Here are the points from Matthew Creamer’s article that stood out for me:
Facebook posts and status updates from brands that encourage conversation … actually lead to conversation! This is true even — and sometimes especially — when posts aren’t “on brand.”
Random, off-topic, and seemingly banal content actually has the potential to resonate deeply with fans and can generate hundreds or even thousands of likes and comments. As a result, the brand gains high visibility in a Facebook user’s News Feed, right alongside posts from friends, family, and co-workers.
Brands need to strike the right balance of conversation-oriented posts and brand-centric status updates. In many cases, this means far more of the former (even as much as 80 percent of the postings) than the latter.
Brands and/or their agencies partners are pouring resources into creating content for social media marketing channels like Facebook, often in the form of detailed editorial and conversation calendars.
Brands should always be evaluating the business value of their Facebook marketing efforts. Gaining new fans and keeping them engaged is a good, and important, start. But getting them to do something that supports the brand’s overall marketing goals and objectives — raising brand awareness, generating new sales, empowering brand advocates, etc. — has to be part of the equation, too.
If your business or brand is developing its Facebook marketing and engagement plan, the Buffalo Wild Wings Facebook Page is a case study worth checking out.
In an outstanding presentation at last week’s 2010 WOMMA Summit, Paul Fresher, director of media for the restaurant/sports bar chain Buffalo Wild Wings (BWW), and Brandon Murphy, chief strategy director at the interactive agency 22squared, explained how the Page had evolved into a hub of online discussion around the brand over the past 15 months, jumping from 100,000 fans in August 2009 to more than 3.5 million today.
BWW’s Facebook strategy, Murphy explained, is to “extend the social experience outside of the restaurant,” and the brand uses its Facebook Page to talk about the things its fans and customers care about: sports, wings, and beer.
Generating responses from Facebook fans
With the Facebook EdgeRank algorithm, likes and comments by fans/Likers beget more likes and comments. The Buffalo Wild Wings conversation strategy aims to tap into that algorithm by posting and sharing content and status updates that are designed to generate a response.
And there’s no question the approach is working. A quick glance at the Wall reveals that status updates and posts from the brand regularly garner hundreds or thousands of comments and likes.
So how does BWW fare so well? Murphy shared what has worked best:
Sticking with short status updates (10 words or fewer)
Asking questions or invite debate
“Post like a friend, not a brand”
Being timely: Posting about relevant topics and during time(s) of the day when fans are most likely to be using Facebook
Following the 80/20 rule: 80% of posts for and about people (fans and brand advocates), just 20% about the brand itself
Not deleting comments just because they’re negative
Celebrating milestones and rewarding fans for their contributions (for example: BWW anoints a “trivia champion” each week and displays that fan’s photo in the Page’s official avatar image).
Integrating owned media and content assets (photos, videos, content/links from corporate website/microsite) to spark conversations
Using Facebook advertising to drive additional fan growth
Defining ‘success’ on Facebook
Buffalo Wild Wings has a clear definition of the “success” of its Facebook marketing efforts, Murphy said. Online, average impressions/month, total fans/Likers, and engagement per post have risen steadily on the Page throughout the year.
And the overall value of that success? Research and polling reveal that BWW Facebook fans visit the actual restaurants more often and spend more money ($616/year) than non-fans.
Podcast interview with Brandon Murphy
I recorded this audio interview with Murphy following his presentation:
* Brandon shares how the BWW Page has grown over the past 15 months and explains why the “art of conversation” is so important on Facebook.
* Brandon notes the need for brand marketers to retrain themselves in order to not treat Facebook as another marketing channel.
* Brandon explains how strong interaction on the Page helps brand posts break through the Facebook algorithms and show up in fans’ News Feeds.
* Brandon talks about the integration of Facebook advertising and its place in fan acquisition.
* Brandon discusses how 22square assesses the true marketing value of Facebook marketing efforts for its clients.
* Brandon shares the two keys to Facebook marketing success.
Podcast transcript
Bryan Person: Bryan Person here with Brandon Murphy, who is the chief strategy director at 22squared. Brandon, you just wrapped up a really good presentation about the Buffalo Wild Wings Facebook Page and the strategic thinking behind that. Can you just start off by giving an overview of the development of the Page: where it started, and how it’s grown over the last year and a half that you’ve been working with it?
