Podcast: Justin Levy on the state of ‘Facebook Marketing’

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Running time: 17:10

Earlier this summer a helpful new book from Justin Levy hit the physical and virtual bookshelves:Facebook Marketing: Designing Your Next Marketing Campaign.

In this podcast, I talk with Justin about the book, and the opportunities for marketers to launch and maintain successful marketing programs on Facebook.

You can stream or download the podcast by clicking at the top of this post. [RSS and e-mail readers: Click through to the original post if you can't see the embedded audio file.] Show notes and a complete podcast transcript are below.

Show notes

* Justin assesses the current Facebook marketing landscape.

* Justin explains why some businesses struggle to see Facebook as a viable marketing channel.

* Justin discusses some of the best Facebook features for marketers: building a custom landing tab, integrating custom application, and Facebook Insights.

* Bryan asks Justin why so many brands struggle to communicate like real human beings.

* Justin talks about the value of Facebook Connect for brands.

* Justin offers his predictions for the future of Facebook, including the ongoing thorn in Facebook’s side: privacy.

Podcast transcript

Bryan Person: I want to welcome Justin Levy here to the podcast. Justin is the author of Facebook Marketing: Designing Your Next Marketing Campaign. He is the business development corporate strategy and client services director for New Marketing Labs, and also the partner and general manager of Caminito Argentinean Steakhouse. Justin, thanks for taking a few minutes to come on the podcast.

Justin Levy: Thank you for having me.

Bryan: The book came out a month or so ago. How’s it going so far? Maybe give us the what you got into writing the book and where it’s headed.

Justin: Yeah, the book is doing pretty well. So, I thought I may need to put some more time into it, set up a book tour, compete with some of my friends, my other friend’s book tours that are going on, things like that. But the book is doing well. It’s being received really well. It is the second edition. I didn’t write the first edition. This was a complete rewrite of the book when it came out about two years ago or so. So, it’s been received well. I had a good name through the first edition. So, really happy with the distribution of it so far. It was just released for Kindle a couple weeks ago, because it took them a little while longer to get it out.

And still trying to push on my publisher to get it out for iBooks. It’s actually kind of funny; it came about when I was on my honeymoon last year. My baggage had gotten lost and I was down checking my e-mail, because I’d promised my new wife that I wouldn’t check e-mail or do any work while I was gone on the honeymoon.

But I had to, because I had to get in contact with the airline. And there was a teaser in my e-mail that offered me a book deal on writing this based on the work that I had done with my restaurant with Caminito. And based on what we do every day at New Marketing Labs. So, that’s how it came about. It was a fun process. It was a long process. Writing a book is a hard thing.

The reason why I don’t go for my doctorate is because I don’t want to write 200 or 300 pages on any one subject. And that’s exactly what I did with this. But it was a fun process. The problem with it is that Facebook is changing so fast that a lot of the things in here have already happened or changed. But that’s why I try to keep it based on concepts, as opposed to particular feature sets.

The Facebook marketing landscape

Bryan: Right. I mean, the first edition was two years ago and, my goodness, how much has changed in two years? Where do you right now assess what is the state of Facebook marketing as you kind of look out at the landscape and some of the clients you talk to? Are marketers where they need to be in Facebook? Is it still much of trial and error? How do you assess where we are right now?

Justin: I think a lot of it’s still trial and error. I think there’s some brands that are doing amazing things, both at the enterprise level, big household name brands like Coca Cola and VW and Microsoft Office that are doing great things with it. Those are just a few. I think there’s some smaller SMBs that are doing well with it. But largely, when we talk with our clients at NML, we talk with them and a lot of times they understand. They get Twitter, they understand it’s real time. They’ve heard the Comcast stories or the jetBlue or Southwest stories.

So, they understand that. They get it, because it’s all over TV. And Facebook, they have a little harder time understanding because they grew up with it, or over the past few years, it’s integrated into their lives as a personal network. So, it’s a little harder for them to make that switch to thinking about it as a brand platform.

But the companies that really try have done very well with it. We just got done, or we’re still working with a client, but we just got done with this campaign around… They are a construction company, their name is Alure Home Improvements, based out of Long Island, New York. And they were the construction company lead for the Extreme Makeover Home Edition that will air this season.

And we made Facebook communications central for everything. So, you had to become a fan of the Page and then that’s where they communicated everything. As opposed to their website, or their blog, or some other tool they normally would. And they grew by 1,000 % in a week and a half.

How brands can succeed on Facebook

Bryan: So, that’s certainly a success there. Well, what do you think are the keys to success with the brands that you’ve worked with? And you mentioned the Cokes and the VWs and Microsoft. When you see a Page and you see that it’s working well, what goes into that? And what has to happen for there to be success in Facebook marketing?

