Unofficial Pages

There are some great stories about fans creating a page or group for a brand, making a huge success of it and ending up employed in the brand. These stories are not your everyday occurrence and are less and less likely the more companies embrace social media.

So what do you do when you find yourself facing many unofficial pages of your brand (some brands have 100’s), especially in the early days when you are still building your fans and it might not be clear to a Facebook user which page is the real one?

Facebook’s Rules

Facebook’s stance is that pages are only to be created by somebody who has authorisation and who is an official representative of whoever the page is created for. Groups are for fans or haters who would to support or take a stand. Therefore, any one who is not official is breaking their terms and conditions. Facebook will merge all the non official pages fans with your page and take down those pages. You will gain the fans who are not already a fan of your page from these.

The Dilemma

The real dilemma for a company is how fans will react to this, is it right to treat fans of your company/brand like that and whether it will cause a problem that will become a PR nightmare? The decision taken will be different for every company or brand depending on circumstances.

6 Considerations

The things that you will need to consider when deciding is:

1. Is your brand/company image being compromised by these pages?

2. How are they unofficially using company images and does this pose any problems like licensing or contractual (e.g. actors and permissions for usage)

3. Are you happy with the way they are representing your company and brand?

4. Have the people who have fanned the unofficial page done so believing it to be official and therefore are being misled?

5. How active are these unofficial pages?

6. Will the fans get a better quality experience by being merged into the official page?

Advice and a Plan

Perhaps involve your PR department and get advice if you are still not sure. Sometimes brands merge these pages and the fans don’t even realise that it has happened and start to see the official messages and become more engaged with your company or brand.

At the end of the day it is an important decision that needs to be carefully considered and you need a plan in case of any backlash. Remember these fake pages are breaking Facebook’s terms and conditions and these people should be encouraged to create a group rather than an official page.

Have you had to consider this and what did you decide?

I hope that the following advice can help you run a smooth and successful promotion that benefits your company, brand or page and leave you with less headaches.

What you need to know about Facebook’s promotional guidelines.

Facebook Apps

You are not allowed to run a Facebook promotion on your wall. It has become a requirement that all Facebook promotions are run on an app.

This should either be an iframe tab app (sits in a tab on your page) or a canvas app (you need to link to this and it appears in the app directory found on developers page app search). This needs to be developed for you — usually you would go to a preferred Facebook developer to develop this for you (not a requirement, but a good idea), but anyone with enough know how can do it.

The other important factor is that this is stored on a secure server with the correct digital certificates to avoid the Facebook warning that appears telling users that they are going to an unsecure connection and some browsers that give an untrusted site warning.

This is probably in place to reduce “spam” on users walls as well as encourage better run promotions within Facebook.

Terms and Conditions (T&C’s)

All promotions should have T&C’s to establish the rules by which the competition is governed. Facebook has a requirement for you to add the following to your T&C’s (or something similar decided by your legal team):

• “Your promotion name” is in no way sponsored, endorsed or administered by, or associated with, Facebook.
• Facebook has no association or jurisdiction over “Your promotion name“
• Information submitted when entering “your promotion name” is disclosed to and collected by “your company/organisation name” and not Facebook.

Always be clear that T&C’s apply and make sure they can be easily found either on your Facebook page or on your website.

Basis of Promotion

You can not base your promotion on people LIKING your page (or any other Facebook functionality). So promotions like “LIKE our page and be entered into a draw automatically” are against Facebook’s promotional guidelines and could result in your page being taken down. Facebook show very low tolerance for breaking their rules. Depending on who you are they may issue a warning to stop doing what you are doing first. Facebook don’t allow their functionality to be used as a way to be automatically entered into a competition. You can, however have them Like your page to reveal an entry form.

Other types of promotions which are unacceptable are prizes based on commenting, liking on the wall, checking into a place or any activity on the wall.

Facebook are a bit flexible in what they call a promotion and if you have a fan of the week with no monetary reward or material gain, they find that acceptable.

Promotion mechanism

You can not use the Facebook like button as a voting mechanism for your promotion. You can use the LIKE button if you design one that does not resemble Facebook’s one as long as it is not used as the basis of voting. In other words your votes should not be Facebook Likes.