Brandon Murphy: The Page started as we consolidated several Pages, some by fans, some by local restaurants. We did that in August of ’09, which immediately gave us a solid fan base to work with. Which is really important, because I really believe that starting a Page from scratch … The first 100,000 fans are the hardest ones to get, because you’re starting from zero. So having an existing fan base out there helped us a lot, and just formalizing it got us off the ground. Since then, we’ve grown it from 500,000 to 3.5 million. And the way we’ve done that has been largely through the art of conversation, which is talking about the things that our customers and our sports fans out there care about the most, and will agree with or debate about, or dislike and comment.
So it’s really been a community where we’ve been able to fire up fans of both the social experience that we have in the restaurant, which is really important, and also just about sports, and competitive ribbing, and trash talk, and fandom.
Bryan: And Facebook is a natural fit, a natural environment for that as well.
Brandon: Definitely. I think the role we serve for sports fans out there is that they go to Buffalo Wild Wings to be with friends. They don’t just go there for “the wings are awesome,” or to see a specific game. They go in there to soak in sports culture, but also, hang out. And we facilitate that hanging out in the restaurant by trying to get them to interact with each other across the tables, but also, by serving what we call “social lubricants,” which are beer, wings, and sports. So really, what we try to do is take that same kind of experience and just take it into Facebook. When they’re sitting there at work, or they’re not able to be at Buffalo Wild Wings, they can still get a little of the social interaction that they would get if they were there.
Bryan: Now you gave a list during the presentation about best practices in engagement. One I found really interesting — and I see this, but I don’t always see brands doing it well — is “post like a friend, not like a brand,” or “post like a real human being, not like a brand.” Why do you think it is that a lot of brands, even consumer brands, really struggle with that?
Brandon: I think they look at Facebook as a marketing channel. Marketers, we’re used to writing headlines, and we’re used to writing offers. We’re used to talking to the consumer and persuading them to do something, and in the social space, it’s something completely different. You want to talk with them so they engage in a conversation with you, and they’ll talk to you about others, and to do that you’ve got to have a table conversation with them versus a marketing conversation with them. I think it’s also hard because we’ve had to retrain a lot of our creatives at the agency, just in terms of how do you write a status post. And a lot of the creatives aren’t really good at writing status posts. It’s social media people that are creative, that understand that we’re having a conversation.
We’re not trying to get them to do anything besides say “Yeah, cool”, or “No, I disagree”, or “Yeah, I agree”. What it boils down to is just being honest. All of us are Facebook users. So in the end, we all take part of this community and this channel. So asking yourself the question, “What would I respond to in my own news feed?” is a valuable thing as well.
Bryan: And you mentioned in there Facebook’s EdgeRank and their algorithm that I think all marketers are trying to figure out: How do you crack through? But can you explain the importance of the way that you craft the post, or when you craft it, or the type of engagement you get, in trying to get into that [Facebook] News Feed and what that means?
Brandon: Well, the News Feed is really important. The way you get in people’s News Feed is really by getting them to interact with your post. That’s the simplest way I can put it. There are lots of scores that go into that in terms of the timeliness, how fast people interact with it, how many people commented versus liked, how many impressions you have, and the ratio of the impressions to the interactions. So there’s lots of stuff that goes into their algorithm that no one really understands; it’s kind of a black box. But we do know that the higher the interaction rate with a post, and the faster that happens, the more likely it is to get in your News Feed, which is really where your efforts on Facebook get amplified.
So we pay attention to interaction rates and things that drive interactions rates: the number of words, assets with the posts, what time you typically post, what the topic is about, how you ignite with questions, or spur participation versus just putting something out there that’s hard to respond to. So those kinds of things we pay attention to and measure on a weekly, monthly basis to say, “This is how we’re learning how to get the most interactions from a post.”
Bryan: You talked in there also about doing Facebook advertising. Can you expand on when you’re running ads, and how that compares to drive engagement versus organic engagement?
