Tag Archive - Marketing

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. 

My Personal Community Challenge

February 6, 2012 in Digital, Lessons from Oola with 1 Comment

Every business wants a thriving community. Yet many businesses struggle to create one.

 

 

I am not a student of the theory of Community Building and Community Management, though several of my brightest friends and former colleagues are. From this week, I am beginning the journey of building a community of parents who seek the same type of play alternatives I seek for my children Continue Reading…

Thank You Shopify!

December 15, 2011 in Digital with 1 Comment

Surprise and delight your customers.

How many hours of marketing meetings around the world have been spent thinking about and discussing this statement?

Today, I want to very loudly thank Shopify.  I would have thanked them before they surprised and delighted me this morning, but now, after a totally unexpected surprise, I really love them even more.

I opened my front door this morning rushing three late-for-school children towards the car to discover 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.

 

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A Stellar Example Of Product Is Everything

June 29, 2011 in Digital, Media with 0 Comments

This is the third of a three part series about Klout.  Read the first two posts here (Is Klout Really About Clout?) and here (What Klout Should Do Next).

Like many following Klout’s recent publicity offensive, I’ve been observing and thinking about Klout for a while.  I’ve written a couple of posts where I shared some of my thoughts about Klout from the ‘appropriateness of measure’ and ‘commercial opportunity’ perspectives.  These are both areas where I think Klout could improve.  And probably so do they as a young company experiencing rapid growth.  Today, I share what I think they have done brilliantly – reflect their product in their marketing and their marketing in their product.

Sounds obvious.  It is.  BUT, it is exceptionally difficult to get right and Klout has done a pretty good job of it.

Klout has taught us a good lesson on how to really snowball a product launch.  Who wouldn’t admit that they’ve gone to check their Klout score more than once in the past month?

It is important to first clarify what I mean by product launch.  Clearly Klout’s site has been around for a while.  The Launch for me is about the day the team is ready for a full on marketing push to drive as much usage as possible.  This nearly always involves PR and when well executed, generates PR that snowballs generating lots of bonus coverage.  Bonus coverage doesn’t happen by itself and is not the job of a PR agency itself.  It happens by reflecting accurately the great attributes of a product which itself has the job of hooking customers and reeling them it.

For anyone who spent the past month in a bubble, Klout has been all over social media, critical for credibility in their field, but also surfacing in mainstream media and garnering all sorts of comment on their algorithm, reliability, relevance.  The important thing is that Klout is driving discussion.  It is on the tips of people’s tongues and making conversation.  The team responsible for marketing Klout, whether by design or luck, have clearly connected with the emotional triggers that drive just enough response to get people engaged – both in the product and in the media talking about it.

I see three key emotional triggers:

- Controversy

- Compulsion

- Comparison

They build all of these into the product so it is clear that their marketing and their product and, without question, their company embodies these characteristics which have made for a great product launch.  The team at Klout understand people as much as mathematical algorithms.  They have honed in on the human characteristics that, at a most basic level, we all share and thrive upon.

Let’s look at Controversy.  Why do I think that it is built into the product?  Well, it suggested that I was an expert in the topic of Nuclear Power.  I don’t know anything meaningful about the topic, though I have a fairly strong opinion about its role in our future.  This label is controversial both for me and for true experts who would easily see the artificial nature of that label.  Similarly controversial are the Tweeters who influence me.  Though some are spot on, in some cases, I do not agree with these individuals or want to perceive myself as influenced by them.  So I am subtly motivated to change my behaviour.  Thereby increasing my interactions with some and possibly decreasing my interactions with others.

Compulsion.  Here’s a human trait that we don’t often want to associate ourselves with, but it is something that drives us.  We all have it, but in each of us, it is directed in a different way.  A colleague once asked me how often I look at my LinkedIn profile to see how many people were checking me out.  I felt like a teenager wondering if the boy in class thought I was hot.  But I also immediately felt like a loser because my answer was an honest never.  I was not looking for a job nor thinking about doing so.  I used LinkedIn regularly in the course of my work to recruit, locate business partners, and investigate other companies.  I had never thought to see who was looking at me for the very same things – what a dolt!  So I went and checked it out.  I signed up to waive my anonymity rather than become a paying subscriber for the exercise (sorry LinkedIn.).  I looked at my ‘stalkers’ a few times and lost interest.  There was really nothing to be gained from that particular activity and I prefer real life direct interactions with people.  Klout has changed all that for many people.  Imagine how interesting it is to check your score.  Did all those clever tweets yesterday make me more popular?  And when they don’t, perhaps we’re not so clever as we think.  How many of you check your Klout score weekly or more, and look farther at the individual components to see how you’re doing.  It is so simple that we are literally compelled to check it out.  A stroke of brilliance from the product visionaries at Klout.

And the age old competition that is driven by Comparison.  Klout does this brilliantly.  Their product compares us to each other subtly by showing who we influence and who influences us.  They then compare us directly with some of our followees.  Are you a celebrity?  a thought leader?  an observer?  Even the labels motivate us to compare.  For some, the same labels may compel you to select our target category and begin working for it.  Some people are happy as an observer, but many want to at least carry an active label – explorer, networker.  Set a target and go get ‘em.

I’ve talked a lot about the product when this post is about marketing, why?  Well as every good marketer and every good product manager knows, the two are fairly inextricably linked.  So Klout started with a product that in and of itself is designed to drive the kind of marketing metrics people only dream of – repeat visits, true engagement, and disucssion outside of the site.

Once the snowball starts rolling, it just keeps getting bigger and going faster.  This is great news for Klout, just as it is for the competitors of Klout.  I would expect there to be at least two signficant standards over time.  After all, competition means comparison.  Comparison compels us to improve.  I can’t wait to watch this unfold.

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