You can however implement your own voting or nomination type competition outside of Likes. (I have strong words of warning later in this article related to this and how to do it properly)

You can not use any of Facebook’s name, trademarks, trade names, copyrights, or any other intellectual property outside of their brand usage guidelines.

Notifying the winner

You can not notify the winner on the wall or using any Facebook messaging or chat mechanisms. You will need to collect an email address to notify the winner by email (not Facebook email) before you announce them on your wall.

It is important to be familiar with Facebook’s promotional guidelines if you are going to run any promotion, competition or sweepstake on Facebook.

Other important things you need to know about running a promotion

Privacy

When you have an app developed you will need to link from the app to a privacy document. You can set this up in Facebook Notes or on your website and supply the URL to your app developer. This can be seen when people go to your app and that little box pops up asking them to give permission to access their basic data (and whatever else was set) — you will see a link there to the privacy document/note.

Collecting data

You are not allowed to use any of the data that is available to you in the API, without getting permission to use it or collecting it yourself. From a transparency perspective it is often best to collect it again when people enter your promotion or competition.

You may need an email address, age and post code to validate age, residency and be able to notify the winner.

If you would like to market special offers and notify them of additional competitions as best practice you should ask for permission (not just stipulate by entering they give permission).

Voting/Nominating competitions

Never run a competition purely on this basis. There are people out there who scour Facebook for these type of competitions and enter and are part of voting syndicates, which work on vote swapping. These people end up with thousands of votes and end up winning. Plus you could end up with a huge amount of irrelevant fans.

Even if you have something in your T&C’s to disqualify this behaviour it is extremely difficult to prove. You can limit voting to your own country only, but it doesn’t stop it.

You should always limit a vote to one per Facebook profile, which is done when your application is developed. People in these syndicates often have multiple fake profiles, which they have made to look very real, with activity, friends and all. This makes it incredibly hard to prove they are fake. Facebook take fake accounts very seriously, but you have to report them and confidently identifying fake accounts is extremely difficult for just a Facebook user. Logistically if you have thousands of voters it would be impossible to look at each profile to determine if it is fake or not.

So how do you get around this? Add a judging element. A winner is judged from maybe the top 5, 10, 20 – whatever suits your promotion. This will lead to a fairer competition. You do get very honest people who work really hard to get votes who lose all hope when they see someone getting hundreds or thousands of votes and it can cause all sorts of unhappiness in your community when they believe someone is cheating.

Competitions can get ugly

People are very competitive – especially if it is around something they are passionate about. You may find that people slander and make untrue claims (outside of your page) about other contestants to get sympathy to increase their votes. They may even attack each other on your wall. And when you do select a winner can be unhappy about it if they feel it is not a fair decision.

The best approach is to ensure that this behaviour is a disqualifiable offence in your T&C’s and have a judging panel. Also ensure that you have stated no discussion will be entered into regarding the winner – though this may be difficult if it is in the open and you openly ignore your fans – in this case get advise and perhaps address it.

Have you run a promotion and had any of these experiences or would like to share additional advice with others? Please leave your thoughts in the comments.

I have just put up a fan page for Aqua Pebble which I have let some of my colleagues know about. I also have a number of topical and specialist pages on the way too. Interestingly this has lead to a few of my colleagues asking me more about Facebook Pages, so I decided it was time to write about them.

Now we know you get both groups and pages on Facebook and are not sure what is the best. My preference for business is pages. And these are the reasons:

Facebook Pages and Privacy

With Facebook Pages a person just likes the page by clicking the LIKE button at the top of the Facebook Page and their profile picture is displayed on the “like wall” as per their viewable public settings. If an admin clicks through to that person they get their public profile (what they have allowed to be visible to the public). This allows people to safely LIKE your page without worrying about their privacy.

How Facebook Pages keep people updated

What ever a business puts on their Facebook Page’s wall appears in a users newsfeed, just like their friend’s status updates. They can then comment, like or share that feed. When they do engage their friends will see their action and if of interest may like your page too. Depending on your audience and business this could get viral.

Driving people to your Facebook Page

This is probably the hardest part and requires an integrated strategy to build your page community. Unless you are a large, well known or well funded organisation or controversial and topical this will take ongoing effort. One needs to get creative and innovative and use every opportunity to drive people to your page. There is also the bonus with pages in that because they are not private they can be found by searching Facebook.

