Corporate Eye

Brands Can Add Facebook Fan Pages to Websites and Blogs with the Fan Box

Susan Gunelius — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 00:38:57 +0000

Facebook Fan Pages are created by celebrities, brands, companies, organizations, etc. They’re an interactive place to share information, start conversations, and engage with a brand. They’re different from Facebook Groups in a number of ways. Perhaps most importantly, Facebook Fan Pages are public (you don’t have to be a Facebook member or be logged into Facebook to view them), and they are indexed by search engines (meaning they can come up in keyword searches). Facebook Fan Pages also offer more interactivity than Facebook Groups such as adding extra applications and related events. The general consensus is that your brand should have both a Facebook Fan Page (for long-term relationship building) and a Facebook Group (for shorter conversations).

Last week, Facebook unveiled its new Facebook Fans Page embeddable Fan Box that lets users place Facebook Fan Page information and updates on websites or blogs outside of Facebook. If your company doesn’t already have a Facebook Fan Page, particularly for your brands, then you need to create one. Then use the Facebook Fan Box to publish your Fan Page information and updates on your website and blog. That way, you’re creating a 360-degree loop of information and conversation. People can find your Facebook Fan Page from your website or blog, and people can find your website or blog from your Facebook Fan Page. Then they can self-select the experiences that they want to engage with in order to further experience your brand. That’s the beauty of the social web! Let it work for you and your brand.

There are over 200 million people using Facebook and according to the Facebook blog, 8 million of them join Facebook Fan Pages everyday. That’s a huge potential audience that your brand could be connecting with! The Facebook blog also provides information and links to directions to help you add the Facebook Fan Box to your blog or website as well as some great examples of companies already using the Facebook Fan Box (I like the example from Threadless or for a simpler example, check out the Blackberry website).

Image: Flickr

Effective Techniques on Corporate Websites

Ed Konczal — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 15:36:39 +0000

I am continually pleasantly surprised to see how some companies find innovative and creative techniques in their stakeholder relationships. These companies realize the power of their websites and use them to make their company standout.

The first site we will visit is Gerber Products–

Note the Story reference and the Timeline. Mouseover the dots and a historical factbite is displayed.

Nice, but these are what I will call Stage 2 innovations (good but not super creative).

Click on Corporate and see –

– a compelling offer to get you to sign up for customized information as your child grows.

Take it and they have you as a dedicated visitor for years.

Next is a tool used by AstraZeneca and it is one that will cause you to smack your forehead and say “why didn’t I think of that?”

It appears on most of the website’s pages and simply asks the visitor for information.

This is a well thought out feedback form and is an easy way to get user information.

Next, Corporate Eye deals with all stakeholder groups, so what better to look at than websites that display how they deal with their stakeholders?

This takes us to Italy’s Edison, which was profiled in a recent post–

This is only a portion of the page. Note how Edison identifies how it relates to each stakeholder group. Visit the MAP to see all stakeholder groups.

Another company that uses a similar stakeholder map is UK and Netherlands based Unilever.

There are more creative techniques and future posts may cover these. But for now the final technique for this post comes from Pepsico.

The technique involves design. The Pepsico home page is a perfect example of elegant simplicity. Perhaps I was drawn to this because I favor minimalist photography (shameless pitch–see my online article on Minimalist Photography).

Well designed, uncluttered. Pepsico uses creative navigation–do mouseover on the lower navigation icons and more navigation links are displayed. Very nice indeed.

If you have any examples please post them.

Don’t forget - you can click on any of these images to see them expanded.

Copyright Corporate Eye

Integrating Twitter with the corporate site

Lucy — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 09:32:42 +0000

Do you have employees who tweet on your behalf? Are you wondering how to authenticate them?

You should have a look at the Wal-Mart site, which is a great example of a range of best practices in this area.

Do click on this image to expand it, or open the Wal-Mart Twitter page in another window, so you can see it…

On this page, Wal-Mart clearly identify the twitterers by name, department and job title, together with a 140 character bio, an image and a link to their Twitter account.

It states that these - and these only - are the official spokespeople on Twitter for the company, and that anyone else you find tweeting is not speaking on behalf of the company. This is very clear, and does a great job of authenticating the corporate twitterers.

