My top 5 tips for social media (and how not to do it)
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.
Amazon’s Black Friday social media fail
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.'
The keyword holy grail: your users
What are the most important keywords for your site? Take a look in your analytics and you’ll find a very comprehensive list of keywords that people used to find your content. So these are your important keywords right? Wrong.
Those keywords aren’t the terms you can use to shape your content because it’s your content that has given birth to those keywords. Let’s say you’re selling a product called Blue Widgets. The top keyword referrer to your site is ‘blue widgets’. Success! Right guys? Right ... ?
This ranking success is only a success for people who are searching for ‘blue widgets’. What if only 20% of your customer base thinks your product is called Blue Widget? What if the other 80% are calling your product Blue Sprocket? The problem is that you don’t know what they call it because your keyword list only contains terms that are already driving people to your site. You need to know what the other 80% are searching for.
And that’s where your users come in and more specifically, your community. Take a look at your social media presences and online forums. What keywords are people using there? What are they calling your product? Collect this information and analyse it. What phrases appear most often? Are there any recurring long tail phrases you could use?
Use these newly found keywords to build content and PPC campaigns which will catch searches related to your old keywords. Sure you might not want to rename your main product but you can certainly incorporate new, recurring keywords into subheadings and into copy.
This technique, of course, works just as well for information provision as it does for sales. Organisations can benefit from taking a break from internally approved language and checking out what everyone else in the world is calling their products and services (a disparity that is apparent all too often) and optimizing their website for these ‘unofficial’ terms.
Don’t have a website that just sells Blue Widgets and don’t have a website that just sells Blue Sprockets. You want to have a website that sells ‘Blue Widgets and Sprockets - the best coloured cogs on the web’.
Bonus tip for vBulletin communities: an easy way to export your thread tags (a valuable goldmine of keywords) is to log in as admin into the control panel, click on ‘Threads & Posts’ and click ‘Tags’. You can copy these, page by page, into a Notepad doc (to strip them of formatting) and then paste them into one big handy spreadsheet. I do month on month comparisons so I can spot new and emerging keywords that can be integrated into site content.
Brave and stark – Eminem’s new album artwork
This is the first of what I hope will be lots of future thoughts on design landing on my blog. The inspiration is the cover of Eminem's new album, Recovery, which is breaking the hip-hop trend for busy album covers and complicated fonts to deliver a sparse, clean and challenging piece of artwork.
The theme of the album is roughly that of Eminem's fall from artistic grace after delivering a double set of stinkers in the guise of his last two albums. Not only is Recovery being billed as a return to form but the stark imagery on the front cover is extraordinarily striking for a rap album.
The lettering on 'recovery' manages to slip in a nice cross symbol in the 'O'; no doubt referencing both the health care connotations of the symbol and it's visual resemblance to the prescription (and non-prescription) pills that have blighted the rapper's health. We're also treated to the trademark backwards 'E'; a nice touch that doesn't at all detract from the powerful symbolism in the 'O'.
However, the massive amount of space smack bang in the middle of the cover is perhaps the most arresting feature of the artwork. The vanishing road of course embodies all the cliches of the 'long road to nowhere' / 'the road a man must walk alone' etc. but it doesn't stop it being any less powerful, especially considering there aren't many rappers who's egos could take a shot of the back of their head being used as their only presence on their own album cover.
FOLLOW ME ON TWITTER
About
Tom Hubbard-Green is the E-marketing and Social Media Manager at Alzheimer's Society and a freelance technology journalist.
His articles have been published in a variety of magazines and industry publications including Figaro Digital, Org Zine, O2 Venue magazine and The City magazine.
The views expressed on this blog are his own. Obviously.
Twitter Stream
Categories
Blogroll
- Alzheimer's Society
- Find50-Marketing
- Great-ads
- Hubbs' Project 365
- Lifehacker
- The Black Sparrows band
- The Register
- Wired UK
- XKCD Comic
Archive
- May 2011
- February 2011
- November 2010
- September 2010
- June 2010
- February 2010
- January 2010
- October 2009
- September 2009
- August 2009
- July 2009
Not for profit thoughts on the new Facebook Pages
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.