Engaging people who land on your Facebook Page

Just like a website a Facebook Page needs to engage a person when they land on your page. Now if your page is not some cool famous brand, saying or cause then you need to make sure you encourage them to want to like your page, else the opportunity is gone. Facebook pages have some great tabs and applications that allow you to customise your page to increase that chance of engagement.

So why a Facebook Page for business?

A Facebook Page is a wonderful way to communicate with your audience in a place that they go to for updates and to interact with others. Even in B2B you build relationships with people. It is known that Facebook is experiencing high growths in the older age groups and is no longer a college student medium. So as long as your business is with people and even if only some of those people are on Facebook, it is not a medium to ignore.

But what about Facebook groups?

Facebook groups is a whole article on it’s own and they do have their place, however, I think Facebook Pages are a better option for most businesses.

And if you enjoyed my article you can like my page by clicking the like button on the sidebar.

By liking Aqua Pebble you will automatically go into a draw to win a custom designed Facebook Page — see competition terms and conditions.

Strategy objectives and social media

Usually when you are creating a new strategy you would have to determine what you want to achieve from Social Media. With an existing strategy these already exist. Social media is a tool that you would use to achieve your objectives, just like the other tools you have in your arsenal. You need to take a look at these objectives and think “can I achieve this using xyz social medium?”

Social media: thinking out of the box

Sometimes this requires you to think out of the box. Get creative and innovative and write down your ideas. When you have your list put on your sensible and logical cap and look at the practicalities involved in each of your ideas. Will they really work? What is involved? What is the cost? What is the time investment? What resources do I have at my disposal? Now make a short list.

Choose and test your social media ideas.

From your short list pick one or more winners, which you think are most likely to help your current strategies, to test. Each business is different. You can look to competitors or others to see how they are doing it for inspiration too. But when it comes to your business it has to work within your environment and achieve your business objectives. What works best for you would need to be tested, especially if you have not used the medium before. What you think may work great, may not work as well as you think and require a rethink about your approach. I think the testing approach is a great way to approach social media when it is not certain that it will work.

Social media doesn’t suit all strategies.

Don’t use social media for the sake of it. If you feel that everyone is using it and think you must jump on the bandwagon and don’t think it through: It could fail miserably and taint future views on social media within your company. Not all objectives can be achieved through social media. It is not the answer to success, but rather another great tool.

The first and probably the most important thing to be able to convince management that social media is for your business is for you to believe that it will work. If you don’t believe it – they won’t believe it! Once you have this you then need to prepare your case.

First off you need to have a plan and understand what it is you want to achieve with Social Media. Just approaching management with a we should use it – will probably get you no where.

Once you have an idea and plan the best place to start is your own market/industry. Start with your main competitors and see whether they are using social media and how. Search for success stories on companies in your market/industry or vertical markets/industries. If you can’t find any for your specific market/industry you may have to go outside – there are many success stories around. Find some that are using Social Media in the same way you have in mind. Perhaps you will even get some new ideas that could work for you.

Search for internet statistics to back up your case. Internet World Stats is a good place to start. It is important though that the facts you quote should be relevant to your case.

Now you have your plan, you have some facts, you have some examples you need to show management what it would mean to the bottom line. Now this is still a new area and as with any new business venture the bottom line is a calculated estimate. Some of your ideas may not even have anything to do with the bottom line. These are usually measured by KPI’s.

The best way to approach this is to look at the measurements that are considered critical by management and establish whether you could measure the same things for your social media initiative and how that could be done. There are new tools coming into the market all the time and companies focusing on benchmarking, search around and see if any are relevant. You may have to see whether the results of your social media can be integrated into your current measurement system. You could find that initially it may have to be manual. The most important thing is that you have a solution and have considered how to measure performance.

The last thing to tie up your case is to outline how you would implement this plan and the timelines involved.

To improve your chances of a success make sure the presentation is professional and to the point.

Once you have a solid case it is time to present it to management. Good Luck!

One of the biggest problems is driving relevant traffic to your website. It is easy to get hundreds and maybe even thousands of people to your website, but if they are the wrong type — the effort is wasted.

Therefore, my first bit of advice is that you make sure that you target as many relevant people or businesses with your Social Media effort.

