There is little in the way of facts about why GM is pulling their ads, but plenty of commentary.

‎7 things that came to mind in 7 seconds but took me 7 minutes to write down (originally published on Facebook):

1. Seriously? GM thought Facebook ads were going to result in car sales… just like that? 20 seconds, 20 minutes or 20 months later? And how exactly did they determine that it was or was not helping anyways? Did they poll people to ask them “Excuse me, since you last saw one of our Facebook ads, did you or did you not buy one of our cars?”

2. Facebook is awesome but it’s a business and this business’ advertising solutions have been optimized so that brands do PAID + EARNED + OWNED. You can’t do one without the other. At least not if you hope to compete with the other Fortune 500 trying to do it right, even if with minimal budgets. Does GM know this?

3. Has anybody told GM that Facebook ads can be done with just a few bucks? I mean, small businesses spending $10 a day in Sponsored Stories are going to get more targeted reach on Facebook than one of the most iconic US brands of all time.

4. Ok, ok I get it. GM has a cool + innovative campaign unlike anything we’ve ever heard of and they’re doing it soon so this is their way of saying “We got this.”

5. Wait. Maybe this is just a STUNT. PR stunt. Could it be? This is easy buzz on Facebook IPO week. Right? I mean this HAS to be temporary. It’s not like someone at GM can say “We shall never ever advertise on Facebook and so be it!”

6. Where is Christopher Barger when you need him? Hopefully they have him on speed dial because they might need some help from the guy who led their social + community engagement during the 2009 crisis.

7. Did I mention I spent 7 minutes typing this? Well, congratulations to you American Express because your always-on ad strategy on Facebook might be paying off. I just spent 7 minutes with this post.. and one of your sponsored posts. Maybe I’ll go and get a new card from you simply because we’ve spent so much time together.

What did you think?

But what happens after sometimes can ruin it all.

You might have an amazing social media presence, and then the customer sees your website, and all that momentum is lost.

Bad Web Design Is Killing Your Business

While there is no limit to the amount of cringe-worthy design elements you can find online, these are some of the biggest mistakes businesses make on a regular basis.

What makes most of these mistakes even worse is the fact many of them can be easily avoided by planning ahead and implementing a simple design strategy.

1. No clear call to action

What do you want users to do once they arrive on your website?

Are you looking for them to contact you?

Do you want them to buy now?

Do you want them to request more information?

When you set up your website, you likely established it with a purpose in mind (or at least you should have). You should make it incredibly easy for visitors to complete the desired action once they arrive at your website.

Having a clear call to action, whether it’s a request for proposal in the margin or a “Contact Us” button in the upper right hand corner of your site, will help ensure you don’t leave visitors wondering what they should do next.

2. Confusing navigation

No one should ever wonder, “Where am I?” when they’re on your website.

Make it easy for people to find their way around your website, as well as ways for them to go back and forward from their current location.

Think about the feeling you get when walking through a big department store: There are always signs letting you know where you are and pointing you in the direction of where you might want to go.

Make sure your site visitors get the same feeling. Don’t just place them on a landing page and leave them wondering, “How did I get here?” and “Where do I go from here?”

By including the “reset” button in the left hand navigation of this website, I can easily eliminate filters or add additional filters to my search results to find the perfect pump.

3. Not testing different browsers

Sure your design might look great in Internet Explorer, but how will it look in Chrome or Safari?

Before launching (or relaunching?) your new website, make sure you test how the design looks from several different browsers.

Your home page might look fine to anyone using Mozilla, but what happens when there are design breaks when Chrome users visit your site? Those visitors might leave your site and head right to your competition – your competition that tested their site across all browsers and devices.

4. Poor readability

While orange and red might be your business’s signature colors, how will they read online?

Will people be able to read the text on your website if you choose those colors?

When thinking of color choices, make sure you are incorporating colors that provide enough contrast to make your words easily legible. Also avoid using small font sizes or using text over images that might results in white text on white space, which eliminates readability entirely.

