Category Archives: Emarketing

Tips on managing corporate Facebook pages

A few tips about managing corporate facebook fan pages. I’ve been burning the candle on the  social media marketing for BuskerFest and so forgive the bullets & short sentences.

– Follow your social network’s blog. The features and functionality for all social networks are changing quickly and without notice. I definitely notice more emphasis on agile development, that is releasing new features as they are developed, rather than waiting for a magic moment in time for a major upgrade release.   By following the facebook or linkedin blog – you get an update about new features (much like wordpress does) so you are not caught off guard (which I’ve experienced with linkedin evolving contact management (tagging) and facebook’s limited profile).

– Social assets can not all come from corporate. The greatest thing I’ve done with BuskerFest is create a volunteer social media team full of young creators.  They truly prove the ‘wisdom of crowds’ (and power of productivity) and have created assets that I could not easily deliver – a song for BuskerFest, a slideshow on Epilepsy, customized google maps, listings of all pr coverage, and importantly, conversation.

– Add applications to facebook for richer experiences. I know what the agency of the future will look like.  Talent will need to be able to source or develop applications for facebook, iphones, twitter, etc.   Here is a great source of apps for facebook by Involver. I recommend adding the twitter one.

– Yes, you can change the order of your facebook tabs. It may not be obvious but you can drag and drop tabs around so long as the wall and info remain the first two.

– Groups = not so good, Pages = great. Avoid sunk costs – try to migrate groups to pages and then focus on pages.  I wrote about this in the past.

– Scope your effort carefully, social networks take a *lot* of management and engagement. If you have an internal audience, you *might* be able to manage a twelve hour day but with external domestic or global customers, the work easily slides to round the clock.  Some of my best discussions occur in the middle of the night.  Pages need multiple admins.

– Where possible – use bit.ly or other URL shorteners for adding links in Facebook.  This provides some metrics whereas the full URL does not.

– Facebook metrics are not that great. I would love google analytics type metrics with historical tracking on fan page growth.   I have lots of thoughts on annoying Facebook practices – being an admin,  I can’t comment on my page as an individual.  I find editing pages, account settings, adding new admins not very intuitive in Facebook.

– Yes – you can get a vanity URL for facebook despite claims you can’t.  Damned if I can remember how.

That’s it for now.   Hope that helps y’all.  I welcome your thoughts and experiences.

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Socializing with a social media agency: Coffee with Mark Campbell, VMG Cinematic

I met Mark Campbell, a social media seeding and feeding guru of VMG Cinematic today at Balzac’s in Liberty Village to shoot the breeze on social media, what clients are asking for, what the market is willing to invest in, how to use social media to engender customer loyalty, what is being recommended and various campaign work we’ve both been doing in 2009.   [Mark and I have a mutual friend from Harley Davidson and so we met thru Linkedin – ah the power of social networking.

VMG Cinematic is an edgy, new media shop producing enviable online video distributed socially thru youtube, digital signage, and more.   They sport a client base we’d all love to play ball with including Harley Davidson, DHL, and Motorola.  Their high quality work is leading to very creative customer and employee focused campaigns integrated artfully across social medias.

There were a couple interesting themes in our conversation, beyond integrated social media campaigns.  One in particular focused on improving marketing ROI thru clever use of content assets.

I used to pull my hair out discovering various content assets being unused and not leveraged but easily deployed or strongly desired by customers.   (by content I mean video, photography, copy, etc).    Developing original content is hard enough and so its important to make every content piece that is developed work really hard.   The time to do this is at the creation of the content and not afterward.

A quick example.. in the condo development market, photos are taken throughout the whole construction process (and often live web cams accompany professional photos) and yet these photos/webcam are not made available to the buyers simply because the content did not reside or originate in the marketing department.  Certainly, there are privacy and legalities to consider and yet the sourcing of content does not have to stop with the marketing department because the customer experience does not stop after the purchase.

This is, in part, the beauty of studying the customer experience of buying a home and understanding how people who buy condos are very, very interested [nay emotionally invested]  in seeing the progress of their home during its construction.  Heck – I have friends who scrapbooks of the building of their home.  [okay – now to really digress – wouldn’t it be cool to see these scrapbooks?  Check out moleskine ‘s mymoleskine section for customer contributed content].

Now marry customer experience strategy, content sourcing with new and social media distribution possibilities and the world is your oyster.

Back to Mark.  Mark had some great examples of how he increased the payout of existing efforts by just adding a little bit more upfront investment.  The old “with just a little bit more spend, we can double the return on your efforts” tactic – but an honest approach that is compelling and working for Mark and his clients.

“It doesn’t cost much to add a production team”  Mark said of sending a team to capture a customer event.   At the end of the day, the customer had the event and a mini-documentary to release on youtube [and in my experience, often some significant internal assets – be that e-learning or corporate communications].    Mark also talked about re-using video assets, or “using the b-roll” as he called it, to extract further value from a production for creating more value for a company.

Well.. the day is done.  This isn’t high school.. I don’t need a conclusion to all this.  G’night.

New Facebook metrics

Kai Elmer Sotto and I served on the Sick Kids Foundation Web Advisory Board.  He was at Ebay and was always full of great ideas for the foundation.    He is a kindred colleague – one who you connect on linkedin but bypass quickly to facebook.    Coincidence  – hHe is now Facebook Canada’s very first employee.   That’s my very long way of name dropping and explaining why I follow his facebook updates.

He recently updated about new metrics tools available for facebook administrators:  We have upgraded Facebook Insights to help Facebook Pages administrators better understand how engaging their posts are. The enhancements show how users are interacting with your content in the stream, both on your Page’s Wall and in News Feed on their home page. …

quicksand of e-business

I joined a new company in Sept. with a large GTA home builder. I’ve decided not to mention the corporate name too much for now since I’m not ready to take on the company voice and they aren’t ready to engage in the conversation yet.

The company is very exciting and at its core is a very good brand. Recently, a buyer’s old house (as they are waiting for a new one) burnt to the ground! Upon learning this, x managed to move up their move in date from July 2007 to December 29th 2006! That is a miracle in itself. They also gave the family winter jackets (that the construction crews get), a big basket of food, bought toys for the children and paid for some hotel stays. I learned of this casually as the family was in our lobby getting something and I heard the story – a whisper almost. This kind of thing makes me quite proud of the company – and its a story that is never shared with others.

Anyhow – where I am going with this is that x is a fantastic brand. And as I was brought into the company to manage branding, research and new media, I underestimated how much I could help digitize the business. I took e-business for granted – and now I arrive and there is no e-marketing (no SEM, SEO), no reported web analytics, no intranet, no collaboration tools, no idea that houses WILL be sold online (let alone currently influencing sales). And so, as much as I’d like to push web2.0 – I have to pace myself. I have to desparately raise the expectation of what I can help deliver. I don’t think anyone sees what I know is coming for home building online.

So my first step is to align myself with good business partners. A new agency, online survey vendor, analytics, research. That takes time but I’m getting there.

The only area that I can push on web 2.0 is getting all the exec onto RSS feeds for listening to competitive and brand conversations. I’ve downloaded RSS Popper – which is freeware and funnels feeds to my outlook. I need something that feeds outlook because I can’t change people’s behaviour too drastically. I’ve just haven’t had time to perfect all my feeds (then will copy the URLs etc to others’ email boxes.)

Then, I’ve got a PR agency in the US to look at incorporating online/blogs into a campaign. That’s as far as I’ve gotten. I need to start sharing my bookmarks with fellow workers but with no intranet I feel a little lost.

Laurie.