Brandon: Running ads on Facebook for fan acquisition is really important. Being able to dial in the mix of organic and paid likes, and the more likes you get from a paid standpoint, it should drive your organic likes as well. And we work with Blink Media. They’re a reseller of marketplace ads on Facebook, and they’re awesome. They help us dial in how many homepage units and ROS units. We do a lot of ads, and a lot of optimization, and a lot of testing to see what’s driving the most likes. We don’t spend an inordinate amount; we don’t spend a lot of money. But the money we do spend, we’re more efficient with because our costs-per-fans are usually between $2 and $5 a fan. And from a paid standpoint, typically, your costs are up around $8 or $10, if you’re going straight through Facebook, and you don’t optimize the marketplace here, etc.
Bryan: And specifically, whether it’s Buffalo Wild Wings, or even some of the other brands that you work with, how do you see an average Facebook fan, and what does that convert to in terms of purchasing on the other end at the offline venue?
Brandon: We look at it several different ways, and sometimes we look at it with specific tactics. We posted a coupon to the Wall, and we looked at the number of prints, and the number of redemptions at the store. That’s a straight link to it, but we also do overall studies. So we’ll poll our fans, and we’ll do studies that show us if the visit rate per month is higher with our fans versus with the non-fans that go to our restaurants, and if our self-declared spend levels are any higher or lower. So we measure fans versus non-fans on Facebook to understand if we’re getting more visitations out of our fan base. But that’s almost a secondary kind of thing. How we use Facebook with Wings is to make sure that our advocates are talking about us, so that when we open up stores in new markets, the people who know us in that new market are already talking to people who don’t know us. So we have lines out the door when we open the store.
Bryan: Finally, if you had to boil it down to one or two things that brands should be doing on Facebook to see the most success, what would those be?
Brandon:Honing in your conversation strategy is really one of the most important things. And listen a lot. Just understand what’s working and why it’s working. So those are the two big things. Making sure you have a conversation strategy that’s more about the fan than it is about the brand, and then measuring and understanding those posts and how many interactions you’re earning based on those posts, those are the two most important things.
Bryan: Brandon, I appreciate your time, and thanks again.
Brandon: Thanks.
Buffalo Wild Wings presentation at WOMMA
Below are the slides that Fresher and Murphy used during their WOMMA talk:
While the “Facebook backlash” angle to the Cooks Source-vs.-Monica Gaudio tale has ragedonline for much of the past week, you just might have missed how another business used its social media experience and savvy to avoid a crisis of its own on the world’s largest social network.
That social media presence extends into its Facebook, where the clinic regularly posts updates on its official Page, including hundreds of photos and videos, while also answering questions from the public on its Wall and in discussion forums.
So when fans spoke out on the Wall en masse last week in the wake of purportedly racist remarks sent in an e-mail by one its doctors, radiologist Aivars Slucis, Mayo was in a credible position to respond.
Here’s how Mayo handled the firestorm on its Facebook Page:
Made three posts to its Wall over two days acknowledging the story (see screenshot below), first by reinforcing its commitment to diversity and ultimately by saying it had spoken to the doctor and “[did] not condone” his comments.
For a period of some 42 hours following the breaking of the Dr. Slucis story, allowed all relevant comments (see a few of them in the screenshot below) on the Wall to stand, provided they did not violate stated community guidelines on its Info tab. In all, more than 200 original posts came in from Likers, plus the related likes and comments to those posts.
Ultimately redirected the Dr. Slucis conversation away from the Wall and into a specific discussion forum (see screenshot below). The tactic enabled fans to continue to weigh in on the topic as needed, but allowed Mayo to recast its Wall as a spot for what it knows and does best: medical news and questions about treatment and care.
So if you’re looking for an example of how to manage an attack around or against your brand on Facebook, add this case study from the Mayo Clinic to your playbook.
Late last week Facebook introduced an “automatic content filtering” feature for Facebook Pages that’s meant to provide an initial line of moderation for Page admins.
Our verdict, after reviewing the feature? While useful as a first-pass moderation tool, the Facebook Spam filter doesn’t replace the need for actual human moderation.