White text on a white background is hard for anyone to read. By either changing the background image or selecting a different color for their text, this issue could have been avoided.

5. Incorporating way too much Flash

Sites that use a lot of Flash, or that feature important information within Flash elements, will likely run into several problems.

Kind of like dinosaurs trying to make it out of the Cretaceous period.

The first problem is the design will be harder to read.

Using Flash elements will also slow down your site’s load time, which could cause people to leave before the page is done loading.

Another negative aspect of using Flash is it’s not good for SEO purposes, so anything you include in there won’t be indexed by search engines.

Also, they are rarely as mobile friendly as other, more modern options.

While this doesn’t mean you should never use Flash in web design, if you decide to incorporate Flash elements into your site, just make sure you use them wisely.

—-

While this represents a small sample, all of these issues can be avoided by taking a proactive approach and carefully planning out both your web design and online marketing strategy.

By utilizing some common best practices, you can increase the traffic to your website, as well as improve your chances of obtaining more online conversions.

Image source: BigStock.com Big mistake

Wikipedia articles on a company get more views, shares and syndication than any company fact sheet.

Wikipedia articles on executives are read more than their official bios and product pieces often see more consumer eyeballs than their corresponding product webpages or brochures.

I spend a lot of time telling clients what type of content Wikipedia’s community will appreciate, but many Wikipedia article writers are customers.

Am I really telling them what this nebulous, large and complex communal entity Wikipedia wants, or just what their customers actually want to read?

What Can We Learn?

Why do so many people read Wikipedia and how can we emulate that?

Here’s ten things about content, marketing and community we can learn from Wikipedia.

1. How to share: Sharing an article about your own company with thousands of anonymous internet volunteers just might be more intimate than sharing toothbrushes and challenging than kids sharing toys.

2. Free content: Free text AND images are one of the top reasons Wikipedia is so successful. Want people to share and use your content? Make sure it’s free.

3. Encyclopedic tone: Wikipedia’s requirements for encyclopedic tone brings most marketers to their knees. Just when you think you’re steering away from marketing speak, you’re only halfway to encyclopedic tone.

4. Convenience > authority: Factual mistakes on Wikipedia have been well documented, but the truth is readers favor convenience over authority and rarely double-check misinformation on Wikipedia.

5. Content is King: But you already know that

6. Get Underground: One of the great things about Wikipedia is it gives the reader this underground perspective on how customers and other stakeholders perceive the brand.

7. Create an Internet Mosaic: Wikipedia brings together tiny colored shared on a topic spread all over the internet and puts them together in a single place to create a complete mosaic. The internet is a messy place. Putting everything in one place has value.

8. You Don’t Own the Brand: Your customers do. At least on Wikipedia they do. You can say whatever you want about your brand. So can your customers. Earn your brand from them.

9. Work with Others: We’re not use to collaborating with outside individuals we have no control over or affiliation with, but welcome to Wikipedia. A valid skill for any kind of community-building.

Image source: Bigstock.com Baby with book

The weekly summary will feature “the most relevant Tweets and stories shared by the people you’re connected to on Twitter,” according to Othman Laraki, Director, Growth and International at Twitter.

The email will be in digest format similar to their “Discover” feature with their 140-character signature.

The digest will feature tweets and links to articles and blog posts shared on Twitter by people you follow, even if you do not follow the original writer of the post and articles.

Users can also see what has been favorited or retweeted by people they follow by clicking on “view details.” You can then favorite, retweet, or reply to those tweets from there as well.

Here is a preview of what the new Twitter Stories email looks like. Many Twitter users will have already received their first email form Twitter.

Stories is based from technology from Summify, which Twitter acquired back in January that allows for the creation of personalized social media digests.

This announcement is also right on the heels of Twitter’s acquisition of RestEngine, which will further improve the digest over more time.

So what are the big takeaways here? Why did Twitter add this feature?

And more importantly, what are the potential benefits for marketers?

1. Advertising

For Twitter, this is another potential place to advertise.

