Lorton Data

The more I read from the social media experts, the more I realize that no one really understands what they are talking about. One day it’s about likes and retweets, the next it’s about having the perfect ratio of comments, links and replies, then it’s all about the quality of the content, or, worse, the quantity of content. Gurus are going to tell you when to post and how to post, but it’s not really going to work. It’s like going to an all–you-can-eat buffet and learning it’s filled with 18,000 different brands of diet food. Sure it probably won’t kill you but honestly you are still going to go looking for glazed donut flavored ice cream the minute you leave the restaurant.

I recently had a friend ask me why she thought her jewelry company’s Facebook page has around three hundred followers while her competition has many thousands more. Interestingly, her company is getting 30,000 hits to its website monthly, but that isn’t translating to Facebook numbers. Before I even started writing this piece, I forewarned her there isn’t a magic potion or silver bullet to getting Facebook fans and anyone who is promising to sell you a silver bullet is probably a freshly shaved werewolf. That being said there are probably a few things related to expectations that need to be considered as well as time and money related issues.

1. Are you getting a return on your investment?

The number one thing anyone working with social media struggles with is the ability to quantify the return on their marketing efforts. In the B2B space, this means determining whether you are generating leads using social media, and in the consumer space this means are you getting sales? Anyone that says social media is only for product branding is trying to sell you on their ability to get a job in marketing without being able to sell anything. At the end of the day, selling your products or services is the only reason to use social media for business. Engagement is nice, but so is having a car. However, a car on blocks in the front yard doesn’t get you to work. There are a lot of links on my friend’s website leading to the company’s online store, but this isn’t enough. The first thing I would do is generate either a Facebook-only promo code or a product link that is Facebook specific to see if Facebook posts are generating sales. From this they can get a sense to see if the social media marketing efforts are having any impact and understand if it’s worth the time they are putting into Facebook.

2. Is Facebook really a competition?

I didn’t spend hours agonizing about the choice of following the Summit Brewing Company or the Surly Brewing Company on Twitter and Facebook. I followed them both because I wanted to. I didn’t think to myself, “wow, I just followed one brewery and I’m exhausted, I guess I’m done with that market segment on social media.” Just because your competition has more followers than you doesn’t mean they are capturing your potential followers, or more importantly, customers. Sure they may have 7000 more likes than you, but if both of you have 200 actual social media customers then at the end you are even with them.

3. Are you trying to build a community or a launching pad?

In this instance, the Facebook page in question has the same format for nearly every post: a wall photo of a piece of jewelry, an interesting comment about the piece with the price, and a link back to the sale website. If your intent is to get people to like and stay on your Facebook page, don’t immediately give them a reason to leave your page. Similarly to a restaurant without tables (I’m writing this after lunch so I’m as baffled as you are by all the food metaphors), you aren’t going to make any extra beverage sales by sending your customers away to eat a slice of pizza on the street. If you want a community, you’ll need a different tack than just posting your specials—that being said, if you are already getting a return on your investment then maybe your strategy is working.

4. Give people a reason to click

My friend’s organization included links to Facebook with every email and likes for everything on the website. However, if there isn’t a compelling reason to like or click through people aren’t going to do it. Just because you have set up a page and plastered an icon everywhere doesn’t mean people are actually going to click. In other words, just because Bravo has another cake-cooking competition, doesn’t mean I’m going to watch. I need a reason to watch. I might think those cakes are delicious, but I have no motivation to tell anyone about it. Give your audience a reason to like something and they will. I don’t have a magical solution for this one, but think about what marketing techniques work for you today and apply those strategies.

The net is, when it comes to social media marketing, a competitor isn’t necessarily the best yardstick to see if you are doing things correctly. With so little real understanding of how to navigate the social media space successfully (beyond historically successful marketing techniques) it’s probably better for an organization to look to case studies and examples of successful social media campaigns and emulate those with your own organization’s unique spin.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I apparently need to go hit the vending machine for an afternoon treat.

I’m sure there are plenty of people that are still too upset about Facebook format changes from three years ago, to be particularly upset about yesterday’s changes. It’s fascinating to read or hear the backlash each time Facebook changes their layout. When we have beautiful fall weather, we need something to complain about, so I guess it gets to be Facebook. I suspect if there was an Amazon review of Facebook it would be “3 Stars, nice product but changes too often and won’t stop my mom from replying to my posts.”