In this screencast below, I talk through and demonstrate how the Spam filter works, and where it falls short:
Facebook’s automatic filtering will now zap new Wall posts from fans containing traditional indicators of spam, such as links to external websites.
And that’s potentially very helpful, especially on high-volume Pages where spammers are going to town.
Facebook automation won’t always get it right
But as with any algorithm or machine-built filtering, there are going to be mistakes.
When we first checked the Spam filter on our LiveWorld Facebook Page, for example, we found three items Facebook had deemed as spam that were actually comments we wanted on our Wall.
The posts had been submitted by a LiveWorld employee and pointed to updates for our company’s fantasy football league, and were located in blog posts on a subdomain of our corporate website. Not exactly one of those scummy make-millions-while-working-from-home links!
This sort of background and context won’t make sense to an algorithm, but it will to real-live Facebook admins and moderators. To ensure that Facebook isn’t incorrectly removing legitimate comments from your Facebook Wall, be sure to review the Spam filter regularly.
Not in place for all Wall comments
At least at the outset, Facebook’s automatic content filtering is only applied to new Wall posts from fans/likers, but not to direct comments on comments made by the business or brand.
In the screencast above, I demonstrate how a post can be moved from the Spam filter back to the Wall, and vice-versa. This allows the Spam filter to be used as a “holding area” for questionable posts that need to be escalated and reviewed by another admin, moderator, or brand manager. If the post pasts muster, it can be unmarked as spam and sent to the Wall; otherwise, it can be deleted.
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In summary, take advantage of Facebook’s new automatic spam filtering as another tool for better management and moderation of your Facebook Page. But don’t depend on it to always know what is and isn’t spam. That role should always fall to perceptive human beings.
If you’re headed to the 2010 BlogWorld & New Media Expo in Las Vegas this week, I invite you to attend a panel discussion I’m leading on community management on Thursday afternoon.
From finding your “voice” and creating dynamic content to creating moderation guidelines and engaging for the long term, our panelists will cover the nuts and bolts of community management, and answer specific questions about getting started and moving forward in the industry.
There’s a major stumbling block to effective moderation of a Facebook Page: Facebook doesn’t notify you when new comments are left by your fans.
The result is massive inefficiency in trying to monitor and respond to the activity on your Page. Of note:
Because there’s no auto-notification system, you have to manually visit the Pages to check for new comments.
Once you’re on the Page itself, there’s no quick-and-easy way to eyeball which fan comments you’ve already reviewed and which ones you haven’t yet seen. You simply have to remember where you last left off. That may not matter much if you’re running a Page for a small business with little activity, but can quickly become a nightmare on a high-traffic Page with dozens, hundreds, or (in the case of major brands) thousands of new comments a day.
If your business or brand posts frequently to the Wall, like the New York Times or Starbucks or the NBA, the challenge is even greater. You now have to keep track of multiple comments threads at once.
Things can get messy quickly.
So, how do you cope? Here are two potential solutions:
Create, and stick to, a Facebook moderation calendar
In addition to reviewing your Page regularly after posting new items to the Wall, consider creating a Facebook moderation calendar that schedules systematic Page check-ins for new comments from fans, including outside of regular business hours. After all, Facebook spammers and fans don’t necessarily sleep when you do! If you have more than one admin for your Facebook Page, be sure to assign individual responsibilities for particular days and times. Here’s a simple example:
Outsource your Facebook moderation needs
If you simply don’t have the staff, discipline, or interest to manage Facebook moderation internally, then bringing in an outside agency or partner could be the way to go.
LiveWorld specializes in moderation, and even Facebook moderation, specifically, to offer you efficiency and peace of mind. Our Moderation Server and tools let us check the Wall systematically, without missing anything. We can also work with you and your business or brand on moderation guidelines, escalation procedures, and activity reporting.
But whether you moderate your Facebook Pages with your own team or work with us, commit
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.
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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Visit our podcasts page for additional audio conversations exploring the intersection of brand marketing and social media.
Any robust Facebook moderation efforts should include a plan for dealing with fans, spammers, and trolls who wreak havoc on your Page by blatantly or repeatedly violating your moderation guidelines.
