We are seeing that the natural catalysts of ego and the relevance has launched companies worldwide into the space of social media in an unorganized fashion. What we are left with in many cases are a plethora of Facebook pages representing every facet of a company. I call this Socialrrhea, and is not limited to Facebook, but that is what we will tackle today. But before you go championing this article as a sign that the times are changing and that there is too much ’social’ in our media, let’s dive in and understand how we can strike a better balance.
Observing the Socialrrhea

Take some time and notice that Fortune 500 brands are having issues controlling the amount of Facebook Pages that are created on their behalf. Without a fixation on the bigger picture, we find that what is created in the name of awareness and sales quickly becomes a shouting match between departments and their products—often times placing a brand at odds with itself.

Certain brands have been caught launching Facebook Pages for each specific product—yielding less than satisfactory results. [See AMD Athlon example below]

While other brands have found great success in marketing products in this fashion. [See Intel Core i7 example below]

Additionally there are a gamut of brands that choose to manage their Facebook fan pages by region, and those can prove to be successful for multi-national brands. Lastly, there are some that choose to manage based upon product groupings. [See Nike corprorate example]

The Pitfalls of Avoidance
But there are brands that are shooting from the hip, and it is getting messy. If you look at the Dell screenshot below we find that Dell has mixed feelings about how to manage their Facebook fan pages—within layers of geography based pages, we have one lone-star, the Social Media for Small Business powered by Dell page that is leeching some 36,000+ members. Could this respectable number of followers be better served and better used?

The cost of not addressing misaligned Facebook Pages can go two ways. Dell is in a position where it is leeching SMB followers that could support a more directed initiative, while they are instead creating a feeding ground for vendors spamming their social media services. They now run the risk of completely losing all value towards selling computers to prospective SMB clients while falling flat on large promises used for recruitment to the page.

Likewise McDonald’s lack of action on branding tertiary pages builds a great deal of brand vulnerability through proximity—this should be a HUGE indication that funneling all branded pages into one Facebook page is a bad idea. From a simple brand messaging perspective, consolidating their presence has left room for brand dissidents. Remember, much like Google, the top 3 pages will procure the most clicks in broad based searches.

Defining your Facebook Page Strategy

We know that not building out sub branded pages can be hugely negative while building out too many pages can also dilute the message. There has never been a more important time to find a healthy balance for brands increasing their exposure on social media. Brands are in effect, subject to backlash due to poor planning, messaging, and follow-through.

So what are some things we should consider when formulating our strategy? Or if our brand is already maturing in social media, what can we do to better focus this powerful medium? Here are a few steps to get the ball rolling.

Step 1: Identify and Prioritize

The most methodical route for understanding which approach is best for your company is to understand and prioritize which business units will have a social media presence, and in which way your brand will choose to communicate. Prioritizing how your brand will communicate should fall within: Brand + Business Group driven, Product driven, or Geography driven.

Understand that this is not a decision that can be made by one person or group, it generally takes a considerable amount of orchestration. I also urge brands to reflect on how they handle microsites vs their main Web presence; this is usually a strong indicator of how you should build out your social media presence.

Still unsure which is best for your company? Ask yourself the following questions.

1. How is my product displayed to my customers currently?
2. What does my current Web presence look like?
3. Do we launch micro-sites? What purpose do they serve and how are we messaging them?
4. What does your company value most? Allegiance to the brand, high-touch relationship with a group, or a deep connection with a leading product?
5. What structure do we use to support our Web sites or microsites?

Step 2: Don’t Migrate, Incentivize

Many of you are in the midst of thinking through how to restructure your social media presence all together. Maybe you are like Dell, and you need a roadmap for what to do with 36,000 people on this Social Media for SMB page. The reality is that a quick call with your Facebook account manager will probably allow you to migrate the entire lot of them over to your main Dell page on Facebook or whatever you think better aligns with your new, better strategy. However, this is not the right way to go about it—don’t put your users in a brand bait-and-switch.

