They Liked it.

And that was all. No “yes, we are” or “no, we’re closed” not to mention “thanks for asking.” Just a thumbs up to the question… I guess?? How utterly frustrating and kind of a time-waster all round. Naturally, I told my Twitter friends about this unexpected sm fail, and some of the replies were quite amusing…

@KrisColvin maybe they thought it was a great idea but they don’t exactly…do it…

— Marjorie Clayman (@MargieClayman) May 11, 2012

@KrisColvin So go, enjoy an expensive meal, and when they bring the check, just give them a thumbs up, and walk out.

— Mike Conaty (@mikeconaty) May 11, 2012

@KrisColvin @margieclayman I think you should go & print a screen capture of the page, leave it for the owner w/your card.

— Pam Moore (@PamMktgNut) May 11, 2012

“Good question, @KrisColvin , we’re so glad you asked us that”?

— Oystein Lund (@OysteinLund) May 11, 2012

@KrisColvin Some people are great at social media! #sarcasm

— Derek Rayment (@PRspcDerek) May 11, 2012 

So… they never did answer. They’re kind of the only game in town, so I will have to keep laboring to get the answer, and I just wanted to point this out to make you think about your own social media use when it comes to customer or prospect questions. Are you using these channels as a place for push marketing? Or as an easy customer service hotline. You should be doing BOTH, if you’re on Twitter or Facebook at all. To blast out stuff you want people to buy, do or share, yet ignore basic questions from people following you is quite crass. To “Like” a question, but not deign to answer it is just downright strange!

Don’t be strange, crass, or stupid. Use social media like the person you are, act the way you’d expect others to act if you interacted with them, and let’s make the online space a better place! Pushing Like is easy… but so is answering a simple question or connecting the person with someone else in your company who has the answer or can help.

Now, to sort out that Mother’s Day meal… le sigh.

Want to do something fun and informative with your staff? Stage your own “checkout in real-life” and follow the process your buyers go through – this works for retail checkouts also, or phone purchases… no one should know before you do the problems, glitches and workarounds it takes to buy something from your company. Tape it to share and remember later, and once you make improvements, you can do this again and see if there really is a significant change for the better – or just a minor one that’s not going to really impact sales.

If you’re a company that needs help with this, give us a shout! We do user experience assessment and virtual visual merchandising as well as ecommerce site design. Go sell!

Lesson 1: Regular Posting Required

We will be doing something new and more interesting for our Fresh ID Facebook Page, but look at it right now: http://www.facebook.com/FreshID – we haven’t posted lately and this is a good lesson for us – if you don’t, the timeline is only showing one month’s posts at a time and if you scroll down you can see that the Page now looks rather empty… not a good indicator of being in a thriving business, unfortunately. Regular posting is clearly going to be more important than ever before, as it’s doubtful people will really hop down through all the months in the Timeline navigation on the right side of the page for the typical business (if you have photos of gorgeous motorcycles or beautiful women all over your Timeline, you may be the exception!)

Lesson 2: Crafty Marketing Required

Unfortunately for the majority of businesses, who used Profile images and custom tabs to promote their goods, services and events on Facebook, the Timeline “Cover” cannot be used for this purpose. What this means is you need to employ some creativity in the one thing everyone who visits your Page will definitely see. Though we will design some cover images with some words on them, they won’t be overt calls to action. For those, we will now use the Photo posts and have to make an image for promotion of an event or a sale, for example. Then as people scroll the page they will see the messaging without having to wade through a lot of text. Figure out the optimal size of photos for this Timeline view so that none of your promotional copy is cut off.

Lesson 3: People Will See Images for 2-3 Tabs… What’s Important To You?

Facebook has once again messed with the Custom Tabs so that they are liable to never be seen, is the sad, sad truth. I don’t think we can designate a Welcome Tab as the default Landing url anymore, and gone is the ability to “Like to Unlock” something. Sigh… you have 4 little boxes beneath the Timeline Cover image, that lead to an app or custom tab, so pick what you want to feature and pray people click the little box. You can change these images for each app, so make the images very interesting themselves so people might want to click them! Photos are stuck in place as #1, so if you are a business, such as a dry cleaner or accountant who doesn’t normally use photos on Facebook, you’ll need to think about this and come to terms with having new tasks in your life. Perhaps you can make some graphic images or at least take a good one of your business 0r staff so you have something of interest showing in the primary spot that people might click. I love that Facebook fancies themselves marketing wizards and want money from businesses, yet continue to make choices that benefit an active college fraternity more than the typical small-to-medium business who purchases ads. (Not really.) 

