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How Much Emotional Intelligence Does A Turnaround Need?

September 18, 2012 in Change, Digital, Management, Media, Women with 0 Comments

Photo Credit: elephantjournal.com

I had to share this piece from my new fave email, The LAUNCH Ticker. Since this is the second post in a row where I focus exclusively on this great newsletter, I will try to generate my own thoughts next time. But this is worth sharing.

I’ve inadvertently* worked in a turnaround setting before and I can see how important this stuff is. I’ve never worked for management with this level of understanding of people when I’ve been in a turnaround setting and it has always shown in the outcome. Continue Reading…

Three Reasons Facebook is No Longer Fun

August 23, 2012 in Digital, Media with 0 Comments

By the River

By the River (Photo credit: urbanworkbench)

More and more, I am seeing how Mr. Zuckerburg might have missed the mark on his transparency mantra. Our lives are multifaceted. There is certainly a place for separation between these facets, especially one’s professional life and personal life. Not because we have something to hide personally, or professionally for that matter. But simply because in the new world of Facebook being used for business, our personal feeds are so polluted by messages that are “work” that they are no longer “fun”.

We live and work in an era of unprecedented connectivity. Many of us watch television with an iPad on our laps – viewing two screens simultaneously. And that same connectivity allows us freedom to work from anywhere and therefore at any time. This benefit brings a risk: the only way to shut down professionally could be to disconnect personally. Isn’t that sad?

I live on the opposite side of the world from my family and many of my friends. When I moved to Australia, Facebook was a wonderful way to share what I was up to, how my kids were growing, and to hear about the important and banal moments in their lives. And then the marketing started.

In order to promote my business, I need to be connected to a number of organisations, many of whom do most of their communicating through Facebook. And so I can only really log on for enjoyment if I’m also prepared to respond to work related things. And even though I own a small business, and I’m usually prepared to jump on a good opportunity, I’m old enough to know from experience that I’m no good to my business if I’m burnt out or unfocussed.

Here are the three problems I see with Facebook that have reduced how much I use it as a consumer:

1. Interlaced personal and business messages have made my timeline a scrolling marketing billboard.

Who doesn’t want some leisure time that is not trying to sell you something?

2. Requirement to be friends with someone before they can become an admin on your page.

Working virtually means that I don’t actually know some of these people, though they do a great job and are indispensible to my business.

3. Requirement to use Facebook as a business tool results in it moving to the list of things I only want to use with a professional hat on.

Meaning that I’d rather share my life somewhere else. I just don’t know what that somewhere else is yet.

And it seems that many of my “in real life” friends have noticed this too as the updates they post (or Facebook’s algorithm allows me to see) have reduced substantially over recent months. Yes, Facebook is a great tool with a phenomenal user base. No, Facebook is not going to thrive as the information superhighway’s billboard service that it has become.

Algorithmic tweaking is clearly focussed on that ever important number of how many posts we each see from any of the contributors to our newsfeed. Facebook is still thinking about their customer, but that customer is no longer each of us as a person, it is the businesses they need to pay  for ads and feed Wall Street.

If you have a solution for keeping it fun, please share it in the comments. 

7 Things Facebook Should Improve for Advertisers

February 26, 2012 in Digital, Media with 0 Comments

Facebook Logo

I’ve been using Facebook for my small business actively for the past 2 weeks. Most of that experience has been learning – you know the stuff that doesn’t work and needs to be different. I promise a full post about what has not worked for me so far, but here, I want to share my observations about a few things that Facebook could improve to make things easier for their advertisers. In my experience, the easier a company makes the process of spending money, the more their customers do it. How many of you wouldn’t want to see this these things improved? Continue Reading…

Perils and Positives of Frictionless Sharing

November 21, 2011 in Digital, Media with 0 Comments

As usual, I eagerly clicked on a shared link from my friend Venessa Paech this morning, on Facebook. Today she was sharing a perspective from CNET on the friction Facebook has introduced in its quest for frictionless sharing. We’ve all see the various automatic updates that some people may not even realise they are providing to their social graph (previously know as their friends) – they’ve read an article on the Washington Post Social Reader or The Guardian; they’ve listened to a song on Spotify. And CNET makes two key arguments:

1. People will be afraid to click on links because Facebook is tracking them, and
2. Facebook is introducing a barrier to sharing.

These are valid points, and yet they deserve a counter perspective. Continue Reading…

How Important is Facebook in Today’s Marketing Mix?

October 10, 2011 in Australian Digital, Digital, Media with 1 Comment

Ever experienced those times where you feel like you don’t know how to really make the most of a channel, but everything you read from the “experts” just tells you what you already know?

I’m having that experience right now, and it is driving me crazy. The problem is Facebook. And the real problem is that for me as a user, most brand pages just don’t resonate. I like them because I actually want to hear from the brand (and in some cases it’s competitive research), and then I unlike them because I’m tired of having my personal newsfeed that I use for entertainment and keeping up with my “in real life” friends cluttered with marketing messages and low quality content begging to be ‘liked’.

I’ve been thinking about some of the philosophy behind Facebook and transparency outlined in David Kirkpatrick’s The Facebook Effect to help me find the solution to using this channel better. Fundamentally, the race for fans, likes, and the lot, is not the actual answer. And there are many companies measuring all sorts of things – comments to fans, likes to fans, and other engagement ratios. All this is good and well, but I still think we’re all missing something.

The skeptic within me thinks that this can’t work for brands because it is a tool by Facebook to benefit Facebook. But there are some (a few) who swear by the channel.  Today, 247wallst.com reported on some of the most successful.  Most people I know admit that building fans doesn’t translate as efficiently into sales as other channels.

This was reinforced for me a couple of weeks ago at the Online Retailer Conference in Sydney. Many people were talking about f-commerce, and one exhibitor would even take a fairly high payment for setting up a page for their customers. But the nail in the coffin came when Jon Kamaluddin from Asos was asked how important Facebook was as a channel and his response was simply “I wouldn’t rush to do it”.

However, Facebook is an important part of many of our lives, like it or not. So there must be a way to take advantage of this commercially in an unobtrusive way. After all, Advertising in the digital world continues to evolve becoming ever more integrated with a user experience so that soon we’re learning about products and services we want when we want them. I know I still want to know about what new products are out there in a range of categories. I just find it really difficult to get good information about where to find them. Surely there must be a good way to use Facebook for this. Or isn’t there?

If you have a good example of Facebook being used to promote a brand, please share it in the comments.

 

Related Posts: Finally, I Notice A Banner Ad

 

Finally, I notice a banner ad

October 8, 2011 in Digital, Media with 1 Comment

Anyone in the digital media world knows that Advertising is both critical to long term success, but also often ineffective in the traditional banner formats that have been in use for most of the past decade. Today, I noticed an ad. And by that I mean involuntarily noticed an ad and thought “wow, I looked and I understand”.  They don’t want me to click, but they want me to remember.  A great example of understanding the reader in creating the advertisement.

Here it is …

 

 

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