Without a voluntary opt-in process you are infringing upon the fibers of which social media is built. In Dell’s case, their promise to deliver constant Social Media tips to the SMB community falls short once a) the tips stop coming b) moderation fails and spam runs rampant or c) they login one day to find out that they now see feeds on their friend wall from the greater Dell about technology feeds and speeds. Trust is something a brand rarely regains—don’t mess with it on Facebook or any volatile medium.

So what do I mean by incentivize? Well, that is mostly your job, marketeer. However I bet you could get there really quick—either shut down the group and re-incentivize a follow, or create an application that redirects them to the Facebook page that marches to your new directives.

Step 3: Manage and Facilitate

Managing and facilitating conversations is the equivalent of ‘keeping content relevant’ on Websites. It is one of those best known methods for managing SEO and repeat visitors, however it is the quickest thing to be tossed out a window once a site goes live. Likewise, on Facebook don’t launch anything you aren’t willing to put into college someday—it is a long-term commitment. It is also worth stating that the content on your Facebook pages are quickly becoming available through traditional Search mechanisms.

Consider hiring professionals to keep your presence updated with specific engaging topic calendars. Though PR might want to control this, it might not be right for them. Meter who you really want talking to your potential customers. If I were Dell, and I will just ride this horse for today, I would definitely pick some SMB savvy associates with a pedigree for numbers and quick thinking.

Last but not least, remember why you went down this long journey of thinking through the way your company organizes its Facebook pages. Create a manifesto for what will and won’t be posted. What pages do and do not follow the vision. How products are, and are not launched. Now we are getting somewhere!

I’m an avid Trailblazers fan. As I sit in the stands I am reminiscent of times before check-in’s and tweets—how did I see everyone in the stands before? Binoculars I think. I pull out my new iPhone 4G and load Facebook—within seconds I select ‘Ping’ and select ‘Friends’. It is amazing thinking that just last year I loaded a clunky program that only allowed me to check-in—but today with a couple of clicks on my speedy mobile device I am saying hello to everyone in the stands that are within my social network.

I hold up the screen and pan from left to right. The video recorder in the iPhone 4g has fully realized augmented reality and it is delightful. A quick on screen overlay shows beacons above the seats of all of my friends in the stands. Look, it’s Tom—I had no idea he even liked basketball. More importantly, I’m not sure his wife would appreciate him taking another woman to the game. Oh well, for another time. This is really something—this whole Social 2.0.

This is my vision of social media, just around the corner. Take a moment to share your vision with us in the comments below. Thanks for your time socialnauts.

Social media is finally making sense to you, your organization, or your clients—and while there seems to be this undeniable itch to jump in head-first you know full-well that the powers that be don’t care about your fancy social networks. With that firmly planted in the back of your mind, you are still rapidly piecing together your ideas, charts, and slides to go to bat for why social media is going to change the way you do business. But like any creative pitch, there is more to it than the medium; there is the nuances of the pitch mixed with the hostility that accompanies early adoption. So let’s ditch early adoption, in favor of early achievement.

1) It won’t solve all of your problems—so don’t tell them it will solve all of theirs. Understanding that Facebook or Twitter or any medium for that matter are not silver-bullets to marketing will enable you to speak in the best interests of your organization or client. It is important to root everything in your social media presentations with direct impacts on business. A simple exercise for making sure you are on message is asking repeatedly, ‘How does this impact sales/buying decisions?’ If you have no answer, find one—if it doesn’t have a direct mathematical route to sales, move along. This is not to say that awareness is not a valuable marketing goal, it just might not be right for this audience.

2) Do your homework. Understanding that the majority of the C-Suite did not get there by being early adopters is a critical insight for any marketing manager or agency director. We once worked on marketing a revolutionary software/server combo for a small tech start-up here in Portland—as we looked to create lead-generating activities we realized that their main market, the banking sector, marched to a specific financial drum beat that often governs the C-Suite. A CFO of one of these banking institutions was quoted as saying, ‘We don’t want to be the first to adopt anything, but we don’t want to be the second to implement anything either. Our investors care that we are cutting edge, but still stable.’

