followed us on Twitter so you could DM us a complaint. When you followed us we visited your blog and saved your Facebook name, email address and LinkedIn profile. Now you’ll never have to miss any of our great deals or soon to be viral marketing videos because we can reach you, all the time, wherever you are. And to think you could have missed out on all that. Phew, that was a CLOSE SHAVE wasn’t it.’

Social CRM is evolving but generally speaking people are still very privacy aware and surreptitiously gathering their personal data will likely cause a huge backlash.

4. DON’T ignore tone of voice

AwesomeBrand posted ‘Stop retweeting that. I was being sarcastic!’ 2 minutes ago

AwesomeBrand posted ‘Man, our product is pretty much the worst shaving experience out there LOL’ 10 minutes ago

DO be very aware, especially in short message spaces, of tone. Tone of voice is easily misconstrued online. Especially sarcasm.

5. DON'T be satisfied with an echo chamber

AwesomeBrand posted 'RT @DefinitelyNotAnAwesomeBrandIntern You guys have the best shaver ever! It's so good I'm shaving everything. Bad news for the dog ROFL!' 5 minutes ago

No one nails social media 100% of the time and all organisations get coverage for missteps. Instead of burying these issues; embrace them. No one truly believes you're perfect and neither should you. Your fans, customers and clients will think more of you for facing up to your shortcomings rather than sticking your head in the sand.

The most important things your community can have are trust and communication. Be as honest as possible and participate in your community for the greatest long term rewards.

Image: M Holden (Flickr)

At the time of writing, the second morning of amazon.co.uk's Black Friday promotion, the online retail giant's social media presences are being besieged by irate shoppers. People are angry, confused and vowing never to shop with Amazon again. What went wrong and how can you save your business from a similar fate? Let's find out.

Amazon's Black Friday promise

Amazon has been trailing its Black Friday promotion in the UK for about 2 weeks now. It promised a week of spectacular deals and American-style shopping bonanzas the likes of which our Atlantic cousins could only dream of. Every hour a small number of amazing one-off deals would be released and it was a first come first served race to grab them.

So less than 24 hours after it was launched, how can the promotion be going so badly? Amazon's facebook page is filled with angry comments and its own forums are overflowing with disgruntled customers vowing to never set a virtual foot in the store again. Where did it all go wrong?

The deals ... aren't really deals at all

The source of most people's anger is that, having been led to believe that this sale will be akin to Amazon chucking wads of the cash in the air and shouting “bundle!”, there isn't anything actually worth buying at the sale price. The coffee maker that was reduced to £350, the fairly mediocre laptop priced down to £450. These are not the Black Friday deals that people were expecting. A particular piece of pricing that has got Amazon in the most hot water so far is its deal on the computer game Vanquish which, it turned out, could actually be purchased for less than the Black Friday price on the Zavvi website.

If you're going to have a special one-off amazing price you'd better make sure it's not more than your competitor’s price for it on a normal business day.

No one’s listening

Someone at Amazon must be watching, listening to the fury that's brewing out there but you'd never know it. As far as I can see there have been no replies by Amazon staff on their forums and no attempt to answer questions on their Facebook page.

Not all of the comments are plain anger. Lots of people aren't clear on how the buying system works. Is it the first person to click on the item that gets it or the first person to complete the checkout? These questions could be easily cleared up but they haven't been and people are really frustrated.

While Amazon does nothing and says nothing it can only lose. Maybe Black Friday won't lose them sales today but they will lose customer trust and loyalty and that is far worse for their business in the long run and far more important than a couple of days of big traffic.

As one commenter put it: 'glad I read these posts first. Am not even going to bother. Will do my shopping on Play.com.'

Image: R Philipson (Flickr)

Lots of sites are still using bad security questions and it's an easy way to get your account swiped. Common questions like 'what is the name of your pet?' and 'what is your mother's maiden name?' are actually pretty easy to get the answers to. Friends with your mum on a social network or like to tweet about your cat? Yeah, you're busted.

The way to get around this is simply to use your imagination. I always pick the 'what is the name of your pet?' question because I don't actually have a pet but I do have an imaginary dog. Only I know his name and since he's not real he never appears in photos on Facebook or does something cute I need share on Twitter. He is my imaginary password recovery dog and you shouldn't wait until Christmas to get one.

4. Use KeePass and go crazy with the long passwords

If you don't have an imagination or you do and your imaginary dog is called "password" you can use the program KeePass to securely hold a list of passwords and even generate random ones for you. KeePass has one master password which allows you to copy and paste your other passwords into your browser. This way you only need to remember one password so you can make the others as complicated and as unhackable as you want.

3. Don't let your online accounts go solo

Where possible, always link a secondary email address to an account. Gmail lets you do it and it's a great idea. Even if your password gets compromised it can be possible to get your account back this way. And since another password secured account is safer than a security question you're better off having it this way. Just don't have the same password for your primary and secondary email addresses.

2. The password is dead! Long live the passphrase!

A password (emphasis on 'word') can be brute forced especially if your password is a word in the dictionary. Far more difficult to get at are passwords that are strings of words put together - passphrases. A string of random words is tricky to remember but if you pick a sentence it's much easier to recall. "ThisIsMyExcellentWorkPassword" with some numbers and punctuation in it is actually a pretty good password.

1. Hack yourself

My recent article, 'How I hacked my own life', showed that there is a staggering array of information available about you on the internet. I found pretty much everything I needed in order to give someone a good shot at cracking open some of my online events.