Once you have created accounts on all your chosen social mediums you need to join relevant groups, pages or lists you. Then it is time to take part in discussions, share information and offer helpful advice and provide links back to your website. Here are some examples:

• If you are selling something then you would offer the link to your relevant page on your website.
• If you have helpful content then you refer back to this
• You can advertise all sorts linking back to more information
• If you have written an opinion piece you can share a brief opinion and link back to a longer explanation
• You can ask questions and link to a discussion
• You can announce events and link to them
• If you want to share things you find elsewhere on the web (e.g. industry news) you link to that.

Sometimes you can’t be selfish and only offer your site, but need to go outside – this will help with your reputation (provided you don’t link to rubbish) and people are more likely to click your links to your website as they get to know and respect you. The key here is that you link back what you are promoting to your website.

It is also important that you put links on your website to your various social media accounts e.g. Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and any other you may belong to so that visitors to your site from SEO efforts have the opportunity to follow you and keep up-to-date and return to your website.

You can also put links to these social mediums in RSS Feeds.

You can develop and run campaigns in the same way you would in traditional marketing that drives people to your website. The world is wide open to what you can communicate. Just make sure it is strategic, relevant and targeted and your efforts should increase traffic to your website.

I am the first person to champion measuring marketing effectiveness and implementing your marketing strategy in a way that you can measure your marketing activities and their influence. I am also aware that some activities have a long term effect and are only measurable in intangible terms for example goodwill or are a supportive role and do not directly influence profit.

Often I have seen business people say “what is the ROI for social media?” To me this shows a total lack of understanding of social media as well as the potential complexities of ROI.

I will explain why I believe this.

Firstly I will go into ROI and get a little technical, which is needed for me to make my point. The standard formula for ROI is: “Gain from Investment (Income)” less “Cost of Investment (Expenditure)” divided by the “Cost of Investment” and is expressed as a percentage. Some people express ROI in a monetary term by just subtracting “Cost of Investment” from “Gain from Investment” and to me is closer to gross profit, however, at the end of the day they both show how much money you made from your investment and that is what is important.

Now it may seem simple to calculate ROI, but this is not always the case and the results are often different for every organisation. The reason for this is that what is taken into account as income and costs differ for each organisation. For example your efforts may not only produce immediate income but future income e.g. subscription or financial products, how this is taken into account can differ. Whether it expressed in today’s terms (net present value) or not. What about future costs or indirect costs like the cost of processing a sale. So we can see that dependent on the complexity of your product and organisation ROI may not be a straight forward question to answer for any type of medium or tool.

Now I come to social media. There is no single use for social media. It is being used for many different things in business from sales, branding, PR, research, CRM, networking, database building, direct marketing and more. In business how you measure sales would be totally different to how you measure research or CRM. So depending on what you want to achieve with social media your objectives will be different and the measurements you use will be different. Some efforts will not have a direct impact on sales and produce a ROI but rather may be a supportive role that perhaps influences customer retention. You can read about how some businesses are using social media in the series I wrote looking at various SM tools use in business.

So when someone asks “What is the ROI of social media?” The answer really is: it depends.…..

My suggestion on measuring SM and SM ROI is the following:

1. Define your goals (broad and general) and objectives (precise and measurable).

2. Choose relevant social mediums to achieve these goals and objectives.

3. Decide on what measurements are important to you and how they are to be measured in a way that satisfies your organisation.

4. If ROI is one of these important measurements you need to decide on what you will take into account for income and expenses.

5. You need to monitor these and compare it to other mediums/tools you would use to achieve these same objectives.

6. Adjust your objectives if need be.

As far as I know there are no industry standards or benchmarks for SM, however, there are for other mediums/tools and I would use their benchmarks as a guideline. No business person will use a tool to achieve an objective that performs worse than another option. And for that, I mean comparing apples with apples. Remember some new efforts take time to reap rewards and can not be compared to an existing method that is reaping rewards, in the long run the new method may out perform existing methods. Be sensible about how you implement a new tool, just as you would with any other.

I would love to hear from others what their views are.

PS: If any of the steps above are a challenge, which they can be and are not a simple as they sound; there are many experts who can help you work through this process.

If you shout loud your competition shouts louder and so we end up with a never ending spiral of noise. We have all become masters at blocking out the noise we don’t want to hear. I believe the answer lies in that statement with the word “want” the prominent word. You need to target your message at people who want to hear it.