There is an important psychological aspect you should be aware of, and that is that some people don’t really like to leave Facebook – bizarrely, they think Facebook IS the internet. You should still make use of Custom Tabs, especially now that you have more width to use (810 now, vs 520 before.) You can’t count on people finding them from these boxes when they hit your Page though, so link to them from within a post or photo update, and continue to link to them from your Facebook ads to try to get people to your focused messaging.

Lesson 4: Your Logo Needs To Be Beautifully Square

You no longer have a long profile image to work with. It’s a square, and it’s going to cut into your Timeline Cover image. Be clever or not, but at the very least your logo or main company representation must look good in this square space as it’s the avatar and the Timeline Cover are the two things at minimum someone will see when they visit your Page. 

Lesson 5: Buy a Camera & Use It Constantly, or Have a Giant Photography Budget

Photos MAKE the Timeline view come alive. Best case in point is Harley-Davidson, who sometimes just says “Photo of the Day” to stick a photo up. Their Page, compared to those who don’t have photos up like this, is better by an enormous order of magnitude. Not all of us have decades of interesting photography to use, however, or a large budget to continuously produce new photos that don’t look like something taken from an amateur’s phone camera. I went to Victoria’s Secret, thinking they might have something really interesting going on, but sadly they do not – they are missing a HUGE opportunity to use all the photos they have at their disposal and load up the timeline with images of gorgeous women scantily clad… on topic and on message! Don’t be dumb and waste obvious opportunities like this.

Believe me or not, but photos need to be an essential part of your new Facebook updates or your Page will simply look too flat and uninteresting. For our friends like Tippin’s Pies, this is easy – just post a pie everyday! The rest of us are going to have to work to find things to post that are graphic in nature. I am not sure what path we will take at Fresh ID – at the very least we will need to put portfolio images in and find a way to make them more interesting looking than a mere screenshot.

What are you learning about this new view and have you had any trouble marketing from Facebook with these changes or is it too early to tell yet? Leave a message in the comments – we’d love to hear about what you’re experiencing as we keep swimming through the social media waters. I heard a great comment on Twitter yesterday, something like “we are NOT digital marketers, we are marketers in a digital world.” SO true! And it’s a jungle out there!

Please see Hubspot’s guide to the changes, and join us for the #smbydesign chat at a special time Thursday March 1st at 9PM CST to talk about the changes and what this means for your custom designed tabs!

The most important, and also ridiculous and unhelpful aspect of this mess is the following (text from Hubspot’s guide):

You can change it as often as you wish, but you should also adhere to Facebook’s policies regarding cover photos, which states that cover photos cannot include:

• Price or purchase information, such as “40% off” or “Download it at our website.”
• Contact information such as a website address, email, mailing address, or information that should go in your Page’s “About” section.
• References to Facebook features or actions, such as “Like” or “Share” or an arrow pointing from the cover photo to any of these features.
• Calls-to-action, such as “Get it now” or “Tell your friends.”
• Covers must not be false, deceptive or misleading, and must not infringe on third parties’ intellectual property.

We often used arrows to communicate things to users about the Tabs – this is BAD NEWS not just for us as marketers, but for users trying to navigate the labyrinth of selections on Facebook’s very busy and constantly changing UI. 

Also, from Twitter…

Facebook is unveiling Premium on Facebook…a paid service to vastly increase the reach of your content. Sounds expensive, doesn’t it? #fmc

— Nnamdi: Suade (@NnamdiNwoke) February 29, 2012

I am not sure what those features are or what the impact will be to smaller businesses.

Our clients should expect emails from us soon regarding their Facebook tabs and whether we’ll be able to change these as part of an ongoing monthly retainer or we will have to give them a quote for adjustments and updating – some clients still have FBML tabs so we are preparing emails for everyone now with details. We will reduce our rates for adjusting the design of tabs we have already done.

Join us if you can tomorrow for the #smbydesign chat. There’s much to discuss. We will talk about Facebook contests next week perhaps – it keeps getting pushed out as we react to the ever-changing social media world around us.

The NFL has a GIANT command center set up, and massive bandwidth has been pumped through the stadium so people can share about the game live with their friends who aren’t fortunate enough to be there. Check this out! and look at this gallery of images from the SMCC. They aren’t just watching to see what is said – over 20 people will monitor to reach out proactively to help people with things like parking info, getting lost in the stadium, getting an answer to a question, etc. even though they have not been directly asked via Twitter or Facebook. This isn’t push marketing – this is amazing customer service! Very, very cool!