Not being perceived as an early adopter but an early achiever is a fine-line to walk. A lot can be written on this topic, but for now let’s keep this simple. Come to all meetings with additional notes, and pre-load your meetings with research that you think will be relevant to your discussions. Be sure to address every question with non-declarative statements—instead utilize statements rooted in experience, research or considerations and provide them with the proper materials. Do your best to show them the work behind the plan.

3) Make your presentation a plan, not a sketch. I find that social media can be a challenging topic for some and even makes some people uncomfortable, so keep your presentation short enough that you can address questions as the arise without being short on time. I tend to cringe at any presentation past 10 slides, and certainly no more than 15 unless requested. At the same time provide at 2 slides that show significant detail into the nuts and bolts of your proposed strategy—the last thing you want them to think is that the meeting they are in is unfounded or conceptual.

4) Provide options for scalability. In my opinion, testing a campaign for scalability is one of the truest tests of any social media effort. Asking yourself, ‘can this effort be scaled?’ is not only a healthy step towards road mapping your efforts, it is also a necessary step in getting buy-in from the higher-ups. So stop thinking about a Twitter campaign, or a flash-in-the-pan interaction. Start thinking about a holistic marketing program that seamlessly integrates social media—that is truly what get their attention.

What are some of your tips? Care to share?

I have always been a fan of Foursquare. What they brought to social media was an exploration into location based social media—testing the waters as to the privacy boundaries, or lack there of, and all issues associated with check-in updates. The adoption rate has been fantastic for this emerging network, and with their ability to strike deals up with European characters Foursquare seemed to be on a roll. In addition the standing offer to be bought out for 100 million+, the writing was on the wall.

Enter Facebook So here we are, about to see Facebook jump into the location-game. Foursquare might have wanted to take that offer after all. They aren’t necessarily out of the game, but we could have seen this coming with the roll-out of a retail storefront sticker campaign that is being tested. Nonetheless, the Internet continues to mature, and I am excited to see it happen.

What does this mean for SMB and Retailers? Contrary to the constant smattering of dissenters, Facebook is very much so poised to teach the world how to integrate social media into SMB and retail storefronts. I imagine that in a years time we no longer will be hearing people holding onto the notion that Google Adwords and SEO are the only way to promote their businesses—to be first to the party for SMB on Facebook was a position of yesterday.

So here are some tips for those not ready for this shift:

Profiles, lists, pages, badges, mayors. The feature-set of social networks continues to evolve, and it is no surprise that the front-runner continues to be Facebook. Let’s not forget that the once ominous Myspace held the coveted best-known-methods of 2006. What we can learn from this is that even though Facebook is in front in 2010 with features and updates, they are also pushing the pace of updates amongst their competitors. Though LinkedIn might not be a direct competitor to Facebook, the hopes that it will have a sustainable offering amidst the giant implies that LinkedIn must adapt and adopt.

What’s New with LinkedIn? Looking to adopt the vernacular that Twitter lists and Facebook communities/pages has set forth, LinkedIn has pushed out a Company Follow feature where followers can customize the rate, method and type of information they automatically receive about the companies they want to keep track of. This is a great way to keep track of trends in personnel at an organization such as a hiring/firing, as well as understand what kind of interaction a company is having on LinkedIn-connected networks.

What can you do with this feature?

At the very least keep your network open and relevant—go ahead and follow the organizations that are within your immediate ecosystem and those that are of broader interest as well. On a local level take the time to follow partnered companies, clients, and even competitors; unlike Twitter and Facebook, it is a little harder to figure out who you are following. As a follower, you are only visible when clicking on a company, and then selecting ‘followers’. With that said you shouldn’t be shy as to who you are following—think of it as a Google Alert for networking.

As a potential hiring manager or customer this becomes an invaluable tool because you can see who might have just left an organization. Likewise for companies you are in close ties with, understanding if they are pushing out updates that are of a positive impact will help you understand how healthy your potential business partners are. Have they let go of an entire team recently? Or, are there a slew of new hires or new recommendations that might interest you?