Generally speaking, Facebook is one of the few companies releasing new features that work, rather than features that don’t work to replace features that never did work from the previous version. There are a few interesting things that have changed with this release and just like everyone else in America with access to a blog, I feel the need to tell you about it at this very moment.

The first thing is their promotion of lists in importance and helping us to formulate them. This is reasonable since I would probably never get around to categorizing my 500+ friends. To be honest, I have fewer socks than that and if it wasn’t for my wife, I’d probably never categorize them in pairs either. Facebook relied on the basic methods of blood (family), time (my Hiram College list) and space (people that are near Saint Paul). None of which are actually that useful to me and I suspect it’s the same for others. I don’t think we structure our social media generated virtual world in the same way we structure our interactions in the real world. Interestingly, my wife was added to a Family Group of a friend whom we’ve hung out with once since her wedding a few years ago. The only buggy thing I can speculate about the algorithms is that her first name starts with a J and last name starts with an I, so Facebook assumed she’s related to me, and that makes her related to my wife? Although the other JI and I aren’t friends at the time of this writing (request sent, I swear).

I’d rather Facebook did content based suggestions to help me organize my social life.

My Facebook Content Lists would be:

1. Posts Only Baby Photos
2. Copies and Pastes Religious/Political Talking Points
3. Serial Farmville Updater
4. Passive Aggressive Vague Post Writers
5. I Won’t Ever Read Your Blog Again
6. People Who Treat Their Relationship Status like a Light Switch

So yeah, there’s that.

The only other things I’d like to comment on are the idea of Top News Stories being related to how long it’s been since your last login is a great idea. Although, for me it’s still littered with people from Twitter and their cross-posted content—that’s a function of them being more prolific and engaged “sharers” than most of my physical world friends. Finally, the only thing I really despise about the new layout is the real time ticker in the upper right hand of the layout. I’ve yet to find something interesting in there AND it’s locked to the screen giving it the feel of a really creepy clown picture with overly painted eyes following me around the room. I just don’t like it and hopefully will get so used to it that I actually won’t notice it anymore.

Like any organization marketing to consumers or businesses, Facebook should connect with its users, and find out what they like, need, and suggest before making serious changes to their product. Just because they think it’s good, doesn’t mean their customers do.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go worry about much more important things than Facebook’s new layout.

I’ve got my PTO request slip in my hand and I’m trembling with excitement as I look forward to the start of next week’s Minnesota State Fair. I grew up over two hours from the Ohio State Fair in Columbus, so my experience with fairs until I moved to the Twin Cities was relegated to some smaller fairs comprised of terrible cover bands, undercooked elephant ears and eight despondent goats going through the motions of being goat-like until they could head out to happy hour. Honestly, I’d like to think all my fair experiences before the Minnesota State Fair were kind of like training camp to prepare me for the awesomeness of hundreds of meat products on a stick, giant tractors taken straight from Gulliver’s Travels and real bands reuniting as they try to reclaim their moment in the sun from their one hit song back in 1976. It’s so close I can smell the excitement—or maybe someone just burned some food in the toaster oven in the office kitchen. I don’t know.

The Minnesota State Fair is known as “The Great Minnesota Get-Together” and according to my in-depth research on Wikipedia, it is the third largest state fair in the US. You’d think that an event that seems to set new daily attendance records every year AND has a 90 pound butter sculpture of the head of the newly selected “Princess Kay of the Milky Way” wouldn’t use social media to connect with the 1.7 million people that attended in 2010, but they do. After @MeetingBoy and my wife, @MinnStateFair was one of the first accounts I followed on Twitter. With over 250,000 likes on Facebook and almost another 10,000 on Twitter, the Fair is doing an excellent job of communicating with people attending, running contests, and most importantly, promoting the organizations and events at the Fair.

