Guest post from Jessica Carlson, a social media manager at Off Madison Ave who specializes in building social communities that create brand loyalists and garner key insights. “Censorship reflects society’s lack of confidence in itself.” -Potter Stewart Facebook recently released a Moderation Blocklist, a functionality that allows Page administrators to set parameters around certain keywords, [...]
Silos, Facebook Advertising, and Opportunity
I was pissed. When I first heard the news that The Washington Post was spinning off a brand-new company to do Facebook-only consulting, I was incensed. Given that the future (and present) of marketing is multi-channel, multi-modal, cross-platform, and other hyphenates, why would an organization that theoretically “gets it” create a siloed professional services firm [...]
Why You’re Pissing Off Half Your Facebook Fans
Sure it has 600 million members and is significantly more compelling than any film made by Nicholas Cage in the past five years, but even with those inherent advantages, Facebook for business is hard. It’s not just that Facebook has a distinctly Favre-like approach to features and decision-making. Or, that Facebook is very clearly in [...]
Invitation Avalanches, Attention Infidelity, and the Science of the Social Break-Up
Is the golden goose poisoned before it’s even an adult? The current relationship between companies and consumers via social media and email is unsustainable. The backlash has begun, and abuse of any one channel has a spillover effect on consumer attitudes toward other channels. That’s one of my main takeaways from fascinating new research from [...]
5 Staggeringly Simple Ways to Create Custom Facebook Landing Tabs
Unless you can get people to click your “like” button, your Facebook strategy will be as limp and lifeless as Matt LeBlanc’s post-Friends career. That’s because the vast majority of consumer interactions with your brand on Facebook do not occur on your fan page, but rather on the Walls of your fans. In fact, research [...]
Digital Sharecropping – Why Most Facebook Customization is Wasted Effort
Part 3 of a 3-Part Rant The time, money, and overall exertion being spent on customizing Facebook fan pages is largely misspent. Just because you CAN replicate much of your corporate website functionality on Facebook, doesn’t mean you SHOULD. Your Facebook fan page is not a collectible automobile. You do not get extra brand advocacy [...]
Mistake Math – Why We’re Valuing Facebook Fans All Wrong
Part 2 of a 3-Part Rant Brands are shouting from the rooftops about how many Facebook fans they have – and the number of “likes” does help you spread your message through the news feeds of your fans (more on that tomorrow). But let’s recognize it takes literally one click of one finger to “like” [...]
Ra Ra Wrong. How Facebook’s Cheerleaders Are Blowing Smoke
Part 1 of a 3-Part Rant I realize it’s in the best interests of Facebook, the media, application developers, and sometimes even brands themselves to concoct pseudo-science that “proves” that people that “like” your company are instantly turned into a zombie army of influential advocates. But it’s simply not true. Despite a pile of coverage [...]
Is Facebook Suffocating the Rest of Social Media?
Forrester Research recently released a 2010 update to its Social Technographics® data that analyzes the social behaviors of global Internet users. For the first time, the percentage of U.S. consumers engaged in certain social behaviors actually went down, not up. Is the bloom off the rose? Is this the long-promised social media backlash? Overall, social media [...]
6 Lessons Learned From the Demise of MySpace
Once the undisputed king of social media (at least in the U.S.), MySpace last week declared what amounts to a post-modern armistice, announcing that they will integrate status updates with Facebook (and Twitter). MySpace used to be Janet, and now it’s LaToya – at best. While the erosion of the MySpace user base has been [...]