There are many reasons that people will want to hear your message. When I consider Facebook I want to hear updates from people I care about, people I have a relationships with. I also want to hear updates from groups I joined because it is about topics I am interested in. On Twitter I like to read updates from people I find interesting, sometimes because I admire them, other times because they provide me with knowledge or entertainment.

In Linkedin some of my groups provide me with information and discussions that help me understand others view points or introduce new concepts, ideas and products. The interesting thing in all of this is that it is driven my me and my interests rather than others pursuing me. I am in control of what I consume rather than the other way around. So I can walk away from the town crier and ignore what he says.

So where does this leave business? This is against how business has always been done. Business always controlled the message and what went out. So does business just ignore this or do they find a way to engage. You hear some people say that social media suits some industries better than others and they may be right. But, they may be wrong too. Maybe some businesses and industries are just doing it better than others and adopt new technologies and ways of doing business earlier, easier and better.

Businesses should be sitting down and thinking about what they want to or could achieve from social media. Is it a PR tool, a sales tool, a branding tool, a relationship building tool or any other tool? Taking social media on face value and believing that it has no place without considering what it could mean to your business could be a critical mistake, especially if your competition figures it out before you.

I also think business needs to evaluate their expectations of social media. Do you expect immediate return and immediate wonders? Would you expect this of another investment? I think if we can set a clear strategy, with realistic objectives and a practical plan we could manage expectations and a lot more people will be less disappointed by what the hype has promised.
What do you think the answer to getting heard is?

I imagine that social networks mapping has it’s own galaxy in those maps and I have used the phrase before: that you can get lost in the infinity that is the Internet and I believe the same goes for social networks and media.

An objection we often see to Social Media and Networking is that it takes too much time for the results. Now I agree that this can be true if you are not on a clear path. Here is what I suggest you do to avoid it becoming a time sink:

1. Know where you are going: without a clear destination you could wonder forever.

2. Plan your time: without a planned route you could follow many detours on your way. Set aside the amount of time you have either, daily, weekly or monthly (hourly for some).

3. Use that time efficiently: stay focused on what you need to do and avoid distractions (in social networking distractions are all over and quite hard to avoid)

4. Keep a log of your activity so that you can measure your efficiency.

5. Measure your social networking results against your other activities to determine a balance.

This is an on going process and one you need to keep assessing. Often the tools we use for social networking and media are not expensive, but the time we put in is. Detouring (distractions) are a big temptation and often can lead to less efficient time management…so don’t go on a detour unless it obviously will add value.

PS: I am busy developing a social media eCourse and my newsletter subscribers will be able to get the beta version for free!

PSS: If you have time please choose an answer in my poll in the first, right hand column. Thanks.

The problem is choosing which ones to belong to. You will have often read that the word “relevant” in my articles, so how do you choose or even know what is relevant? You may have heard go where your target market is, but how do you know whether they are using a particular social network or medium without doing expensive research?

Finding relevant networks could take a lot of work and effort if you go by trial and error and most of us just don’t have that sort of time. Even I, sometimes, wonder whether I could be missing out by not joining a group I was invited to – but that is just good selling. Here is my advice for choosing relevant social networks or mediums:

1. Decide what you want to achieve using social networks; there are many objectives e.g. improve knowledge, build new relationships, selling, branding, research, PR, customer service to name some.

2. Build a list of keywords relevant to your objective.

3. Start with the main social networks e.g. Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, LinkedIn and search your keywords.

4. Take a look at the results, are the conversations relevant to your objectives, if they are join or follow.

5. Search for active blogs based on the topics in your keyword list and add them to your favourites or feed and contribute whenever you can add value.

Just taking these 5 steps should get you started and help you to get your head around the networks, groups, pages and blogs that are relevant to your objectives.

Relevance means that they add value or help you achieve your objectives. The rest is just noise, but always keep an eye open for new opportunities that are relevant. Once you have some experience taking part in your chosen social networks, understand the time requirements and can assess the results from what is in your current basket then you can then put out your feelers and widen your horizons. Just be careful not to go too wide – it is easy to get lost.

PS: I am busy developing a social media eCourse and my newsletter subscribers will be able to get the beta version for free!

PSS: If you have time please choose an answer in my poll in the first, right hand column. Thanks.