Mashable has some ways you can use SM while watching and talking about the game: http://mashable.com/2012/02/05/super-bowl-2012-social-media

And we have set up a mini Tweet Command Center using Intefy today, that anyone can make their own just by logging in and tweeting while watching the search streams in the other columns. Go to http://intefy.com/superbowl if you want to watch it or use it today. Here are some things you should know about using this app:

Login Securely using Oauth to Tweet
Once you login, you can tweet from this page securely and we don’t see your account credentials, dm’s or anything. 

Retweet and Reply from Other Columns
If you mouse over a tweet you’ll see some icons show up under the avatar. Click one to retweet or reply, and the text will pop over into your Tweet box so you can edit and send it to easily communicate with others. (You won’t necessarily see it on this page if it doesn’t contain a keyword being searched.)

Problems with the Page?
If you run into problems, tweet us @intefy and we will try to help. The product is going through a development change regarding the way searches happen – if the page times out today and you see error messages, wait a few minutes and reload the page and hopefully the time will have passed where it will display tweets again. We will soon have a different api from Twitter implemented that will eliminate this issue.

We have no preference for a winner today, since our own beloved Chiefs aren’t in the game, but have fun watching the Superbowl and ads! See you online.

https://twitter.com/#!/CamryEffect
https://twitter.com/#!/CamryEffect1
https://twitter.com/#!/CamryEffect2
https://twitter.com/#!/CamryEffect3
https://twitter.com/#!/CamryEffect4
https://twitter.com/#!/CamryEffect5
https://twitter.com/#!/CamryEffect6
https://twitter.com/#!/CamryEffect7
https://twitter.com/#!/CamryEffect8
https://twitter.com/#!/CamryEffect9 

You can try looking at the accounts, but within a few hours and lot of griping online about it by some of us, they seem to be unverified (no more logo next to the name) and they are now protected so you can’t see the tweets they’ve been sending. Note: protected, not taken offline, which is standard Twitter protocol in response to enough spam/block reports.

I believe these accounts and the verification were paid for and Twitter was aware of the campaign in advance. Why? Check this tweet out: 

That’s one of the Directors of Sales for Twitter, praising how CamryEffect was going to be using Twitter, and then they had 10 accounts sending non-stop spam messages to people who mentioned Superbowl-related keywords (from what I could tell by clicking on lots of their tweets before they closed their accounts off.

So what’s the big fuss, anyway, you may be asking? I’ve had several conversations about this today. There is a fundamental difference in advertising, and partaking in events that result in ad delivery, such as a Google search, watching TV, going to a movie, using a free platform, listening to the radio or reading a magazine, vs. SPAM, which is a direct and personal solicitation to you, using an account of some type that you have (your phone, your social network account, your email.) There is also the concept of “cold” solicitation, which hovers somewhere between the two. If I say I need a dry cleaner (for example) and someone who doesn’t know me – a person, or a dry cleaner – says “Hey, we do that, if you want to check us out we are here” that is a little more appealing to me personally than spam, which is often the result of an automated delivery, and therefore impersonal and meaningless.

What Toyota’s CamryEffect campaign was doing was pure and total Twitter spam. Someone set up bots (someone on Facebook said this was done using http://localresponse.com/#brand which delivers advertising real-time. Their ad agency Saatchi & Saatchi LA has been tweeting repeatedly to watch the ad they created for the campaign, so we might assume they had something to do with this Twitter campaign also though we don’t know. There was a press release about an integrated marketing campaign using something called Shazam. So really, multiple culpable players were involved, at least Toyota who approved it, Twitter who helped enable it by making accounts look Verified and Official, and (maybe??) an ad and/or social media agency who boneheadly decided that what Superbowl football fans REALLY wanted tomorrow is a big old can of SPAM, otherwise known as the CamryEffect.

I feel sorry for the car. It really had nothing to do with this short-sighted money-grab and textbook worthy negative social media case study. And, as always, my concern is for the end users. One tweet about a car today, because you mention watching an event on Twitter, could well be 50 unwanted tweets about everything from zit cream to male impotence products based on watching The Mentalist. Or whatever it is you watch and people think you will buy.

And THAT is the single thing that really could be the death of Twitter. People will stay for ads, they’ll stay if you charge them… but if you suck them in and then sign them up against their wishes for canned SPAM, they’ll go elsewhere.

