NevilleHobson.com

Facebook is for brands – the careful ones

neville@nevillehobson.com (Neville Hobson) — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 21:38:00 +0000

ReadWriteWeb published a detailed post today on research from Razorfish about online consumer behaviours with a strong focus on Twitter and Facebook.

While the overall post makes for interesting reading and is very useful from a fact-finding perspective, what leapt at me from RWW’s page were two charts and a concise paragraph.

First, the two charts:

Just look at what people said was their ‘usual’ behaviour (the bright-red bar). And the highest – purchase a product or service.

Which reflects the top answer to a specific question asking what’s the primary reason to be a friend of a brand on Facebook:

In the case of Facebook fan behaviour, content isn’t king: getting a good deal is.

Then, the paragraph of text:

[…] An even higher percentage of respondents have "friended" a brand on Facebook – a whopping 40%. Considering that Facebook is a social network that started out as a way for college kids to network, this is a statistic that will make companies and organizations take note. If you want brand recognition on the Web, according to these statistics there’s a very good chance that Facebook is a place you want to be.

The bold is my emphasis.

What this text is doing is making a comparison between behaviours in Facebook compared to Twitter.

Even without a comparison, 40% looks a pretty notable metric to me.

A complementary post by MarketingProfs, also published today, gives some sound advice to marketers and how they should behave on Facebook, beginning with a warning worth noting:

[…] A full 44% of people who are fans of at least one company or brand on Facebook also say social networks should be used strictly for interpersonal communication. They don’t believe marketers are welcome. To them, self-identification as a fan is not an invitation; it is an expression of personal taste or style intended to be shared primarily with friends.

So the risk is very high that brands – more correctly, the people behind the brands as brands are purely inanimate devices and not people – will not recognize the innate behavioural differences in personal connecting vs marketing messages.

So here’s some good headline advice to marketers:

Don’t act like "marketers"
Align with fans instead of selling to them
Be quick to listen and slow to speak
When it comes to positive comments, let your fans tell the story for you.
Direct consumers to other channels for marketing messages

All the details are here:

40% of People "Friend" Brands on Facebook – ReadWriteWeb
Why 70% of Facebook ‘Fans’ Don’t Want Marketing, and What You Can Do About It – MarketingProfs

Proposed cookies law is an ass

neville@nevillehobson.com (Neville Hobson) — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 08:48:00 +0000

“Breathtakingly stupid” are the words used by Struan Robertson, editor of Out-Law.com, in a post describing a new law that demands consent to cookies that will be in force across the European Union within 18 months.

Cookies are small text files many websites automatically store on your computer that do things like remember your preferences on a website, let you log in on a next visit without having to enter your details again, etc – useful activities such as these.

So according to the Out-Law.com post, what’s about to happen across the 27 member states in the EU is a law that requires any website owner to get a visitor’s permission for a cookie to be be stored on that visitor’s computer, or accessed from that computer, only if the visitor "has given his or her consent, having been provided with clear and comprehensive information."

I guess this would includes bloggers like me, too, as you’ll have a cookie on your PC after a visit here if you’ve done things like left a comment and asked the site to remember you.

Robertson has some suggestions on how a consent process could work:

[…] You could seek consent with pop-ups, if you’re happy to ignore accessibility guidelines that discourage pop-ups – though users’ browsers may block pop-ups by default, which risks confusion. Or you could do it with a landing page that contains a load of information and some choices. The choices for users could be:

Give me a load of cookies, now and in future visits, and let me get where I wanted to go in the first place – and please don’t interrupt me like this again.

Cookies sound evil. I’m going to use American sites instead, because they don’t scare me with this cookie nonsense.

I don’t want cookies from your advertising partners, but I’ll gladly pay for an ad-free version of your site. What’s that you say? I need cookies for that too? OK, but just a few please.

You need to ask each new visitor just once, of course – until the visitor deletes his ‘consent’ cookie. Like a blow to the head, that action will cause your site to forget that you’ve actually met before and you’ll welcome the visitor like a stranger.

I’m all for addressing privacy concerns as well as technical issues such as cookie hijacking. Yet this new law seems to be about restricting the functionality of a technology – can a law actually do that? – rather than addressing concerns like privacy or criminal behaviours and enable something of greater benefit to everyone using the internet.