The page also pulls in their recent tweets, and uses tabs to separate the twitterers by country (US, UK and Brazil) rather than lumping them all in together. Again, this makes sense, not only because the different regions are likely to have different interests and projects, but also because the US/UK and Brazil teams use different languages.

The Walmart Twitter guidelines are available on the corporate site, and are clearly linked to from this page (top and bottom). The guidelines themselves are clear - and the copy neatly integrates Twitter with the Walmart purpose:

Twitter asks a very basic question of its users: “What are you doing?” And we know the answer to that question – we’re working every day to help people save money and live better.

The rest of the Twitter page is well done, too, incorporating related resources in the sidebar: images, video and a location map.

My only quibble is that it took me some time to spot the link to this Twitter page. I arrived direct –via Twitter, of course– and wanted to work out where the page sat in the corporate site.

And it took me a while to find, though the breadcrumb trail clearly indicates it is available from the home page. I was surprised by this — because very few corporates link to their twitter accounts from the home page — and spent some time looking in the main content on the home page and others, and failing to see it. I also checked the sitemap, and again, it isn’t listed as a main page.

However, it is there, and is available from the footer bar on every page, including the sitemap. My suggestion would be to include this as a link from the About section - perhaps in the sidebar - and list it as such on the sitemap. Incidentally, I wonder why these site services pages aren’t listed in the sitemap proper, only in the footer on that page (as on every page)?

Quibble aside, I think this is very well done, and demonstrates a number of best practices for integrating at least one social media outpost with the corporate website.

Copyright Corporate Eye

Twitter and Investor Relations, Why So Difficult?

Brian — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 08:02:09 +0000

Take a look around in virtually any magazine, newspaper, trade publication, or website and you are bound to find numerous articles about Twitter, like this one here on Corporate Eye about creating value on Twitter. Publications and webpages with a technical audience (and authorship) are likely to proclaim Twitter as the future of all communications, and issue grave warnings that you are already falling behind in this critical new universe. Those resources dedicated to marketing and public relations may be less effusive, but are also likely to be completely on board with all things social media, including Twitter.

On the other hand, media with a legal or regulatory focus are more likely to sternly advise you of the inevitable lawsuits that will plague your company if you even think about Twitter in the wrong way. Mainstream investing publications seem to split the difference, calling on readers to aggressively use and promote a corporate Twitter account, while at the same repeatedly cautioning investment professionals to mind the possibility of violating securities related rules or regulations.

Twitter’s IR Conflict

The difficulty surrounding using Twitter or other social media, sometimes referred to as social marketing, stems from multiple factors. All too often, these intertwined concepts are glossed over, or simply ignored. Unfortunately, in business, ignorance is almost never bliss.

In this multipart series, we’ll take an in-depth look at Twitter and other social media websites like Facebook and see just what they have to offer top-level Investor Relations departments, and what perils the same sites may expose your company and your IR department to. Most importantly, we’ll look behind the opinions and statements and reveal the intricate play between the numerous factors that go into making Twitter such a challenging proposition for even the best prepared IR teams.

Social Networking Basics Guide

Although Twitter seems to attract the most attention these days among those in the Investor Relations realm, it is far from the only social networking site. Twitter was launched in 2006, by then, sites such as MySpace, LinkedIn, and Facebook had been popular for years.

The most common resistance to social networking sites from non-users is that they can do the same thing via phone or email. While both provide the means to communicate with others, they require a continuous selection of who to include on each communication. Additionally, in order to keep certain communication separate from others, many people have multiple email accounts that they check with varying frequency.

Further, it is common to forget just who has and had not been included in previous communications, opening the possibility that people you intended to communicate with were, in fact, not contacted. Thus, the potential for accidental exclusion in any broad conversation is higher. The author actually did not let a favorite aunt (nor more than one client) know when his son was born because he thought the email lists he used had covered everyone while excluding those who would not be interested.

Email,then is best suited for either small or static, homogeneous groups, such as members of a team.

Social networking sites, by contrast, are a way for self-defined collection of individuals to communicate in an open manner. Unlike email which requires the sender choosing to specifically include you on each email, social networking sites provide for anyone who has been previously included to take part in all exchanges. As an added bonus, unlike email, social networking messages need not commingle with other communications because messages can be read online instead of through an inbox.