Additional Considerations Take the time to understand that your business is that much more transparent now. Understand who your ‘followers’ list is composed of and how the impact of positive or negative information will effect your professional relationship with those individuals. If you are approaching a lay-off season, understand that looking at that list before hand will enable you to be pro-active about addressing a situation before the bad-press hits. Likewise if you are hiring or getting praise that will be seen by followers, use it as an opportunity to reconnect with that list. Likewise understand that not everyone will take advantage of the list, and be pro-active about keeping them in the loop.

Lastly, invite people to follow your company on LinkedIn. Insert it in an email blast at the very least. 

For quite some time now we have been talking to clients [clients of Quango Interaction Design] about the immidiate impact that the SMB audience can see when utilizing social media channels; prodominantly Facebook. As if 50+% of the online population in the US wasn’t enough to captivate marketing manager imaginations, Facebook has taken it upon itself to push the subject.

SMB Facebook Window Decals!

Back at Quango we are already implimenting social media handles in identity systems because we knew this was right around the corner. The reality is that Facebook is now in the drivers seat and is making a concerted effort to not only expand their reach through better UI ['fan' becomes 'like'] into emerging markets and more topical brand association, it is now looking to arm some of those brands with tools to make it worth their while.

A recent article sent around by a colleague that was written by Ars Technica talks about a Facebook psychological study that based consumer experience on physiological reactions while viewing content. In this article they conclude that Facebook users have a more pleasing experience when diving deeper into profiles, as opposed to just reading the Facebook wall that collates the information from various feeds for them. This study is poingnant because it is hiting home what we have all known about Facebook; we go there to have a closer mode of interaction with people we want to be connected to. The same holds true with the entities that hold profiles, but are not necessarily people.

Simply put it is time for SMB to make a real standardized effort on Facebook. Users are primed and ready for this engagement, and in the end the shoppes that keep their content fresh and on target with their consumers will reap the rewards. Facebook is betting on it, in fact they are shipping out decals to be placed in store-front windows with incentives for doing so. It is not a new strategy. Citysearch has been doing it for years, and people actually found it useful. Now, Facebook will do it and prove that their content deliver method is more scalable.

Tuesday afternoon, Richard Rosen and I continued to prepare for our DMA 2010 Though-Leadership lecture. Working with Richard is fun, to say he knows his stuff when it comes to Direct Marketing is an understatement—and as a Creative Director of Quango Interaction Design, a proven Social Media agency—I find that we often try and tackle subjects over a glass of wine or a mug of coffee, that are far beyond the how-to implementation and BKM’s of marketing.

Even though we feel like we might have hit-gold on how to give Direct Marketers at the DMA Annual a model that ties in their marketing wisdom with the medium of today, what interests us most is the evolution of the Facebook like button, and what it means.

All discussion aside, I love the like button. But what I love more than the feature-set is what it means from a brand stance—Facebook is showing that it is human. Not through the linguistic sense of the word like, but more so from the desire to better its product. Though confident in nature when announcing at the F8 conference all of the features that Facebook would tackle today, it hurries past what it has left behind—yesterday. Become a Fan was so off from a psychological, and an international-sociological approach [not everyone thinks of fans like we do here in the states] it showed users the hand that Facebook was ok with selling-out just a little-bit as big brands jumped onto the fan bandwagon. Facebook admitted it was wrong in a passive, way stating ‘we hope this allows users to associate to more content’. It’s ok Facebook—we like you as more human—making mistakes is good, and making them small rather than large is even better.

Tell me again—why is being human good? As a social media marketer I can’t emphasize enough how important it is to be authentic. Retracting a feature that has underperformed is the software equivalent of a retracted statement in public relations—they are healthy, and build a better brand.

How does this effect business on Facebook? More important than just making it easier for someone to voice their allegiance to a brand or idea, is the interaction that the like button provides for traffic driving purposes to content-driven sites. For example, take a look at a Quango built Seneca Website—we have launched our new brand [a full top-to-bottom rebrand of the company] in harmony with the roll-out of the Facebook feature availabilities. Not only is the new site dang good looking, but it also allows for users to like any content page on Seneca’s Website. Go ahead, try it out—maybe think about integrating a similar feature on your client’s Webpage.