If the situation calls for banning a fan from your Page, Facebook gives your two potential paths to follow:
1) Manually review your list of fans
Facebook’s native tools don’t enable admins or moderators to search for a specific user to ban, so this first method can get very clunky and time consuming if your Page has thousands, hundreds of thousands, or millions of fans.
Click the “See All” link in the snapshot of your Page’s “Likers” (Screenshot 1), located in your Page’s left-hand column.
From the ensuing “People who like this Page” pop-up box (Screenshot 2), scroll through your list of fans to find the actual spammer and click on the ”X” link to the far right of his/her name. Note: Because Facebook only displays 5-6 fans at a time and just 100 per Page in the pop-up box, you may need to click the “Previous”/”Next” buttons several times to move forward and backward through your entire list.
From the ensuing “Remove” pop-up box, check the “Ban Permanently” box, and then click “Remove“. Voila – the spammer is banned!
Screenshot 1
Screenshot 2
Screenshot 3
2) Flag and ban fans from the Wall
The more efficient way to report and throw out spammers starts right from the Facebook Wall.
Beneath the user’s offensive comment or Wall post, click on the “Flag” link (Screenshot 4).
From the ensuing pop-up box, click on the “Report” link (Screenshot 5).
From the ensuing “Report this link” pop-up box (Screenshot 6),
Select the “Reason” you’re reporting the violation (your options will be “Attacks individual or group” and “Advertisement/Spam”)
Check the box to permanently ban the user from your Page and to remove all of his/her previously posted content.
Facebook will acknowledge your submission with a “Thank you for your report.” pop-up box (Screenshot 6). Click “Okay“, and you’re done.
Screenshot 4
Screenshot 5
Screenshot 6
Screenshot 7
Note: The scenarios above for banning Sarah Silverman from our LiveWorld Facebook Page are for demonstration purposes only. Sarah is one of our top-notch community managers, and is very much in our good graces!
Through the end of September, the nonprofit is asking people to “give up their September birthdays” to raise $1.75 million and provide clean drinking water for the Bayaka people of the Central African Republic.
Its a noble goal, powered by a passionate team plus a social media marketing playbook that should make larger brands green with envy!
charity: water provides an array of digital assets (videos, sample tweets, arresting photos from C.A.R.) for easy sharing on its website, Facebook Page, @charitywater Twitter account, YouTube, and Vimeo, and then supports and promotes each of the individual campaigns through those same social channels.
In this podcast, I discuss the nuts and bolts of the charity: water social media strategy with Paull Young, the nonprofit’s director of digital. Click above to stream or download the podcast. [RSS and e-mail readers: Click through to the original post if you can't see the embedded audio file.]
While the actual 2011 edition of SXSW Interactive is more than six months way (March 11-15), it is the public voting now, in the dog days of August, that goes a long way in determining which panel sessions are actually added to the final schedule.
With that in mind, we submit 20 panels worthy of your “thumbs-up” selections. To vote, just follow the title links below.
And we admit we’re biased here, but we think the first two proposals below from LiveWorld are especially interesting! Mark Williams and I will be attending our 3rd SXSWi event next March, and we’re hoping for our first crack at leading important industry discussions.