Robertson’s post goes into some detail on specific implications in the UK and suggests how our government could “take a bullet for Digital Britain.”

I think Robertson’s view that this is breathtakingly stupid is about right. Indeed, the law is an ass.

Read the complete story: Consent will be required for cookies in Europe.

Photo by anomalous4, used under Creative Commons license. Post cross-posted at The Next Web Europe.

The Hobson and Holtz Report – Podcast #499: November 9, 2009

neville@nevillehobson.com (Neville Hobson) — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 07:53:27 +0000

Content summary: Introducing FIR Phone Quicks on ipadio; FIR Interview with Steve Rubel coming; just ask @FIR if you want to be included in the FIR Twitter List; the next show is FIR number 500: add the hashtag #FIR500 if you comment publicly; Michael Netzley reports from Singapore on the Frost & Sullivan ‘Meetings Around the World II’ study, and more; the Media Monitoring Minute with CustomScoop; News That Fits: Why social media is vital to corporate social responsibility, Joie de Vivre CEO experience prompts the question: how authentic should the CEO be on Facebook?, why you should apply your common sense about permissions when using content created by others; listener comments discussion; music from Jemimah Puddleduck; and more.

Get FIR:

Messages from our sponsors: FIR is brought to you with Lawrence Ragan Communications, serving communicators worldwide for 35 years, www.ragan.com; Save time with the CustomScoop online clipping service: sign up for your free two-week trial, at www.customscoop.com/fir.

For Immediate Release: The Hobson & Holtz Report, for November 9, 2009: A 71-minute podcast recorded live from Wokingham, Berkshire, England, and Concord, California, USA.

Links for the blogs, individuals, companies and organizations we discussed or mentioned in the show are posted to the FIR Show Links pages at The New PR Wiki. You can contribute – see the show notes home page for info.

FIR #499 show notes at The New PR Wiki

Share your comments or questions about this show, or suggestions for future shows, in the FIR FriendFeed Room. You can also email us at fircomments@gmail.com; call the Comment Line at +1 206 222 2803 (North America), +44 20 8133 9844 (Europe), or Skype: fircomments; comment at Twitter: twitter.com/FIR, or at Jaiku: fir.jaiku.com. You can email your comments, questions and suggestions as MP3 file attachments, if you wish (max. 3 minutes / 5Mb attachment, please!). We’ll be happy to see how we can include your audio contribution in a show.

Join the FIR Discussion Forum and extend your conversations with the FIR community. You can also join the FIR Facebook Community and become an FIR friend.

To stay informed about occasional FIR events (eg, FIR Live), sign up for FIR Update email news.

So, until Thursday November 12…

(Cross-posted from For Immediate Release, Shel’s and my podcast blog.)

The problem with PR email

neville@nevillehobson.com (Neville Hobson) — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 10:52:00 +0000

A timely story about that distribution channel so often misused by the PR industry – email.

In an article published in Journalism.co.uk (and elsewhere), Iain Fleming, who works for Newslink, a news aggregation and delivery service in the UK, writes about the results of a survey he carried a few months ago on people’s attitudes to the email that PR agencies and others send them.

Probably little surprise at some of Fleming’s findings:

[…] the results of my small survey – including responses from 101 editors, section editors, journalists and IT managers – showed just how much those working on news desks disliked the PR industry – despite their growing reliance on it. So much of what is being thrown at them is completely irrelevant – if it gets to them at all.

What does get through – and 95 per cent reported problems with email of which around a quarter said it was ‘every day’ – is sent in ways which either crash their systems or can’t be opened because their employers simply cannot afford to upgrade software on 200 computers as regularly as a small PR agency of just a few people can – and does.

And that is just for ‘traditional’ text and pictures. The message that a national newspaper can happily use a picture – even across several columns – if it is only a few hundred Kb in size has not got through to the PR people, who keep sending out 10Mb files at a time.

Move on to ‘new’ media and the situation is even worse, with the same issues of incompatible file types, too large files, poor quality content and stuff that is ‘just not newsworthy’ topping the list of complaints. A senior manager within ITV told me just last week how one station struggled for several hours to get video sent by a fire brigade into a format suitable for broadcast, but ran out of time and the bulletin went out minus the footage.

What a picture. Read the full story in its gory detail.

I like to look beyond the dismal picture Fleming paints. There are great opportunities for the few – yes, there are some – who get it right.

Related posts:

[Photo by Neil Crosby, used under Creative Commons license.]

Thesis tweaks with a little community help

neville@nevillehobson.com (Neville Hobson) — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 10:21:55 +0000

About 15 months ago, I implemented the Thesis theme for WordPress on this blog. It’s a premium theme (you pay for it) and a powerful one as it gives you access to the means to customize many aspects of the look-and-feel of your WordPress site and its functionality without your having to know much about PHP, CSS and such things.

Since developer Chris Pearson released the new version 1.6 last month, I’ve been tinkering on and off with it over on my Testing Thesis blog, a place I set up to aid my learning of what I can do with Thesis (and where others can help out, too, notably the great help earlier this year from my friend in Portugal, Bruno Amaral).

Today I’ve made some small tweaks to this blog and added the welcome box at top right of your screen beneath the banner. Thesis 1.6 makes it easier to see how to do this – what I did was customize the multimedia box option – but I still needed some hand-holding for specifics on getting it looking more or less how I wanted it to.

Things like padding and margins, font size, background tint: some of which just meant clicking some choices in the Thesis Design Options admin page, others needing code entering into the custom.css file.

So thanks go to all the Thesis users in the Thesis support forum whose relevant questions and posts pointed me in all the right directions; and specifically to Thesis Hacker and to Marko Saric at HowToMakeMyBlog for their invaluable tutorials.

And special thanks to Jonathan Wong who created the social media icons you see in the welcome box.

Related posts:

Upgrades to WordPress and the Thesis theme
[Testing Thesis] Thesis 1.6 installed – and it rocks
[Next] Adding intelligence to WordPress theme design

Art on the go

neville@nevillehobson.com (Neville Hobson) — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 10:34:00 +0000

If you’re an art lover who owns an iPhone or iPod Touch, you will rejoice today as you can visit the Musée du Louvre in Paris right on your device, wherever you happen to be.

The museum just launched an iPhone app that offers a glimpse into the rich works of art and other treasures you find in the museum galleries in Paris.

Get to know the Mona Lisa. Explore the works of Tintoretto, Titian and others of the Renaissance period. Tour the museum through a collection of videos. Get information about opening hours so you can plan a real-world visit.

This English-language app – not yet mentioned anywhere on the Louvre’s website – is available free (App Store link), is a delight and is very well produced.

Even if art’s not your thing, you’ll enjoy a tour of the museum and learn a little history.

One other art app I’ve had on my iPhone for the past few months is Love Art, an excellent pay-for app (£1.79 in the UK App Store) produced by Antenna Audio for the National Gallery, London.

This is in another league compared to the Louvre’s app as its various sections are more deep audio-visual tours of the content you want to explore.

And what content! Over three hours of video and audio, in fact, covering such a range of all you would find in the gallery if you visited.

Rembrandt is here as is Van Gogh, complete with detailed commentaries and visuals on their major works. You can watch or listen to compelling content on other masters whose works are displayed in the gallery including Leonardo da Vinci, Botticelli and Renoir.

Delightful tools, ones that add real value to your mobile experience.

Now if only there were an app for other iconic museums and galleries. Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum, for instance.

Oh, wait…

Antenna Audio again. Nice work!

The iceberg uncovered

neville@nevillehobson.com (Neville Hobson) — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 13:01:58 +0000

This week’s edition of The Economist arrived in the post this morning. Not an unusual event, really, except it reminded me that last week’s didn’t show up until Tuesday because of the postal strike for three days. Which followed the two-day strike the week before.

During this week, I’ve noticed more companies’ websites with statements saying that if you buy from them, delivery won’t be affected as they don’t use Royal Mail.

Retailer John Lewis has switched entirely from the Royal Mail to alternate carriers.

Then I read articles and features in the mainstream media analysing the situation confronting the Royal Mail and everyone who works there. It’s a dire projected picture as this graph from a BBC report last month suggests.

So what’s next for the Royal Mail and the CWU union? The strike the union had planned for today and Monday isn’t happening as both parties are talking again amidst signs of diminishing public support for either side’s confrontational position.

Meanwhile, here’s what’s going in in the real world of the customers, strike or not.

The owner of a mail order business in Liverpool:

I have a mail order company with a turnover of £30 million and I employ over 200 staff. I have just stopped a contract with Royal Mail for over £1 million and I will not return to them.

A small business owner in Rugby:

As I run a small business I must take immediate action to ensure my invoices are delivered to my customers. The unions and the Royal Mail have forced me to invest in some new software allowing me to e-mail my invoices, statements and remittance advices. I cannot see any circumstances were my business would return to using slow mail.

An online retailer in Durham:

I’ve just moved my e-commerce store deliveries from Royal Mail to couriers and I don’t think I’ll be going back either.

Just a very small cross section of opinion from small and medium-size businesses in the UK, to add to the headline-making actions by the bigger firms like Amazon and John Lewis.

Whatever your cause, driving away the customers makes no sense whatsoever.

Related posts:

FIR Cut: What options for CIPR facing financial crisis?

neville@nevillehobson.com (Neville Hobson) — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 21:53:19 +0000

Overflow from FIR #498 on November 5, 2009.

PR Week: CIPR Seeks To Calm Concerns Over Looming Financial Loss. (Referenced: IABC wipes out deficit by Allan Jenkins, Feb 2006.)

Download this podcast (2.54Mb, 5:33)

If you want to automatically receive FIR Cuts as they’re published, subscribe to the RSS feed.

(What are FIR Cuts?)

The Hobson and Holtz Report – Podcast #498: November 5, 2009

neville@nevillehobson.com (Neville Hobson) — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 21:11:57 +0000

Content summary: Shel’s on his own in Toronto; how the Union for Reform Judaism used Twitter and Facebook to solicit member questions for Tony Blair’s live appearance at the group’s biennial; Google Wave and Twitter List reminders; Dan York’s report; Media Monitoring Minute; News That Fits: Novell introduces Pulse with Google Wave integration, the move from stickiness to spreadability, more on Twitter Lists including a how-to guide from Mashable, Second Life takes enterprise software into beta; listener comments; and more.

Get FIR:

For Immediate Release: The Hobson & Holtz Report, for November 5, 2009: A 66-minute podcast recorded live from Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

FIR #498 show notes at The New PR Wiki

Join the FIR Discussion Forum and extend your conversations with the FIR community. You can also join the FIR Facebook Community and become an FIR friend.

To stay informed about occasional FIR events (eg, FIR Live), sign up for FIR Update email news.

So, until Monday November 9…

(Cross-posted from For Immediate Release, Shel’s and my podcast blog.)

See how far your tweets go with TweetReach

neville@nevillehobson.com (Neville Hobson) — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 12:38:08 +0000

This is one of the simplest yet most useful measurement tools for Twitter I’ve yet seen: TweetReach, discovered via a tweet by David Terrar earlier today.

What TweetReach does is calculate how many people have seen something you, or anyone else, has tweeted. It connects to Twitter via an API and searches what’s there to produce its results.

It works on hashtags, URLs, key words, anything in a tweet. Here’s an example of the results from searching on a URL, a post I wrote on The Next Web the other day:

Note in the screenshot that the URL is a short one, not the underlying original URL. I found out that TweetReach doesn’t work on the original if what you tweeted was a short URL. In other words, it searches only what was actually tweeted, which makes complete sense.

How does it all work? Here’s what TweetReach says:

[…] Basically we search Twitter and find all the tweets we can. Then we look at everyone who tweeted and who follows them to make a set of calculations.

The reach is the total number of different people who would have seen tweets on this topic in their Twitter stream. This takes into account people who follow the same people.

Here’s a reach example… Let’s say you have two loyal followers: User A and User B (don’t worry, you’ll get more popular). You tweet a link and they retweet it. They both have a loyal follower in common: User C. User B also has a second follower: User D. In this case, the reach comes out to 4 because Users A-D have all seen a tweet on this topic at least once.

If you’re paying attention, you’ll notice in the above example that User C would have actually seen two tweets about this topic, which brings me to exposure… Exposure is how many times someone saw a tweet about a particular topic. If 5 people I follow tweet the same link, I’ll have been exposed to it 5 times. Each time someone sees a tweet, we call that an impression

Useful (and free).

One thing I haven’t quite figured out is why the difference between the results TweetReach reports (in this case, the reach from 23 tweets as the screenshot shows) and the number of tweets reported on the website via the Tweetmeme button (in this case, 123 as I look at the post right now).

Still, it’s definitely another tool to add to your social media temperature testing toolbox to give you some helpful stats and pretty graphs.