The obvious merit to this integration is that it will allow your site to be picked up via a heavy content syndicator in Facebook. Just wait until Facebook starts providing analytics on your likes; trust me, it will happen.

Want to know how to put this on your site? If you are using Wordpress check out this plugin, otherwise for enterprise customized solutions like the one on Seneca, send me an email for info.

I’m not a gambler, and I certainly do not have a crystal ball. However it is becoming pretty evident that location based social networking will continue to grow. Simply put, a higher degree of mobile device integration by some big players [Google: desktops will be replaced, Intel: showing their hand towards mobile , Apple: the iPhone was successful, what if we made it bigger? ] continues to cater to the demand for continuous connectivity—and more importantly, support for seamless real-time-location interactions.

This is not a new principle—but if we were talking about social networks as a whole, in human-development they would just be entering into adolescence. They are hormonally challenged, seeking an identity, loose with their privacy, frenetic, and awkward—all while having a great deal of potential. To boot, they have a look that they all will be ashamed of in 10 years.

So what does this mean for Foursquare?

Well, this means that Foursquare is positioned to be the most successful of its graduating class—let me tell you why. I’ll be upfront in saying that I’m not convinced any of the location-based networks are ‘doing it right’, but no one knows what ‘right’ really looks like yet. However, let’s analyze some key characteristics that Foursquare has going for them and what will keep the lights on:

1. Foursquare is clean. Back to our adolescent analogy—Foursquare hasn’t made any high-commitment bad visual decisions. If we look at Gowalla we see a hip, stylized interface with cheeky cartoons and badges—it is cool no doubt, but not timeless. Don’t get caught up in mayors vs badges, or buttons vs text; in the end it is about functionality. I could go into a deeper dive as to brand creation, and planning for the future, but it is pretty obvious; Gowalla has planned for today, but not the future—they have tattoos not piercings, in their desire to attract attention today. Not convinced that I am right? Remember a little network called Facebook that came off as vanilla that was battling all of the ‘personality’ that MySpace had?
2. Foursquare is mingling with the ‘adults’ of technology, and connecting on a fraternal level. Call it an initiation or a test run—either way, they are getting to play with some matured companies. This is a sign of a strong biz-dev roadplan messaging themselves as a entity vying for a buyout someday. Check out their deal in the EU with Vodafone, or their integration with tech-giant Intel at events like GDC 2010.
3. We’re adolescents, we’re testing our boundaries. As far as technology goes we have seen social networks dance the fine-line of privacy T’s&C’s. In the end it is breeding a population of users that are ok with pushing the limitations of technology while sacrificing a little privacy…if the incentive is right.
4. Lastly, the concept of check-in’s are already a fading interaction. Similar to downward Twitter trends, only having one type of interaction is a recipe for an early eulogy in social network shelf-life. What we are seeing is other social networks jump into the check-in space like Yelp; imitation is the best form of flattery, right? Regardless there is promise that the earlier stated relationships, coupled with early integration of interaction technology, enable Foursquare to move onto more-and-better interactions to engage their communities.

Despite incentives of mayor status, badges, giveaways and what-not I will end on this: the brand promise of a social network, the professional posture of who you play with that enables for expansion into more offerings, and the adolescent-timing of social networks as a whole make Foursquare a contender.

While reading mashable.com this morning I stumbled across an article by Shiv Singh, the VP and Global Social Media Lead for Razorfish—a reputable agency of which I have watched evolve over the years. What Shiv brings to our attention is an algorithm which he champions as the SIM Score.

It is no mystery that clients are demanding, and should continue to demand, more and more detailed analytics into their social media endeavors. I have been saying it to my clients and readers as much as possible—the days of friends and followers were limited, frenetic, and are now nonsensical.  With that said, I first applaud Shiv for taking a crack at the indexing of influence on social media. Shiv uses simple math, and in my opinion simple is best for communicating business objectives.