This didn’t happen when Ev and Biz were running the show. I knew something bad was going to happen when they left. If you care about this stuff, don’t just tweet or Facebook it. Put it in a blog post. Send it to Twitter. Say you don’t mind promotion but you expect them to promote responsibly. Yes, the site is free, but you create the content that keeps this crazy rat wheel turning. Don’t sell yourselves short as the end user. You DO matter! And maybe the Camry is even a good car, I have no idea. Ask your friends if they have one and if they’d recommend it. That’s a good way to find out.

Wake up companies and agencies. This is NOT your oyster. Our accounts are not your free-for-all. You’ll get it eventually because if you keep acting like this, you’ll have to come up with yet more ways to do push marketing because we’ll abandon in droves the sites where you abuse us.

Update 2/5:
As I published this last night, Toyota went and apologized on a blog post at TNW:
http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2012/02/04/toyota-takes-to-spamming-twitter-for-camry-super-bowl-promotion

We will be discussing this at the next #smbydesign chat, which is held every Thursday. Check out the times and information and please join us to talk about whether or not you think campaigns like this are a wave of the future we have to accept or we will be able to use our voices to stop Twitter and brands from heading down a wrong path by publicizing their mistakes.

Some great insights on WHY this brilliant scheme may have been cooked up are at Marketing Handy, so read that quick post if you have a minute. I’d love to have him talk to our #smbydesign group about the “viral video” conundrum marketers have when they want to make video but for the specific purpose of having it “be viral.”

This simple, but poignant video might help you think of new things to try and do for your business if you’ll sit back and think about where you could say things another way, or give your customers the unexpected.

What words are you using to tell your story?

Thanks for sharing this with us, Jake! (Our client, owner of Pandolfi’s Deli.)

#SMbyDesign Weekly Twitter Chat

#SMbyDesign is a Twitter chat I have long dreamed of starting. A Twitter friend named Daryl Woods and I had this discussion probably two years ago but I did not make it happen, though it keeps coming up. So today, another friend, Emily Fitzhugh who is a social media consultant and I decided to make it happen! We’re kicking off this Thursday (yes, day after tomorrow) and will do this every Thursday morning at the following times:

PST   7:00 AM
CST   9:00 AM 
EST   10:00 AM
UK    3:00 PM
KUWAIT   6:00 PM
BANGALORE   8:30 PM
HONG KONG   11:00 PM 

I’ve shown a few representatives from different countries here as we tried really hard to make this time work around the globe. #SMbyDesign chats will cover a few different aspects of social media design:

• the actual design processes and challenges of branding and doing interesting things for clients or your company on social media platforms
• great examples of social media channel design we see that is inspirational or pushes the envelope and gets us thinking about new ideas for engaging fans
• interviews with designers, agencies and marketers who have done a phenomenal job of branding social media channels so we can learn from them
• strategy and tactics for different platforms for those just starting out in social media (though it will help you to be somewhat savvy as many conversations will be of an advanced nature)

A lot of advice can be found online for how to market yourself on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube or LinkedIn. But advice on maximizing these channels from a design and branding standpoint is not so readily available. To truly do “social media by design” it takes more than a strategy – execution of the brand being extended visually and emotionally is important and yet not talked about as much. Let’s discuss it together!

Girls/Women Who Love MLS Soccer Community

Also in the process of being formed is a social community for women like Sherry, Heather and I who love their pro soccer team here in the US: MLS  pro soccer. Some great sites like http://kickette.com exist but are largely focused on soccer overseas. We noticed a missing presence of female-oriented blogs and personalities, though they exist scattered around the web and social channels… we want to bring these women together and create a safe and fun place to both learn about the sport (a lot of us don’t know the technical aspects and so some reporting goes over our heads) and to show other women that there are crazy, soccer-addicted females all around them that they can relate to. This is not so much to exclude men, as it is to be able to freely talk about things that interest us that don’t interest and usually annoy the men (player hair and fashion IS a very important topic!) Some phenomenal women around the nation are part of the founding group – you’ll get to know them after we launch. The community is open to any female of any age that loves her MLS team and watching pro soccer.

This site will be launched prior to the season opening games. If you’re interested in being notified when it launches head to our temporary site and submit your email to be notified. We will be so happy to meet you and play with you in our new community when we launch!

I hope you’ll join me in the #SMbyDesign Twitter chat on Thursdays or the soccer community if you’ve been bitten by the MLS bug like I have. If you have any questions about either group, let me know in the comments!