While Twitter users include about 10% of adults in the United States and while Twitter is growing at a rate of about one million users a day, it still wants more reach. With this new feature, Twitter can reach inactive or less active users.

And of course, not only will Twitter reach less active users, but your ads could potentially reach them as well.

2. Email Is Important

Consumers trust it, we always return to email in some way or another. This is good for marketers. Your message can reach more people.

3. Content Research

Via this new Stories feature, your team can learn what kinds of articles are popular in your audience, not just in your industry. You can also learn how much of what is being shared is relevant to your business and to recent news.

4. Content Lifespan

An even bigger reward for this is that your content and your tweets could get very popular and ultimately have a longer lifespan online. As it is a weekly digest, your content will continue to gain hits longer rather than getting an email a few hours to a day later after it is posted.

5. Find Conversations

Another advantage to this is that you can find popular conversations to participate in and contribute to. You have the opportunity to be seen, add blog comments, parallel conversations on Twitter, Facebook and other platforms. You could even take this opportunity to respond to the featured/popular content on your blog.

Last week, thinkJar and Sword Ciboodle released a whitepaper, We Are Social: The State of Social Customer Service, and in it identified the top 5 primary benefits of social customer service:

1. Increased Customer Satisfaction
2. Meet Customer Expectations
3. Intangible Benefit
4. Increased Loyalty
5. Reduced Cost of Customer Support

Other benefits included increased revenue and deflected phone calls coming into the call center.

One data point that I found interesting is that a little over 20 percent of those surveyed reported that they are not using social channels just yet.

Other interesting findings that came from this report include:

• 35% of organizations between 100 – 500 agents have not started to implement social customers service
• 40% of those organizations with more than 1,000 agents have deployed social customer service for the past 2 years
• Two thirds of organization that are piloting social customer service are doing so with no defined process
• 59% of organizations have adopted Twitter as a channel for social customer service; and 60% have adopted Facebook

Omaha Steaks is bucking the trend toward Facebook store abandonment and has opened a store to offer fans access to exclusive merchandise, a move that is considered a no-brainer by company senior vice-president Todd Simon.

“I think not having a Facebook store would be kind of like saying we don’t have to have a retail store,” stated Simon in a recent Adweek article. “We sort of held back really getting into this until the technology was there that allowed us to develop a shopping experience around the social platform and really create a social experience as opposed to just trying to rubber stamp out what we’d already been doing in other channels,” he added.

The store, tabbed as “Fan Exclusives,” offers specially-priced merchandise, as well as items that can only be found on Facebook.

Other ways the company attempts to lure fans to purchase products is through badging and points. Users can earn a Steak Lover badge for shopping in the store, a Steak Advocate badge when friends click a shared link that directs to the store or the First Time Buyer badge for an initial purchase said Adweek. And for every $10 worth of merchandise purchased, customers receive 1 point that equals to $1, which they can apply toward their next purchase.

This approach bodes well for three reasons:

• Exclusivity – One way to get fans shopping on Facebook is through the use of exclusivity. Give fans something they can’t get elsewhere and they will buy. But, the offer has to be compelling enough to incite a response; otherwise, sales won’t happen.
• Incentives – Incentives, such as Omaha Steaks use of rewards points, inspires loyalty and keeps customers coming back.
• Status – Gamification techniques such as badging appeal to some people because they serve as a status symbol. A basic human need is to “stand out,” to be recognized as having attained some type of special status. Concepts like badging help people achieve “social” status.

Simon’s understanding that shopping on Facebook requires a different way of thinking is key to the company’s potential for success, as is his willingness to wait until the dust had settled on previous, less successful attempts by other large brands.

Of equal importance to Simon, according to his statement, is having the right technology. For its store, the company chose social commerce platform provider ShopIgniter.

The store is Facebook-inclusive in that the purchase transaction happens inside Facebook rather than pushing customers to Omahasteaks.com. It also makes use of the extended real estate now afforded through the new Timeline format.

There is one point of concern, however.