Here is where it falls short though:

If we look at Shiv’s formula, the Net Sentiment of the Brand quickly loses its value when incorporating the Neutral Conversations metric at its face value. Simply put an agency like Razorfish is paid to push ‘neutral’ conversations across many mediums—it is called PR. If you think that PR isn’t being pushed on social networks, then you might as well buy into this formula.

You see, the sentiment of a brand cannot be measured by the fiscal investment of that said brand. We cannot buy our customer’s sentiment. If we include Neutral Conversations in our formula for sentiment, we have in fact purchased our sentiment through impressions. Or done what a good PR agency is hired to do, and that is muffle the negative sentiments—thus skewing our data.

So if you truly do want to see the true sentiment of the brand. Simply divide the Positive Sentiment by the Total Amount of Conversations. Don’t stop at sentiment though, consider deeper analytics such as degrees of connection and depth of conversations. Additionally, try not to make business statements based upon singular metrics…it just causes trouble. 

Social media has really been the hot topic this past year between my clients and my agency—there is a good chance that those of you reading this are still chomping at the bit to figure out how social media can make your weekly PowerPoint status-slide sing.

A couple of years ago, it seemed that I couldn’t get a marketing manager to even fathom the idea that Facebook had any amount of relevance to their target audiences. All things social media, even as recent as a couple of months ago, were vocalized to me as fringe and fleeting fads that the youth and their hippity-hop cultures waste-away on—not what sophisticated business people spend time reading.

What seems to really be the tipping-point [sorry to steal a Gladwell buzz-word] in the trajectory of conservative clients accepting the magnitude of social media, is the promised impact social media can have on Business-to-Business relationships. Simply put, from an agency perspective, the golden medallion for this year is to position yourself as the conduit for B2B relationships on social networks.  For those of you that are client-side, the bullet point that shows an increase in B2B relationships and their retention are sure to put you above the rest come review season.

But before you go making promises that will give you self-induced IBS, here are a simple list of positioning rules that should keep you in line—consider it my gift to you, towards a successful and rebounding 2010.

1. Define your/your-client objectives by how they impact the business relationship to other businesses. Do not kid yourself into thinking that simply shooting towards fan-base count will do anything for you in the long run. The C-suite doesn’t give a damn about your fans, tweets, check-in’s or followers. More often than not B2B social media is more about relationship management while also achieving business success—so position yourself to also be successful by identifying that relationship as your main objective.‘My company needs to enable partners to reach their customers through our social media efforts in order to shorten the sales cycle.’
2. Identify what pain points your business-partner needs to solve that are influence, awareness, sales, or quality based. By identifying what specific point we desire to remedy or strengthen, we can set our creatives up for success when reaching the desired audience. Again, stay away from awareness for awareness’s sake—through friend acquisition. There needs to be a business reason to engage an audience.‘Our partners have had great product performance reviews, however their product isn’t moving. We need to enable our partner to better-know their customer-base.’ A pain-point like the one above give us something to dig-into. In a scenario like this we can develop messaging, incentives and drive loyalty that will take a product to market easier, and shortening a sales-cycle, by engaging customers earlier in the design process. This statement screams for customers to vote colors, preferences, features, etc—let them buy in early, that is what this is all about.
3. Redefine your goals with decision-makers. Glass or a whiteboard happens to be my favorite surface to work on, and there is no better time to do it than when figuring out B2B social media strategy. Insist that you need your client—or peers if you are client-side—in the room with you working through numbers and projections to achieve their stated business goals. Simply put you need your top social media minds re-aligning click-through-rates, followers, cost-of-acquisitions for followers and cost-of-interaction for each and every goal. The C-suite might say 10,000 votes on features outlined in point-#2 are just too few—this is where social marketers show value, by white-boarding the math that will produce their stated goals and talking real business.In my opinion, the majority of failed campaigns on social networks, are failures because the goals were canonized by un-savvy executives muscling their only-strong-on-their-blog social media experts. Show your value by reaching a business decision collaboratively—don’t enter into a poor business engagement.