While it’s true that these consumers in the survey ranked high a desire to learn about new products, that is not the same as what the marketer thinks… that people want news on the brand and products. “New and different”, vs. “continually tell me about your products again” are very different things. And by and large, in this game-playing, high-expectations world we live in, customers, friends and followers don’t just want content – they want games, incentives, promotions and something to do, moreso than something else to read. The YouTube generation has a less than 2 minute attention span – they aren’t going to spend it reading a press release.

We need to ASK, in a formal survey of our friends, fans, followers, prospects and customers, why they follow us and what they seek from us. That’s one place to start. Some of the things marketers believe didn’t make the list at all for people who answered this survey, so if that’s the case with your batch of followers, throw out the pointless activities, trim the fat, and spend your marketing budget giving people what they will actually interact with instead of more of the same.

We do contests and promotions on Facebook for our clients, but haven’t done that for ourselves. I’m going to be looking at what we can do to make our updates – especially on Facebook – more interesting than noise this year. There are things even a creative agency can give away or do for people that don’t cost us much, but would benefit a prize winner greatly, like a site conversion to WordPress, or a rebrand of social media channels, for example. We could also design some unique things to make on zazzle.com to give away, like an iPad cover or messenger bag… not with our logo all over it, but with a cool design on it that benefits the recipient (or maybe our logo could be included, but very small and subtle.) Look at your business and see what you could do to bring a little fun to your social networks in the way of a contest or promotion of some type, even if you are a B2B service provider.

This is not the only study I’ve read that talks about the need for more interactivity and games, contests, etc. in the content mix. Below are some additional articles with more information and food-for-thought. If you have questions or want to brainstorm ideas about your Facebook content, let me know in the comments. Have a great week! 

 How Consumers Interact With Brands on Facebook

 13 Best Practices for Restaurants on Facebook
This is an aside… I have noticed that whenever I post images of the food at Pandolfi’s Deli on the Facebook page, consumer interactions are increased, and quite often someone will come into the deli to eat because this prompted a reminder. This is EASY for you to do if you’re a restaurant or food seller of some type. People want to SEE and desire what they don’t have in front of them that moment. Help them, help you!

 ExactTarget Study on Why People “Like” a Brand on Facebook

 Why Brands Need Friends – Not Fans – On Facebook

 CMOs Need to Change How They Communicate to Their Fans in 2012
Be sure and look at all the questions and answers from the survey I talked about in this post – very interesting.

Apparently, Google is sharing that one of our core capabilities is… Live Nude Events!! Except, umm, wait. Though we love doing hybrid virtual events for conferences, and live online events that involve revealing things, surprises, interviews and scooping the press we have never yet done a Live Nude Event for anyone. The pricing formula for that would be so extrapolated it would be comical:

Price + % Added for Reputation Risk – % Deducted for Number of Visible Abs + % Added for Bandwidth if Famous Celebrity – % Deducted for PR Exposure of Fresh ID for Featuring Naked Famous Celebrity…

You can see how complex this is!

In all seriousness, I DO know how Google picked up these words… I named a blog post about the first live online event we ever did (LikeMinds) “Live Nude Events… Behind the Scenes of Like Minds 2010′s Online Event”

I initially thought “Google is the Devil” but then realized this was my fault. It seemed like a great idea at the time – I was being cheeky and referring to the transparency and potential for problems you run into when you are doing a live videotaped event online, in real-time, with hundreds of real people watching, commenting, and running into their own issues. But I never intended to promote these 3 little words as a “skill” , though I’d like to think if anyone could pull off a successful, interesting and buzzworthy live nude event it’d be Fresh ID. LOL!

So, the lesson learned this week is – be careful what you name your blog posts, pages and online assets. I have chuckled at the daily visits from people searching “live nude online” or “watch live nude events” because I knew they were hitting that blog post, being disappointed and leaving again (sorry, no naked folks here!) But I’m a bit chagrined to know that an accountant or doctor, or someone else who is conservative may look us up and rule us out based on our rather randy set of offerings (according to this Google search) “Digital Strategy & Live Nude Events!! Portfolio NSFW!”

Just be careful. I’m going to talk to our SEO partners about what to do about it, if anything. We have an excellent team that does SEO for our clients and we are going to use them for ourselves this year also but haven’t begun yet, so if you need SEO to clean up a problem like this or just to be found online more easily, give us a shout.

In the meantime, if you have a Live Nude Event you need to throw, Fresh ID specializes in – oh, well, I better not offer that.