Adweek says that Omaha Steaks is “looking at its Facebook store as another commerce channel” rather than how it relates to its existing e-commerce site. For example, comments and reviews do not cross-populate between Facebook and the e-commerce site, and while users can register on Omahasteaks.com with their Facebook account, a user’s shopping cart on the e-commerce site will not be linked to the one on the Facebook store.

Rather than view social media as a “channel,” it’s much better to see is as a “layer.” Integrating the two sites to enable social sharing between both the .com and Facebook, something Facebook’s Open Graph certainly facilitates, makes sense.

But, rather than rain on Omaha Steaks’ parade, I’ll refrain from judgment until some numbers are reported. The use of exclusive merchandise, combined with incentives in the form of rewards points and gamification techniques such as a badging are certainly steps in the right direction.

This isn’t a bunch of reasons how you can be more “green” at your next event.

This is three ways you can eliminate paper using text messaging.

These ideas will save you hassle, create better event, and make your attendees, or the people your brand meets at that next event, happier at the same time.

Every one of us, when we attend a seminar, meeting, conference, whatever — we bring our phone with us. We are adept at using that phone to take notes, respond to emails, and Tweet about the live event we are at.

Why not incorporate those skills to improve everyone’s experience?

1. No more fishbowls

Not only do they collect needless paper they look tacky.

Are you having attendees drop their business cards in a fish bowl to win a prize or get more information?

And then who is wasting their day manually entering those business cards into an Excel file or CRM?

Have attendees send a text message to enter the giveaway. Ask them for their email address too.

Now you have two pieces of information, instantly. You can even have that information pushed into an Excel file or CRM, automatically.

Why not have an email sent to them right after the event thanking them for their attendance?  What can you include in that email while the event is fresh in their mind?

2. Take all those clipboards and pens and throw them away

If you’re still collecting information on clipboards you’re doing it the hard way.

Instead of asking your attendees to wait around for someone to pass them the clipboard have them pull out their phone while the speaker is still talking, send a quick text message, and signup.

In seconds you will have saved all that hassle of waiting for the sheet, trying to find a pen that works, and then trying to decipher their writing.

Remember, you can ask them for their email address too.  Then a welcome email can ask them to complete other information that will be helpful to you.

The email can also link them to your social media sites.

3. Nobody likes to count votes

Does your event involve some type of voting or survey?  Are you still using paper ballots?

Text message voting isn’t just for American Idol.  Have your attendees send a text message to cast their vote.

Not only is it easier for them, they won’t be wondering around looking for the ballot box.

It’s also easier for you and your event staff because the votes are counted instantly.  You can announce the winners right away without rushing to count a stack of paper ballots.

You can even screen the votes so each mobile number can only vote one time.

Don’t Forget – Events are Great Place for Mobile Marketing

In the end not only do these tactics save trees and make your event run smoother, they also open up a few really good opportunities for mobile marketing.

In any of these situations the event attendees mobile number could be saved (with consent) for future messages.  In addition, the confirmation response messages could include links to a mobile landing pages and videos.

For example, “Thanks for entering to win! To get a behind-the-scenes look at our latest product follow this link …”

Being a data analyst, I sometimes talk with organizations that struggle to use data.

I see good research sit on a shelf because it’s either overwhelming and businesses can’t translate the numbers into action, or they’re looking at the wrong numbers.

One of the quickest ways to really understand your data and, by association, your community is through a ratio. Here’s why.

Getting a Baseline

Let’s say you have 1,000 members in your community. You do some basic analysis and learn that each week there are approximately 50 new threads posted in your forum and about 500 replies.

These three pieces of data are a good baseline for starting to look at ratios. A bit of quick division and your ratios come out like this:

Ratio of posts per member, per week: 0.05 (50/1000) (baseline)

Ratio of replies per member, per week: 0.5 (500/1000) (baseline)

Scenario 1 – Members Up But Engagement May Not Be Keeping Pace

Fast forward one month and let’s say your community has grown to 1,500 members, thanks to some advertising and promotion. This is a huge increase, but are the ratios keeping pace with the growth? Let’s say, for example, that there are now 100 new threads posted (a lot of the new members introduced themselves) and about 650 replies each week.  Your new ratios look something like this:

Ratio of posts per member, per week: 0.0666 (100/1500) (increased)

Ratio of replies per member, per week: 0.4333 (650/1500) (decreased)

The ratio for posts per member (per week) has gone up thanks to all those new members introducing themselves to the forum. However, the ratio for replies per member has decreased and hasn’t kept pace with the growth. Using these findings as a starter, a quick look around the community may reveal that all those new members are introducing themselves but are not engaging or replying as much.

One action from this could be to run a quick email promotion, reminding the new members about some of the great discussions happening on the community and nudging them to participate. Another action could be a public reward for a random new member who replied to a forum discussion.

Scenario 2 – Members Down But Is The Quality Better?

In another example, let’s say your community experiences a slight loss in membership, dropping down to 900 members, but the number of posts and replies stays the same. The new ratios are:

Ratio of posts per member, per week: 0.055 (50/900) (increased)

Ratio of replies per member, per week: 0.55 (500/900) (increased)

This example speaks to the “context is crucial” point from part 2 of the “Introducing Numbers to the Community” series.

Here, the amount of community members has dropped, which might seem negative at first.

But the engagement (number of posts and replies each week) hasn’t decreased. In fact, the ratios above show that your community is actually looking very healthy, and so the decrease in membership likely represented inactive members.

——-

Ratios are a simple way to start putting context to your data and dust off those basic “division” skills.

In the first example, the community numbers increased, which looks great, but the number of replies didn’t keep pace with the growth— leading to some actions or follow-up with the newer members.

In example two, the overall numbers dropped, which looks negative on the surface, but the ratios show us that the community is actually healthier now.

But when it comes to the social web, we tend to forget the wide spectrum of audio that exists outside of the context of music.

Alexander Ljung, CEO of the popular music sharing service Soundcloud, spoke at Mashable Connect about the “Unmuting of the web,” set to a background score of low growling drones and ethereal synth pads.

Sound is the only medium we can consume in parallel.

Meaning we can consume audio content while we perform other tasks. Like listen to a webinar while we respond to emails or listen to a book while we drive home.

We can simply process way more sound than video.

The Silent Web

There was a time on the web when people loaded up websites with music and sound bites, but the web has grown increasingly silent in recent years.

When we’re online, we’re deaf, and Ljung predicts that in the future sound will be bigger then video online.

We are pre-programmed to respond to change in sound, we isolate it.

Sound as Presentation

Ljung proved how pre-programmed we are to respond to change in sound by abruptly shutting off background music he had been playing during his presentation and sitting in silence for a few seconds before resuming.

It worked. The room stood still and noticed the change for a few seconds, focused on it.

From conception we have been trained, beginning with the heartbeat in our mother’s womb, to notice sound.

The Rise of the Mobile Microphone

With the rise of the smartphone people are conscious that they have a killer digital camera that can shoot photos and videos, but often forget that they have a great microphone as well.

“With sound you don’t need 140 buttons; you just need a single button,” said Ljung. “We like to think SoundCloud is 140 times simpler than Twitter.”

So how can you bring the authenticity of sound into your brand?

For any service related business, like Ljung said, it’s as simple as a record button. The Soundcloud iPhone app provides simple recording and sharing capabilities in one easy app.

1. Record a testimonial.

Think about the authenticity of natural human voice when it comes to reviews. We naturally tell people about businesses we like, and online reviews have become a jump off point for many shoppers online.

Have your plumbing technicians grab a quote from happy customer as they end their call.

Offer a free drink for a free soundbite at a local bar.

At your next meeting, record your customer talking about that unique way they use your product, and love it.

2. Record the world around your brand.

Different places have distinct sounds.

Think about a laundromat or a baseball stadium, distinctly different sonic atmospheres.

Listening to “Take me out to the ball game” sung by 30,000 crazy fans creates a totally different emotion that the industrial churning of washers and dryers, but both illustrate a scene in your mind.

Isolate those senses and give your community another way to think about your brand.

3. Host a podcast

Nike+ introduced a “Karaoke-themed” podcast running mix on Soundcloud for their fans online.

This introduced another touchpoint into the already robust Nike+ campaign that kicked off at SXSW.

Bring the executive chef out of the kitchen and have a conversation with a customer explaining tonight’s wine selection. Record it. Share it.

Tech pundit Loren Feldman can do a podcast version of his popular video series far more often as a podcast than he can as a fully edited videos.

Both video and audio are important forms of content. There are benefits of both.

But often, we ignore sound.

Maybe it deserves a closer listen?

These are just a few ideas for ways you can create new branded content using the Soundcloud platform.

Communities like their content served up in many ways, and Soundcloud’s next version, brings the ability to share sounds of all styles throughout the social web in an instant.

Just as photos and videos are social, so is sound.

Keep that in mind and help “Unmute the Web.”

For a number of factors, we have experienced considerably better results at FanFeedr, results that are worth discussing here.

The examples and outcomes that follow are for Facebook ads placed for several of FanFeedr’s team specific Facebook pages.

For some background, FanFeedr is a sports news aggregation site that collects and classifies over 10,000 quality sports related sources, photos, scores, and tweets into team specific pages. Content is published on team specific Facebook and Twitter accounts, in addition to the FanFeedr website.

We have engaged in trials using Facebook ads for several of our pages with the goal in mind is to increase the following:

• Awareness of FanFeedr and its many team pages
• Our overall Facebook presence growth
• Referral traffic back to our site, FanFeedr.com

Precise Interest Targeting

For each page, we ran multiple ads and A/B tested everything from advertising copy, the photo in the ad, location, precise interest targeting, and demographics such as age, and gender.

The factor that consistently saw the largest increases in CTR (click through rate) and largest decreases in CPC (cost per click) was precise interest targeting.  At times, we included over 60 precise interests and this resulted in significantly better results than targeting a larger and more broad audience.

You can see an example of the precise interests we included for our New York Yankees page here:

Here are a few examples of ads that were placed:

Surprising CTR Results

In fact, our Yankees page, which was one of our best performing pages, saw a peak CTR of 0.45%, which is 997% higher than the reported average.

Here are our top four weeks for our Yankees page campaign that received the highest CTR with at least 30,000 impressions:

Improved CPC

We consistently saw much lower than average CPC rates for our pages and targeted audience as well.

Overall, we saw an average of roughly $0.15, good for 81% lower than the reported average. Here, our campaign for our Cincinnati Reds page had an average CPC of about $0.17:

International Targeting

Since American sports have an international fan base and we also cover teams that are located in other countries, we tested targeting international users.

For example, we cover the English Premier League and wanted to grow the number of fans on the FanFeedr Arsenal Facebook page.  Arsenal is one of the most diverse teams in the world with players from 19 different countries.

We took advantage of this by using precise targeting of Arsenal fans in England who like English star player Theo Walcott, or Arsenal fans in the Netherlands who like their countryman and team captain Robin van Persie, for example.

The same could be applied for all sports teams and players.

The experiment was successful as you can see in this chart breaking down CTR by targeted countries:

As well as the complete results for the campaign including a peak CTR of 0.38% and a low CPC of $0.02.

Over the duration of our trial, we ran campaigns for over 30 of our pages.  On average, we saw page growth of 2,476% with a high of 7,220% (some pages started at a very low number, to be clear).

We think the reason for our success is simple: people would rather see an advertisement for a page or product they’re interested in (in our case, their favorite team), as opposed to something that may be completely irrelevant to them and that they most likely will never click on.

We realize that a lot of brands or agencies may not have the luxury of advertising a page or product that people may be as emotionally invested in as sports, and as a result, this causes our findings to be more of an exception than a model that can be repeated.

However, we have concluded that we would rather target users who are more likely to be interested in our page and product, and that it is cost efficient to disregard users who are less likely to be engaged (at least in terms of advertising).

This aspect of our strategy could be adopted by anyone placing Facebook ads.