Only by actively trying to hack your accounts can you really be sure how it easy it is to get into them and only by looking through your public social media presences can you know what information you've divulged that might be used to crack open your online world.

Next week I lay into the 3 most irritating ads of 2009. Subscribe via RSS to make sure that you don't miss out.

The quest begins ..

I allowed myself only one starting point: my name. My name which is, unfortunately in the Google age, rather unique. Googling myself turns up my LinkedIn account at the top of the pile. In less than 30 seconds we have discovered what I do for a living, where I work and where and when I went to university. So far so good but what about getting some really useful information like my age? Well I don't list my age on LinkedIn but it isn't too hard to figure out from the dates of my education although, without an actual birth date, this information is probably only marginally useful.

So, back to Google and it appears that I've got 2 Twitter accounts. One is locked down (as is the cache) but the account name seems pretty unique and this hunch is proved correct when a bit of Googling brings you to a related website and a quick WHOIS gleefully spits out my home address.

Now I have my name, year of birth, place of employment and home address. Now, apart from my address, I'm not that worried about that information being out there on the web because, really, it seems like the kind of stuff that you could get your hands on in real life without too much effort.

But then I have a terrible thought: I've so far assumed that the key bit of information that was keeping me safe was my birthday. I've always been careful to obscure it from public facing sites, even choosing to fill in a false one on occasion (a move that permanently locked me out of my Flickr account when I forgot my password) but I start to get a sinking feeling that I might have actually tweeted about my birthday. I slavishly scan through my tweets and, sure enough, there it is: a big, flashing, publicly available neon sign that says 'THIS IS MY BIRTHDAY'.

Oh dear. Life = well and truly hacked.

The problem with privacy

Although not as true as it always was, for a long time websites with logins relied on your birthday as the key piece of identifying information that differentiated you from an impostor. Before social media kicked off it was a fairly reliable assumption that only you and a handful of friends and family would know your birthday and enough about you to answer any other security questions. Now that social media has grown up it is relatively simple to find identifying information about people; anyone who picked 'what is the name of your pet' for their security question could probably do with an urgent search through their social media presences to see if they've ever let it slip (handy hint: you have).

Now that we're living our lives online with more and more transparency as well as experiencing more incentives and reminders to share what we're doing, we should revamp the way we protect our online identities. Security achieved through 'secret' personal information is just a comforting daydream in the modern media age. For those of us that spend our lives on the web it is time to start hacking ourselves and seeing just what we discover.

The engineer Claude Shannon famously said of security design that you should assume that "the enemy knows the system". Well, now the system is you and you need to find a better way to protect it.

Next week I'll be sharing my tips on improving data security that I learnt as a result of researching this article. Subscribe via RSS to make sure that you don't miss it.

Image: Matt Hamm (Flickr)

Twitter's growth has been exponential over the last year with an ever increasing army of people and brands joining the service's ranks of microbloggers. The reason for its growth is undoubtedly down to Twitter's simplicity and the way in which it allows users to receive each other's updates without entering into anything approaching the social bind of a 'friendship'; the system employed by the networking behemoths Facebook and Myspace. If you're interested in what someone's saying then you can 'follow' them and hear more and when you get tired of them you can sever your ties without the slightest twinge of social guilt.

Technology businesses have naturally been some of the first and most effective to use Twitter as a platform for brand awareness and consumer engagement. Dell Outlet UK, the arm of Dell that sells its cut-price returned and refurbished computers regularly tweets about new offers and deals. This is a win-win situation as consumers get alerted to money saving offers and Dell harnesses the power of the microblog to create an exclusive club of potential customers who are privy to the best deals and are actually more likely to purchase them because of the implied scarcity of products offered only to a minority of people.

Twitter has also allowed businesses to keep track of what their customers are saying about them. 5 years ago a customer might have called or emailed their friends to tell them what terrible customer service they had received; a complaint that would have cut the company out of the loop. But now that same customer might tweet about their bad experience and, as Twitter updates are publicly viewable, the company can not only listen to the complaint but also respond to it.

Indeed, Southwest Airlines recently received a slew of free advertising for spotting a tweet by a technology journalist who was dissatisfied with the company's communication regarding his canceled flight. A representative of the airline got in touch with the journalist to smooth things out and the result was a widely read article praising Southwest Airlines' use of Twitter as a customer engagement tool that hit all the major social media news portals.

In the current employment market Twitter has also become a tool of finding work. The social media site mashable.com recently ran an article on finding a job on Twitter and reports seem to suggest that many people have been successful. With the right tweets, retweets and followers it seems like Twitter really can get you a job although this also means that those still in the market for a job should take care of what they say on Twitter as employers are now sure to be watching potential employee's accounts as closely as their blogs, LinkedIn profiles and Facebook activity.

Correctly harnessed then, Twitter can be an unrivaled tool for brand awareness, customer engagement and personal gain but all would do well to remember that Twitter now has the power to make and break reputations and businesses and it would be prudent to plan your engagement strategy before joining one of the world's fastest growing networks.

Unfortunately this kind of functionality isn't officially available yet because Apple haven't released the code that developers would need to access the live video feed from an iPhone.

However, this is rumoured to be coming in the 3.1 software update and with the iPhone positioned to be one of the best AR platforms available I would be very surprised if Apple didn't have plans to allow developers to use the live video feed in the near future.

And for those of you still in the dark about Augmented Reality here's a little video to explain things: