Originally I set out to write a post giving shiny gold stars to some of the brands who, so far, have been successful in their use of Facebook Fan Pages but after opening a blank document the issue of how to measure the success of Facebook fan pages presented itself. Is the Fan Count indicative or a successful page? Or rather is the activity that fans engage in on the Fan Page?

Do you want a million passive fans? Or a hundred-thousand active fans?

Pretty much everything that happens on Facebook leaves a trail. (Not including the News Feed items hidden because of the clever use of privacy settings.) Those active fans, when engaged, will have their interaction with Fan Pages displayed on their own profile wall. It is this interaction that I decided to focus on.

With all of this in mind, I began scouring Facebook in search of the best of the best.

This following list is not complete and will, without a doubt, continue to grow as more and more brands develop their Facebook presence but these are a few of the brands that have excelled at showcasing Facebook’s potential to create and maintain engaging and entertaining brand/fan relationships.

H&M - http://www.facebook.com/hm
Highlights: Fashion, Style guide & photo tabs are rich with engaging and creative content.

Ben & Jerry’s - http://www.facebook.com/benjerry
Highlights: Wall is full of content from recent events. A custom tab showcases (as of this writing) a link to a Facebook application that allows users to create their own ice cream flavor to enter into a global contest.

Whole Foods - http://www.facebook.com/wholefoods
Highlights: Boxes tab is visually compelling and full of relevant information. RSS/Blog tab is very well put together, connects Facebook page to external Whole Foods blog effectively.

Discovery Channel - http://www.facebook.com/pages/Discovery-Channel/6002238585
Highlights: Shows tab is a great way to showcase all of the channel’s shows & their respective Facebook Fan Pages.

Zappos.com - http://www.facebook.com/pages/Zapposcom/7172307686
Highlights: Daily funny-photo caption contest. Aggregates content from their blog & Youtube account showcasing office culture.

Starbucks - http://www.facebook.com/Starbucks
Highlights: Has their Twitter feed linked to their Facebook status allowing them to update and engage fans across the two networks.

Please feel free to add any additional Fan Pages that you feel deserve recognition in the comments section.

We’ve been piecing together our digital identities for a long time, but Twitter has provided a new and distinctive way of doing so. Unlike any other digital communications platform, Twitter prompts us to uniquely build our identity 140-characters-at-a-time. Or tweets.

Since our first tweet, we start progressively narrating our public digital personalities by constantly associating and disassociating with articles, thoughts, images, and videos. It allows us to express who we are, to create, recreate and continually tweak a fluid public mosaic.

On Facebook’s bio section we can define ourselves through the content we associate with - but the association is static, one-dimensional and can become stale. We exist more through groups and wall posts than through individual statements. Our value within the community is more prevalent than our value as individuals.

Blogs are an aggregation of calculated thoughts and are not as immediate as Twitter. Whereas tweets represent one thought at a time and have a subconscious value, blog posts are subject to more rumination before they are published and lack the urgency of a tweet. They don’t have the mosaic quality because they vary greatly in size and intent.

But what makes Twitter a mosaic more than anything else is the inclusion of sentiment. On no other platform will we see the individual, the owner of the profile, page, post or picture use sentiments to describe him or herself as much as on Twitter, where feelings prevail. There we share not only the digital snippets we curate, but ourselves as well. Twistori - a service that extracts tweets that include the words love / think / believe / feel / wish - is only one example of applications that amass tweets of similar sentiment.

Twitter’s restrictive nature inevitably creates an incomplete picture. It becomes necessary to continue narrating the mosaic and sharing more thoughts, more feelings, more pictures, more articles and more opinions to prove that we exist in the space and to compile a more holistic image of ourselves. That is what, above all, makes Twitter a unique expression tool and the digital personality mosaic.

Related posts:

1. Twitter: How many people CAN you follow?

Image via Flickr

If there’s one thing I’ve learned after spending almost two decades of my life sitting in classrooms, it’s how to make a good paper plane.

Coincidentally, the process of creating a successful digital marketing strategy has a lot in common with the process of creating a successful paper plane.

With a paper plane, the first step is to find the right paper. Its gotta be strong and sturdy but not so thick that you can’t fold it without making it clunky and cumbersome.

With a campaign you also have to find the right building materials. Is the campaign going to be based off of Facebook? Youtube? Twitter? How are you going to build awareness? Are you going to force it down the throats of users? What kind of bait are you using? Is that the right bait for your intended fish?

After you find the right type of paper, the next step is investing time crafting the plane, making deliberate and thoughtful creases.

When courting a fan community are you trying to throw a campaign together at the last moment? Or are you investing the time necessary to make meaningful and widespread connections to the community that you’re trying to reach?

Then after you put the time into your plane you take a deep breath, exhale, cock your arm back and launch that plane into the ether.

With a digital marketing strategy after you’ve invested the time and effort in crafting it you have to pull your metaphorical arm back and launch that campaign into the ether.

A well-crafted campaign, much like a well-crafted paper plane, once launched, will take off and soar to new heights. A poorly crafted campaign, however, will hit the ground hard and you’ll end up getting teased by your peers.

And no one wants to get teased right?

Related posts:

1. Are You Counting The Numbers Behind the Numbers?

This inspired me to create a handful of digital billboards. Feel free to re-post.

(Click on the image for a full size version)

The idea that brands have some kind of monolithic control over how they are perceived in our digital world is obsolete. What your brand means is defined by status updates, hyperlinks, and blog posts; not by the 3 Core Traits written on page 25 of the Brand Bible that your million dollar branding agency wrote for you. How your brand is perceived is now defined by the ways people interact with your brand; not by your shiny new logo. Your brand no longer has the ability to define the context in which it is experienced; now brands have to play in the arenas created by their audience.

The sooner that your brand embraces this new reality, the sooner you can start having fun again and start earning a little love.

Related posts:

1. 100 Words About Digital Branding

The truth is, most brands use the web in superficial ways. And our favorite place is becoming littered with pointless Facebook apps, ‘viral’ videos and widgets (whatever those are). Brands chase hits because they fundamentally ‘misunderestimate’ the power of this medium. They look for whatever sounds popular, hoping for rapid and mass adoption; the kind of curve they’re used to seeing through mass advertising.

Do you disagree? I’d love to start a conversation.

Related posts:

1. The fall of advertising, and the rise of marketing
2. What the F**k is Social Media?
3. The Digital Version of “Make the Logo Bigger.”

Just a few thoughts that have emerged from my blogging over the past year. Love to hear any feedback or interpretations you may have.

• People’s lives don’t revolve around your brand, they revolve around life.
• Your competition on the internet is everything else on the internet.
• Design your brand to be taken apart and put back together in unimagined ways by your consumers.
• Pass-along is made of people.
• Exponential pass-along is a social phenomenon, not a magic trick.
• Invest in relationships.
• Being measurable isn’t the same as being worthwhile.
• If I can’t see what you’re interested in and what you choose to share, then I don’t know who you are.
• If your brand is acceptable to everyone, then it won’t be exciting to anyone.
• Care about something more important than your product.

Related posts:

1. Branding in the Era of the Remix

Nope!  Instead, they’ve devised 3 new kinds of banners that are, “much bigger and more attention-grabbing than the banner, which is despised by publishers, advertisers and readers alike as an ad unit.”

So, the solution to those nasty banners that are “despised” by everyone, is to… drumroll please… make them bigger and more attention-grabbing?  To make matters even more interesting, the article shows a heat map of yet another eyetracking study that shows that banner blindness is real.  Check it out:

Hrmph.  It seems like we’re still stuck in the same puzzle we’ve been trying to assemble for years: how to create marketing that works, that people actually seek out and enjoy.  I have some ideas, but I’m saving them for a secret pentaverate meeting to be held in my bunker deep beneath the Rocky Mountains.

“We now have all this data,” Alexander told me. “And we have computers that can analyze that data. And I wanted to use that data in a progressive way. When I hired Daryl, it was because I wanted somebody that was doing more than just looking at players in the normal way. I mean, I’m not even sure we’re playing the game the right way.” … The games are games of odds. Like professional card counters, the modern thinkers want to play the odds as efficiently as they can; but of course to play the odds efficiently they must first know the odds. Hence the new statistics, and the quest to acquire new data, and the intense interest in measuring the impact of every little thing a player does on his team’s chances of winning.

If your work has anything to do with marketing on the internet, then this should sound familiar to you (if it doesn’t, 2009 is going to be even rougher than you feared).

As budgets shrink and companies demand closer accounting of every penny they spend, “measurement” has suddenly become the hot new industry buzz word. Clients are demanding a new level of accountability from their digital agencies, and it’s long overdue.

The implications of this shift, though, go well beyond a renewed interest in metrics that the client should have been getting all along. Clients are also seeking a greater level of detail in statistics across all marketing disciplines and executions. More granular statistics can uncover a world of new insights about a brand’s health online. Best of all, tracking these additional metrics over time can give brands an incredibly deep and well-rounded long-term perspective on their overall success.