I’ll admit I don’t engage with the Fair on Facebook, but I do on Twitter. For anyone looking to leverage Twitter for business purposes, I highly recommend checking out their Twitter account. Not only do they push updates and information, but they actively engage people on the platform. Be it replies to people tweeting about the Fair, sharing links to fairground maps, answering random questions, or just making me hungry for new food offerings from vendors, the people behind the @MinnStateFair account do a fantastic job of building a community and engaging it with worthwhile content. While I am quite sure a significant amount of effort is happening in the background to manage the social media interaction for the fair, I think you’ll agree that it’s time well spent. I know it sure beats all the businesses that start a Twitter account, send out three links a day, and call it a social media marketing program.

There are a lot of “gurus” out there that will tell you how to do social media for businesses, organizations and non-profits. They’ll inundate you with an avalanche of advice and even more snake oil. But rarely will they give you a positive example of an organization that isn’t a multi-billion dollar conglomerate. More likely, they will enhance the negative related to a bad social media event and just say “good social media practice is not doing this.” In this instance, the Minnesota State Fair Twitter account is a great example of how to do social media right within a professional context and their page is worth a read, if not a follow.

Now if you’ll excuse me I have at least 30 jokes to write about the Fair for my personal Twitter account and at least 25 of those can’t be about the Miracle of Birth Center.

At some point during the last twenty-four hours, I’ve accessed Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail, Gmail, Twitter, Tumblr, LinkedIn, Facebook, Salesforce’s Chatter, Groupwise Messenger and Google+. I also talked to my father on the phone and received a text message from my wife—it said “moo.” While the time I spent on each communication platform wasn’t excessive, it adds up quickly to an amount that would allow me to build an addition on my house—or at least get the dishes washed. There are some people that can reach me on as many as nine of these eleven different communication mediums! It’s hard to believe any one person can manage all of those platforms in a twenty-four hour period with less stress than is involved in setting the timer on the coffee pot. Here’s the essential question when I think about this: Is it better to be tied to many different platforms and manage interactions across all mediums, or would it be less challenging to manage fewer platforms but wade through more information?

Most days I just coast along and do communication rather than think about it. I write emails at work, wade through tweets, occasionally smirk at a Facebook status and try to figure what I should be doing with LinkedIn. Some days I do all that, and blog! However, with the release of Google+, I’m starting to evaluate all these different platforms and trying to make sense of my daily communication. I’ll freely admit that I wasn’t interested in Google+ until I got an invite to join (funny how that happens). While I need another social media platform like I need that hole in my head from the ill-advised earring from college, there’s something very compelling about Google+. There is also something very concerning to me.

In a quick overview, Google+ is kind of like a long-form version of Twitter with the ability to comment like Facebook, Tumblr’s ability to integrate images into posts, a whole slew of other nifty features, and the promise of even more integration with other Google applications. It sounds fantastic, but it also sounds like an informational firehose that will be difficult to turn off. Google Circles is the following/follower management system for Google+ and its premise is that it allows you to post to the people you want, when you want, based on the Circle you’ve placed someone in. It breaks down the “Walled Garden” concept of other social media platforms, where the application is separate from the web at large, and transcends the specific one-on-one communication of email. While it sounds great for the broadcasting aspect of Google+, I worry that it won’t actually work for inbound information. In a sense, you always go to the main “Stream” page much like Facebook’s “News Feed” where you are inundated with everything everyone wants to say. It’s like ordering cable, but being forced to watch all the channels at once.

Today, I can ignore Facebook for a few days before the guilt rolls in. Or, I can take a night off from Twitter and if someone wants to reach me they can. My business life won’t end if I don’t check LinkedIn. With Google+, the potential to have all of those different audiences together (even if they are parceled out into different Circles) could make it too compelling to never take a day off. The non-stop flow of information into your stream will be challenging–even moving from Circle to Circle, the idea that “just one more group” could leave us wide awake late into the night. Adding to this is the possibility that having it tied to everything else I do on the web will make it a bit too overwhelming. I’m not predicting this is the Matrix, but if I want to take five minutes to read the latest musings from my favorite unemployed stand-up comic in one circle, but always feel compelled by guilt to comment on what my mother had for lunch (in the same application) we are moving away from something we do, to something we have to do. And for me that’s the biggest concern with breaking out of the siloed approach to social media that Google+ plus offers.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to cross post the link to this blog on Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, and email it to my friends. Oh yeah, and I have to do it on my personal and work accounts.