Customizing Facebook pages, hybrid theory, and being positive but not annoying
July is a time for skeleton crews, as vacations take over the calendar. With Steve in California, Jeff off in a tent somewhere, and Jonathan working on-site with a client, it was down to Astrid, Mike, and me. We still had fun learning and sharing. Here’s what we deemed important to teach this week.
Social Networking Behavior and Search Engine Innovations
Mike Newswanger, Lead Programmer
Social Networking
This week I shared some recent articles with the team that serve as good reminders about the fundamentals of social media. With increasing popularity in social networking, questions about what is appropriate and what is not are coming up more often than ever before. Bragging about yourself, your company, or your friends and family is very common on social platforms, but when does it get to be too much?
Advertising through social media can be an effective way to reach people. It gives a personal touch to your product or service, and it builds rapport, but if you only praise yourself and your company, many will become disinterested and ignore or “unfollow” you.
The articles’ authors suggested this approach: Ask yourself, what am I (or what is my company) contributing to this network through my posts? If the answer is nothing, then you have no value for potential clients to link up with you in this avenue. A great way to achieve value in your posts is to aim for a 1:1 ratio of praise about your company and achievements to praise and relationship-building comments regarding others.
Part 2: Search Engines
A Google employee recently revealed to the public where he believes search engines are headed. While some of his suggestions would make search engines more invasive in our lives, there were other areas that would benefit the population. The two biggest areas of needed improvement:
- Rather than just searching text, search engines are currently making their way toward being able to search other media types, including images and video. This allows a more complete result set through a search, which can provide excellent information; after all, a picture is worth a thousand words.
- Search engines should provide a more semantic interface (i.e. provide meaning to the search query). When trying to track down side-skirts for my car, the “smart” advertisements continuously provided clothing banner ads. Side-skirts are not skirts, but the search engines of today are not intelligent enough to point this out.
Google has also recently filed a patent for pointer tracking, which will determine where on the screen a mouse pointer is located, and for how long it has been there. It’s anyone’s guess if and how this will be implemented in the future, but this could lead to some interesting changes to how the search engine behaves. There are a few big drawbacks with this For one, with touchscreens becoming more popular, pointer movements are not as common as with a mouse. Many people will follow along with a mouse while they are reading, but with a touch-screen based computer, this may not occur. One thing is for sure, search engines never stay the same.
Facebook Pages: Interaction Leading to Sales
Astrid Salim, Creative Director
Today, I continued the topic I had last week. Again, we looked at the Facebook pages from some well-known brands.
First, we looked at the Mark Meyer Photography page. I like how they integrate a slideshow of the photos into the page. I also like the Bodum USA page because viewers can browse, buy and pay for the products they want without leaving Facebook. However, I’m not a big fan of clicking on the logo in a “click to enter” fashion. The team thought it was probably this “entering” that allows them to include a “like” button and count on the next page. Eco-Artware.com also makes their page look like an online store catalog. Unlike Bodum, however, you need to go to their website to buy and pay. This is unfortunate since I really like the idea of doing everything (browse and buy) in one Facebook page.
As I stated last week, I like Facebook pages that make the users interact with them. Living Proof page guides their Facebook users to find a perfect product for them by making them do some kind of quiz. The users have to answer 4 questions regarding their hair, and at the end, Living Proof finds the best-matched product based on the answers. This is very clever since they make the users interact with the product. It also directs the potential customers to easily buy the recommended product, even though the customers’ initial thought is just to browse.
A Marketing Manifesto from Brian Solis
Daniel Klotz, Social Media Strategist
Brian Solis, author of Engage, is one of the bloggers I look to as a thought leader in my field. He spent this week laying out a manifesto about the future of marketing, advertising, and communications in a three-part document he calls The Hybrid Theory Manifesto.
The manifesto, to me, is an articulation of ideas I already embrace and act upon. At the same time, when I read Brian’s words, it strikes me how radical they are in the history of mass communication and marketing. Things are changing, Solis says, and the rise of social media, or the “living web,” is mostly to blame. Because companies and constituents co-create content and ideas, they therefore co-own and co-controls that content and those ideas. That’s new, and it means we can no longer think of the traditional marketing mix (product, price, place, promotion) without also thinking of a fifth element of the mix, people. Creating a product, pricing it, positioning it, and promoting has always involved people. But today, the people who used to be faceless middlemen or voiceless consumers now are sometimes very influential.
Some have looked at this state of affairs and concluded that paid media (advertising) is dying. Not the case, says Solis. Advertising is still relevant, it just needs to be rejoined with the rest of marketing (PR particularly) and address the new marketing mix element, people. Advertising that is more personal, immersive, and empowering can be placed in contexts where it resonates with many people who see it. It’s not just enough to count eyeballs or clicks today; what’s important is to measure the ratio of people who see the advertisement to the number of them who find the advertisement resonates with their interests, needs, and values.
Advertising that moves in this direction will go from being part of a series of ad campaigns to an advertising continuum, as Solis calls it. With an ad campaign ten years ago, doubling your media buy would result in double the results. If you suddenly stopped advertising, you would suddenly lose all that business. That’s a series of ad campaigns. An advertising continuum resonates with people and then empowers them to engage as a co-creator and co-owner of the brand’s meaning. That means that advertisements bring people into the fold, and then active communication keeps them there and engaged. An ad campaign sustains a customer base; an ad continuum grows a customer base. At the end of the day, you lose all the people you haven’t engaged. Traditional advertising doesn’t engage. It only targets.
What Solis calls for then is a “hybrid theory” of marketing, advertising, and communications. Rather than thinking of PR, advertising, product development, social networking, and so on as “separate but equal,” we must think of them as one, as a hybrid. Doing so takes skilled professionals who can connect all those pieces in a comprehensive way. As such, I find the manifesto encouraging: It’s what we as a team do at YDOP.