Note: In order to vote, you must already have or create a PanelPicker account. Public voting through the PanelPicker closes at 11:59pm Central on Friday, August 27, 2010
LiveWorld panels
1) Social Media FAIL: Lessons from the Dark Side “Have you ever seen a social media FAIL in progress and wondered why the brand involved couldn’t see the mistakes they were making that made the situation worse? Doing everything ‘right’ in social media planning does not necessarily guarantee success, but doing the wrong thing will definitely ensure failure …” – Mark Williams, senior community manager at LiveWorld Solo session
3) The Black Art of Optimizing Facebook Wall Posts “Not all Wall Posts on Facebook are created equal. Ever wonder why some get more visibility in the News Feed than others? There are proven tactics to optimize content for the News Feed to foster engagement, grow fans, raise awareness and drive conversions for brands using Facebook Pages …” – Helen Todd, Sociality Squared
4) To Reply or Not To Reply? Facebook Conversations “Most businesses (especially big ones) are on facebook, but not all businesses actively engage with their customers and fans on a regular basis. this panel will focus on which brands are having a conversation, how to have a conversation successfully …” – Jeannette Arrowood, Fleishman-Hillard for AT&T
6) Socially Regulated: Social Media in Regulated Industries “While many businesses and corporations have started to adopt social media as part of their marketing, communications, and other business practices, regulated industries – such as pharmaceuticals, financial services, and the automotive industry – often face challenges and restrictions that other industries do not need to consider, such as federal regulations and industry guidelines …” – Shwen Gwee, Vertex Pharmaceuticals
7) Will Online Patient Communities Replace Primary Care? “With doctors spending less and less time with their patients, patients with chronic conditions are turning more and more often to their peers instead of (or optimally in addition to) the medical community for guidance …” – Greg Matthews, WCG
9) Viva la BBS! The Beauty of Hidden Communities “How secret, heavily-moderated, under-the-radar communities are providing the best social experiences on the internet, and have since the early days of the BBS.” – Jon Bell, frog design
10) Are Your Customers a Crowd Or a Community? “The word “community” is becoming so overused that it is beginning to lose its meaning. Many businesses apply that word to their customers without understanding the value of true community …” – Thomas Knoll, Zappos.com
11) Real-World Moderation: Lessons from 11 Years of Community “After 11 years of running MetaFilter.com, I (and the other moderators) have been through just about everything, and we’ve built dozens of custom tools to weed out garbage, spammers, and scammers from the site …” – Matt Haughey, MetaFilter
13) Without Tummeling, Your Web Community Will Fail “Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody describes ridiculously easy group forming online, but also that most of these groups fail. The key to success is to have a Tummler to play the role of conversational catalyst within a group, to welcome newcomers, rein in old hands and set the tone of the conversation so that it can become a community …” – Kevin Marks, BT
Social business
14) Leveraging Social Media Middlemen ” The frontline employees who interact directly with your target consumers will have to be increasingly familiar with social tools. They will be your social media middlemen …” – Tom Cummings, Dachis Group
15) Finding Your Brand’s “Social” Voice “Conversations are the backbone of social media. But, unlike their face-to-face cousins, they’re far more difficult to master …” – Jennifer Kane, Kane Consulting
16) Agency Structure: Where Do We Fit New Creatives? “First we added the HTML guy, then the flash guy, then the app guy, then the design guy. The collaborators for any kickass advertising project are growing as new dimensions are being added to what counts as a delightful brand experience” – Rachel Mercer, VCU Brandcenter
17) When Good Companies Go Horribly Wrong “This is not my beautiful job, how did I get here? We never want to believe it, but often we watch in horror as the company that we once loved, either as a founder or as an employee, suddenly descends into a rotten, back-biting, stinking mess …” – Rolf Skyberg, eBay, Inc. *
Content marketing
18) Not My Job: The Ultimate Content-Strategy Smackdown “OK. So let’s say your business has a website, a Facebook page, a Twitter account, a blog (or lots of blogs), an email newsletter, some SEO stuff, and eighty bajillion landing pages you forgot about back when it was still funny to rick-roll someone. Who’s doing all this content?” – Kristina Halvorson, Brain Traffic
19) Resurrecting Your Corporate Blog: Changes to Make Now “Social media is crucial to the success of small & large businesses alike in today’s media dependent society. Unfortunately, the most commonly used tool, the corporate blog, often gets lost in the shuffle …” – Aleksandra Todorova, Mint Life
20) The Death of the Brand Website “Today’s brand sites do a great job of communicating a message, but what most sites lack is fresh content that keeps visitors coming back. Major brands can take a lesson from blogging sites that do an excellent job of keeping content fresh by creating stories around their products, adding video, and integrating social networks like Twitter and Facebook …” – Gary Nelson, Organic/digital marketing
* Disclosures: 1) LiveWorld is a Buddy Media partner. 2) eBay is a LiveWorld client.
A post about Facebook marketing in Ad Age earlier today reinforces some of the trends and best practices that we’ve been seeing, advising clients on, and blogging about here.
If your business or brand is developing its Facebook marketing and engagement plan, the 
The 