What Is Twitter? Twitter Explained

Not long ago, whether or not you knew about Twitter was largely defined by your age. Twitter was originally conceived as a way to send short “status updates” to your friends. “Short” was set at 140 characters in large part because this amount would be an acceptable size for a SMS message, more commonly known as a text message, on any US wireless network.

In the early days, Twitter was used primarily by teenagers and twenty-somethings to find out what their friends were literally doing. With Twitter, your friend Dave could tell you what club he was planning on going to. Then, when that location turned out to be lame, Dave could update his status to let everyone know he was moving on to the next location. When he got somewhere he was happy with, he could report that too. Using this information, Dave’s friends didn’t have to worry about showing up at the wrong location and Dave and his friends didn’t have to make dozens of annoying cell phone calls just to find out what everyone else was doing.

Other users found Twitter a refreshing way to text their friends faster and easier than by typing on their cell phones. It was during this initial phase that Twitter earned its reputation as nothing more than a place where you tell other people what you had for dinner and read about what other people had for dinner.

Today, nobody posts an update about what they ate for dinner.

Real Friends and Twitter Friends

One of the difficulties many first time users find with Twitter is the concept of friends. In the real world, friends is a select group of people. Depending on your demographic, it is possible that many of your friends do not have Twitter accounts. As such, you would have only a few friends to follow and only a few friends to follow you. This makes Twitter virtually worthless since other methods are a more efficient way of communicating with small numbers of users.

This may explain why Twitter caught on faster with younger people who are more likely to form and disband ad hoc groups at different times for various events. Consider a single person who begins their weekend as part of a group of ten, all attending the same concert; that becomes a group of fifty people, some the same and some different than the original ten, at a party after the concert, which then morphs into a group of 15 avid bicyclists planning a Sunday afternoon ride.

For this type of situation, the number of friends is significantly higher than the traditional definition and includes not just person friends, but also members of the same groups, both formal and informal. Another cyclist, for example, with no interest in the concert, party, or breakfast, can still stay connected about where to show up.

Investor Relations and Investing Friends?

How, then, can such a concept grow to include Investor Relations? Certainly, IR cannot consider everyone who requests an annual report to be a friend.

Therein lies the possibilities of Twitter. Thanks to its broadcast nature, comments, suggestions, and even the bane of email-based communication, jokes, can all be “sent” in a way that they can be seen and read by “everyone” without being perceived as junk communication.

Indeed, in a real way, Twitter is the “Send to All” button. However, where sending a message to everyone in an email is reviled as spam, Twitter, is the ultimate opt-in campaign.

Ready to get started right now?

Hold on. The devil, as they say, is in the details.

Watch for the next article in our series, or just grab the Investor Relations RSS feed and let it come to you.

Twitter’s Trademark Stance

Susan Gunelius — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 00:03:38 +0000

What’s a company like Twitter that is built by its open API development model to do when those same developers who support the product and make it easier for millions and millions of people to use use the Twitter name and look in their applications? What if they use the word Tweet?

This month, Twitter has responded to developers and tech folks who want to know why the company is suddenly playing hard ball about its trademarks — including ones it doesn’t own yet. For example, Twitter only applied for the trademark for the word “tweet” in April 2009, but the company is already telling developers to avoid using it in application names. The company does own the trademark for “Twitter”, and while people are allowed to use the word in application names, etc., Twitter is encouraging people to get more creative with the naming of their own products. The team behind Twitter is also getting a bit tougher about ensuring third-party applications look distinctively different from the actual Twitter interface.

I think it’s about time that Twitter started to get tougher in protecting its brand trademarks (and acquiring new ones). There is no doubt that those names carry value, and while it’s important that the developer community and the open nature of Twitter be allowed to thrive, there is no reason that the brand names have to be used so freely. Using a tagline such as “for Twitter” or “approved by Twitter” to distinguish between applications Twitter actually endorses vs. those that Twitter does not, would be a great way to help Twitter users differentiate between the best apps and to reward Twitter app partners. Of course, I have no idea if this is something Twitter is interested in getting involved in, but even the simple “for Twitter” tag (rather than using Twitter in the app name) which offers no endorsement at all would work to tell people what the third-party application is for without infringing on trademarks.

My point is this, protecting your brand assets is imperative. While the initial buzz over Twitter’s stance on its trademarks was negative (you can read the TechCrunch post here and the Twitter blog post here), I think Twitter is doing the right thing. What do you think?

Image: Flickr