Justin: I think that you have to really use all of the features. I think a lot of times what a lot of people are doing right now are setting up as basically placeholders. You go squat your name. And you do a little bit of work, you might put in your company name and upload a logo and things like that. And then they just kind of leave it there.

But Facebook isn’t that type of a platform. Facebook is just like other platforms such as Twitter. Flickr is a little different. You can upload a batch of photos and maybe, like with our Inbound Marketing Summit, we only run that conference once a year. So, we only are going to upload photos once a year. But still, we get thousands of hits on there and we measure it, we look at it. And people use those photos. But on something like Facebook, there’s 25 billion pieces of content being uploaded every single month. It’s a network.

And 50 percent of the users are logging in on a daily basis and spending 55 minutes a day on the platform. So, when you’re spending that much time sharing that much content, to be relevant you have to use the features. So, some of those features are integrated in the FBML code, Facebook Markup Language.

And what that allows you to do is create custom tabs in apps and things like that on your page. So, if you go to any one of those brands I mentioned – Facebook.com/CocaCola, /Office, /VW, they all have a custom tab. They have a custom landing page that carries their band with them.

So, it’s a seamless, or mostly seamless, experience between their website, their Twitter page, if they have a custom background. And then their Facebook Page. Also, it allows them to make fun apps.

One of the best apps that I’ve seen recently, or that I liked a lot, used in a lot of presentations, is Fight Club [that] was coming out with the 10th anniversary of the movie.

And they’re digitally remastered and all this stuff. And they made a site called “Welcome to FC.com,” and it took you eventually to a Facebook Page. But that used a Facebook application and used Facebook Connect to bring an experience onto a landing page, that then took you over to their fan page. And it’s really interesting.

You go on there, you pop it in, it makes it an experiential exercise in taking information from your profile and creating this experience around Fight Club for you. So, that was really cool. I think they are using the full feature sets, and I don’t know that people know the full feature sets. They don’t know about Facebook Connect and how powerful it can be. They don’t know how powerful FBML can be, or the Insights, which are just the basic analytics package.

Engagement on the Facebook Wall

Bryan: And so you talk about this custom tab, which is really useful for someone who comes in the first time and isn’t a fan. Once someone, let’s say, becomes a fan, where they’re going to be taken to is the Wall tab, right? So, once you become a fan of Coca-Cola, the next time you go back there, you’re going to land on the Wall. It seems to me a next step and where a lot of brands fall down is — and you talk about this in your book — is the idea of simply engaging: actually putting content out there on a regular basis on the Wall, responding to comments, answering questions.

I’m seeing, for example, AT&T is doing a decent job of that right now. And they get lots of complaints and questions, and they’re in there answering. Why do you think that it is that they struggle with just putting up content regularly and actually engaging like human beings? What holds companies back there?

Justin: I think they’ll usually say that it’s a lack of time. I don’t know if I always believe that, because Facebook doesn’t demand as much attention as some other platforms do. Because you’re not going to be on there with 50 status updates a day, like you may on Twitter, or any some of the other platforms that force you to engage more like an online community or something like that. I think that they’re scared of what to say or what to do, and it’s hard for them to not sometimes see it as a promotional tool. So, it’s a mindset change. It’s not so much with the platform. It’s with the mindset of the company.

I think that the people that are doing it the best are the ones that will go on there. And one of the things we have to coach our clients on sometimes is that you can go in there and just ask someone simply how their day is going, or ask your community simply how your day is going and that will help you stay top of mind.

Of course, you should be trying to produce remarkable content as part of the overall strategy, where Facebook is part of it. But just simply engaging with them, people just want to talk to you. And if you show that you’re human, that there’s humans behind the logo, some remarkable things can happen.

How Facebook Connect helps brands

Bryan: Justin, you mention and talk about using the different tools. You mentioned Facebook Connect, and you also go into this quite a bit in your book. We’ve kind of seen Facebook Connect explode over the last year-plus. How are you –whether it’s talking to clients or seeing the landscape here — see the value of something like a Facebook Connect for brands?

Justin: Well, there’s lots of them, just because of how open of a whiteboard Facebook Connect really is. But what Facebook Connect is, is it allows you to take an experience or take Facebook and carry it with you around the web.

So, a few things happen. If you’re signed into Facebook and you go on a site that’s using Facebook Connect, you don’t need to log in to that website. If you choose to connect with Facebook Connect and you go through the initial, you have to allow the permission sort of thing, from then on you can go on that site and you can like content if they have that new Facebook “Like” widget on there that you’re seeing on CNN. And almost all websites are now starting to put it on there.

So if I’m CNN, I put that on my site, you connect with your Facebook profile. Now, when you like a comment, you’re going to click Like on that article and instead of it being a comment on our page and giving us one more comment, that’s going to post to your Wall on Facebook, depending on your privacy settings. And now that helps me as being CNN take advantages of your social graph. So now, my couple thousand friends will see it, and then if they share it, their friends will see it and it will bring more attention to the article.