Combined with standard online metrics like display advertising click-through, website visits, and length of engagement with a branded experience, new numbers from social environments will begin to give brands an idea of how relationships work together with reach and awareness to create a successful online marketing campaign.

There’s more to Facebook than fans.

• Are you counting wall posts?
• Are you counting fan photos?
• Are you counting discussions?

There’s more to YouTube than views.

• Are you counting comments?
• Are you counting subscribers?
• Are you counting embeds?

There’s more to Twitter than followers.

• Are you counting @replies to your account?
• Are you counting ReTweets of your messages?
• Are you counting mentions of your brand in the public timeline?

There’s more to blogs than mentions.

• Are you counting positive sentiment?
• Are you counting relative authority of the blog?
• Are you counting referral clicks from blogs to your website?

These details are just the beginning, and they should be thought of as the basic package.

The real fun starts when you can begin to analyze these metrics in order uncover indications of higher quality interactions, connections, and impressions.

What is the ratio of fan activity on your Facebook page compared to the total number of fans? (Is the community alive?)

What is the ratio of subscribers to your YouTube channel compared to the total number of video views or channel views? (Is you content genuinely compelling?)

What is your ratio of @replies and ReTweets on Twitter compared to your total number of followers? (Are people inviting you into their conversations?)

How many repeat positive mentions of your brand are you getting on the same blog? (Are you creating brand advocates?)

Not all brands are ready for all of this. But, all of these numbers are waiting to be counted. And in tough times like this, it’s more important than ever that companies build systems and devote resources to getting smarter. Some short-sited brands are going to blow their budget on lavish short-term spectacles. Let them. They may win the battle. Other brands are going to give themselves a view from 30,000 feet, and in the process discover their strategy for winning the war.

Comments welcome.

If you work on client projects, inevitably you’re going to have to update someone on the status of those projects. The concept is pretty simple, I’m doing something for you, it’s fairly complex, so I’m going to tell you about how it’s going. The sad reality though, is that status updates usually fall into one of two categories, completely useless or so time consuming that they destroy both client and vendor productivity. This doesn’t need to be the case.

One of the main killers of a good status update is granularity. Getting to the right level of detail is a balancing act and in my experience most people err on the side of too much detail over being brief and concise. When you think about it, this is a pretty uniformed choice. The people we communicate with, aka clients, are busy. The more time you ask them to spend reading something the more you increase the chance that they won’t.

Next up is the division of information which should be very simple and intuitive. I’m a big fan of the following organization:

• Item - Use a simple and clear name that is easily recognizable.
• Description - Describe the item in 1-3 sentences.
• Client Contact - Who is the client responsible for this item? Ideally this should only be 1 person … more than that and confusion is likely to ensue.
• Internal Contact - Who in your company is responsible for the completion and delivery of this item.
• Status - What is the current status of the item? We subscribe to the Twitter model for the Status section and aim to describe the current state of the item in 140 characters or less.
• Next Steps - List out any immediate actions that need to be taken on this item and also be sure to assign responsibility for these next steps. There should be as many steps listed as are needed, but try to keep the length of each item to 140 characters or less.
• Questions - What open questions need answering? Again, say it succinctly so that is easy to understand and answer.

One additional way to organize items is by sorting them into bins of active, potential, and completed. I like to color code line items to make it easy to differentiate. Some people find that color coding is better suited to communicating priority, but I’ve found that this can be far too subjective and incendiary. If seeing something in red is the only indication to your client that it’s in a bad state then I’d argue you need to work on some larger communication issues.

The last major factor is the method of delivery. Every client is different, so delivery of a status update could be best accomplish with an email, PDF, or shared Google Doc. I’d encourage you to pick whichever method you think will be best utilized by your client and change it up if you find they’re not reading it.

Getting in the habit of communicating status effectively and frequently, i.e. every week, is a good way to facilitate smooth running projects. Be flexible with this kind of documentation to ensure it is serving a purpose and most importantly, don’t let the process of utilizing status updates inhibit getting work done.

It’s time to stop talking about influencers and start talking fan communities. Influencers are a PR strategy; they don’t provide the critical listening component that marketing in 2009 demands. A dollar spent on fans is a dollar well spent. These thoughts are yours to argue (here or at slideshare), steal, share, link, or augment.

Related posts:

1. Fan Relationships (It’s Complicated)
2. Bud Melman’s Mad Men Report
3. Digital Media is not Mass Media for Cheap