Tag Archive - Social media

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…

Stay the Course

February 14, 2012 in Lessons from Oola with 0 Comments

Building a business takes time, and patience. And it simultaneously requires running 100 miles per hour (which is like 160 kph -eeek!).

Some days these things are at odds with each other in my world. I want to do something and immediately see results. Something like this chart reminds me that I’m doing something right. But then the next day comes and the spike was just a spike. Continue Reading…

Making a Facebook Landing page for the Non-Techie

February 8, 2012 in Digital, Lessons from Oola with 1 Comment

Having just laid out my objectives for the next few months, my first step was to tackle improving my Facebook landing page.

As a small business owner, we all know that Facebook is one of our most important channels to reach our customers, but even more importantly to engage with, listen to, and communicate with our customers. And when marketing dollars are tight, social channels (all of them, not just Facebook depending upon your audience) are a great opportunity.

Now I’m no expert on the intricacies of Facebook, you know the under the covers what it takes to actually deliver the vision of marketing teams or commercial people. I’ve supported lots and lots of testing and experiments in my days at Lonely Planet and even at Loopy Love in the early days of Facebook. Yet I always relied on my outstanding teams to actually implement the tactics we used.

Roll forward to now. I needed a very simple landing page to start me on my mission of building a following. I had a clear vision for what it would look like and how it would behave. I’ve just introduced promotional codes at check out and I want to offer a good deal to all my Facebook fans as thanks for their support. So where to start Continue Reading…

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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What Klout Should Do Next

June 14, 2011 in Digital with 0 Comments

This is the second in a three part series about Klout.  Read my assessment of Klout here.

In my last post, I complained about the manipulability of Klout as a result of its (denied) reliance on volume and frequency to drive the score.  As I continue to think more about Klout and their kin, I realised that there are some really exciting potential uses for businesses becoming the authority on influence.

Really knowing influencers and experts about certain topics is a critical skill of experienced marketers.  There’s a massive industry of sports and celebrity endorsements of all sorts of products that short cut to influence by use of popularity.  In parallel to the notion of 1:1 marketing, social media has allowed a new type of ‘celebrity’ influencer.  Individuals who are exceptionally knowledgeable in their niche are great influencers for the category.  If channels like Twitter enable them to reach a large enough audience, tools like Klout could enable marketers to short-cut the hunt for these key leaders to promote and endorse their products.

Klout is onto this and trying to incentivise usage of advertiser products in exchange for potential endorsement.  A Klout Influencer’s endorsement might reach a smaller audience than the A-list celebrity or athlete, but their audience is one with whom the endorser has built a relationship through discussion.  That relationship should raise the trust that such a recommendation will carry.  I experience this within my friend group who often ask which products we recommend for travelling with our kids.  Indeed we’ve road tested many!  Will an algorithm be able to get specific enough to find these true influencers or is it a popularity contest?

One of the existing problems that Klout has is discover-ability of key influencers.  Although +K will begin to allow direct endorsement of a person’s expertise and influence, only the very dedicated will have the patience to note the Twitter IDs of those who influence them and enter these one by one into a Klout search.  I’ve been happy to test +K with the handful of individuals Klout selects as my influencers or influencees.  I’m not so interested in searching for people whose IDs I don’t know.

What about an alternative business model for Klout where they allow access to their data for businesses large and small to hunt down their own key influencers and create offers and opportunities directly.  Most businesses, even small ones will pay for this, and it saves Klout having to manage the entire sales force and agency relationships with big brands.  Imagine the impact of a long tail of marketers.  The platform could be so much more powerful.

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