So, you’re seeing uses of Facebook Connect like that. You’re seeing it take on the purpose of single sign-on. The ‘net has always demanded over the past couple years to have a single ID. And we’ve seen it with OpenID, and depending on who you talk to will tell you whether that’s a success or a failure. But the second that Facebook enabled the ability to do that, they had … now they have 500 million people that have the ability to have single sign-on across the web for every site that integrates Facebook Connect.

Bryan: Do you ever see resistance from marketers to this because if I’m signing on with my Facebook information, the marketer is maybe not going to get as much information about me as they might like, right? I mean, what Facebook passes on to the site owner is maybe more limiting than they might get if they had their own sign on or their own registration. So, do you see that tension eventually going away, or what are you hearing when you talk to clients?

Justin: We definitely encounter that. And one of the ways that you get through it, or we try to get through it, is it depends on what they want to do. And is there another way that they can capture information into their database through a call to action, some type of form, in other ways. And if they’re going to use Facebook Connect, could they use it in a limited feature if they’re worried? So, maybe it’s only to access a certain section of the site, or to engage with a game or an experience that you might create, or an app that you might create for them. Whereas, if they are going to subscribe to your newsletter, well, you’re not going to use Facebook Connect for that.

If it’s a contact form or a lead-generation form, you want them to actually take the steps, because you might have other systems in place in other platforms, such as CRM or something, that’s going to drop that lead or that contact information and create a lead for your sales team to go out and contact. Or it might attach tracking analytics to it.

So, usually we see them, our clients right now wanting to do it or people I talk to do it around small applications, or things that aren’t lead generation that are for community building. So, Fight Club again as an example. Fight Club doesn’t care about capturing the e-mail addresses of everybody. At the end of the day, their goal is get conversations started and to sell as many freaking copies of that movie when it comes back out as possible. So the more conversations they can start, the better.

So, using Facebook Connect on that was perfect because it took advantage of everyone’s social graph. It was a way to make it experiential for the user. But it also took advantage of everyone’s social graph, because once you saw it on my Wall, you’d want to know what it was about. You’d click on it, pop in your information. Now it goes to your Wall. In two degrees, they’ve got it out to a few thousand people.

Facebook’s future

Bryan: So, I guess this all comes back, as much as this does is, what are your business goals? What is your marketing strategy? And tying back the specific tactics and when you’re using Facebook Connect to that strategy. One final question, Justin. Where do you see — if there’s a third edition that’s being written in a year — what’s it going to include? What are the trends that you’re seeing happening right now? Where do you see as Facebook crosses that 500 million threshold and is marching toward a billion, it hopes — what do you think is coming?

Justin: I think that one of the things is exactly what you hit on. I think, first of all, that there are talks about the third edition, so we’ll see where that leads. But, I think Facebook will cross a billion. I think it will be in the next 12 months. If you’ve looked at how fast they’ve achieved the next 100 million person mark, every time it’s been in a shorter and a shorter timeframe. And so, I think that we’ll continue to see that. I think that we’ll see that happen over the next 12 months.

I don’t know if it will be in the next 12 months, but look to see Facebook probably continue to position themself for an IPO. There’s not too many people that could afford to buy them, and I don’t think that Mark Zuckerberg would sell the company. And I think that some more that will be revealed in the movie when it comes out. That movie that’s coming out about it, and about some of the other books that are being written about Facebook show that he’s not, he doesn’t want to sell it. This is his baby.

And so I’d think that you’d see them IPO, probably possibly swallow up some other social networks. You see them keep making place for other smaller companies that they’re shutting down or that they’re incorporating the technology, like FriendFeed. But we might see them make some bigger acquisitions over the next year.

And I think that you’ll see more business cases come out of it as long as they keep up with the privacy. That’s one of the thing that comes up in every interview I do. Every conversation I have is, what about the privacy of Facebook? And people fail to forget that Mark Zuckerberg is a great CEO, but remember that he’s running the third largest country in the world behind China and India.

So, with that, we’re not always happy with the decisions that our country makes, but hopefully they’re making them in the best light for the majority of the people. Well, they’re doing the same thing. So, they screw up sometimes. Well, I think privacy will continue to be an issue. And as long as they don’t have some huge hit from it, I don’t think that there’s much that’s going to stop them on their growth climb.

Bryan: Well, Justin, excellent insight. I thank you for the time today. The book is called Facebook Marketing: Designing Your Next Marketing Campaign. It’s the second edition. It’s at bookstores everywhere. You mentioned it’s on the Kindle and hopefully soon coming for the iPad to the iBookstore. Justin, thanks again for your time, and it’s been fun.

Justin: Thank you.

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