Facebook

Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Can’t friend requests be a little more sociable?

I currently have 105 pending friend requests on Facebook and a similar number awaiting action on LinkedIn. I’ve been trying to figure out what to do with these, since I have no idea who any of them are.

I’ve decided, reluctantly, to simply delete them all.

I’m happy to connect with people whose names I don’t instantly recognize as long as I know what the link is. Of course, I can follow the link to each individual’s profile and see if I can tease the connection out of the information they’ve offered. On Facebook, I can see the friends we have in common to see if I can figure out the connection from there.

But I don’t want to.

The folks with whom I have connected took one simple extra step that made the decision easy for me: They added a note telling me who they were and why they wanted to connect. “I was in your workshop in Chicago last week and wanted to connect,” is really all it takes.

But the default request to become friends on Facebook doesn’t cut it, nor does the default “I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn”—unless it’s accompanied by the connection you’re able to indicate (“Mary Smith has indicated you are a person they’ve done business with at Acme”).

So if you tried to friend me or connect on LinkedIn and never heard back, and you’re still interested in the connection, try again just a bit more socially. Thanks for understanding.

UPDATE: I’ve decided to contact each of the folks who’ve sent friend requests using the “Send a Message” feature. They’re all getting the same one, word-for-word, and I’m actually getting answers that are leading me to go ahead and connect with nearly all of them. Many have acknowledged that they should have included this information in the first place.

Monday, December 14, 2009

Fan pages for nonprofits and local institutions require care and feeding

I read Shannon Paul’s Open Letter to Companies on Facebook with considerable interest. Shannon’s right. Becoming a fan of Domino’s Pizza or Hilton Hotels doesn’t necessarily mean I want a relationship with the organization. The occasional coupon or contest notice is fine; flooding my news feed with company announcements and news releases is not.

But I don’t feel that way for every organization. Big consumer companies are one thing. Local institutions and nonprofits are another.

Take hospitals, for example. (I’ve been doing a lot of work with hospitals lately.) I’m not likely to become a fan of a hospital’s page unless I live in the community the hospital serves. In that case, I do want to be updated. In fact, getting tied into what’s going on at the hospital is the most likely reason somebody might become a fan of a hospital Facebook page.

The same is probably true of nonprofits, like (for example) the American Cancer Society. While you might become a fan of McDonald’s because you like the Quarter Pounder and don’t mind being public about it, you became a fan of the ACS because someone you cared about survived or died of cancer and you want to be part of the effort to do something about it. In that case, information is precious and fans probably want the ACS to keep them updated on its activities. Even member associations like IABC would attract members as fans because they’d want to stay current with the association and be able to interact with leaders and peers.

The easiest way to characterize the difference between a fan of a consumer business and one of a local institution or a nonprofit is by their degree of desired engagement.

The problem is that most local institutions—I’m singling out hospitals here for special attention—and nonprofits don’t do a very good job with their pages. They certainly don’t put as much care and feeding into those pages as their commercial counterparts do.

For people who want a relationship with their local hospital or the nonprofit supporting a cause near and dear to their hearts, becoming a fan of a Facebook page is motivated by the expectation that the organization will use the page as a vehicle for keeping its fans up to date. Many hospitals, for example, host educational events for the community, but few hospitals take advantage of the “events” tab on fan pages to list those activities. If they did, their fans would be notified of the events in their feeds.

Even the “info” tab is woefully underused, with many institutions dropping just an address, phone number and URL onto the page.

I’m bemused when people tell me they created a Facebook page for their institution but few people have become fans, since I know I’ll find an anemic page that hasn’t been updated in months and that contains woefully little information the community could use.

If you’re thinking of creating a page, it’s important to understand the commitment you’re making to its care and feeding. One great resource is “About Face,” a free white paper on Facebook pages from the folks at The Advance Guard. In general, follow these basic tips:

• Populate the Info tab with all the information your fans may want to know about your organization.
• Take advantage of the Events feature to let your constituents know what’s going on with your institution.
• Monitor what people are posting to the wall and respond wherever it’s appropriate. Let people know you’re listening and care about what they’re saying.
• Photos and videos are terrific ways to connect with people, particularly if you’re introducing them to real people they might encounter in their interactions with your organization.

If you work for a hospital, a local institution or a nonprofit, what have you found attracts fans to your Facebook page? If you’re a fan of an organization like this, what kind of content are you looking for?

Monday, October 26, 2009

Recruiters shouldn’t care about that Facebook picture of your beer pong game in college

It’s becoming a litany.

In a meeting or during a presentation, somebody—usually an HR rep or recruiter—will tell me how many candidates she has rejected based on something she saw on the candidate’s Facebook or MySpace profile. In every case, it has been something along the lines of a photo taken during a party at college. My response: “If your employer knew what you did during college, would you have been hired?”

College is for two things: Getting an education and being stupid. The only difference between college when I went and college today is that there was no Facebook, or anything remotely like it, during my days at university.

Today, we’re living through one of the most remarkable transitions in history. We’re moving from an era during which people were secretive and kept things close to the vest to an era where everyone is networked and everyone shares everything. And those who grew up in the soon-to-be bygone era are making hiring decisions about people who grew up in the era that is hurtling toward us like an out-of-control freight train.

It has become conventional wisdom for people of my generation to wag their fingers at millenials, warning them of the dangers that await if they’re too open with their extracurricular activities. Even Dan Tapscott, whose “Grown Up Digital” does an admirable job of explaining the Net Generation, insists that the one thing they don’t get is that sharing outrageous behavior today will come back to bite them in the ass a few years down the road when they’re trying to get hired.

That’s true today, with people who kept their late-night fraternity-house drinking binges on the QT. It won’t be so long, though, before the hiring managers have shared just as much of their social lives online as the recruits they’re looking to hire. The fact that people got drunk and engagred in questionable behavior in school just won’t matter.

Consequently, that Animal House behavior really shouldn’t matter to hiring managers today. Like I say, the hiring manager probably engaged in some pretty stupid behavior of his own when he was in college, too. The fact that he did shots off a co-ed’s belly when he was 19 didn’t make him a bad hire when he was 23.

Back in 1987, Judge Douglas Ginsburg didn’t make it onto the U.S. Supreme Court because he’d smoked a little pot when he was in college. Today, denying a job to anybody who ever tried marijuana in college carves a huge slice out of the pool of prospective candidates. A prospect’s social behavior in college is simply not a predictor of their value as an employee.

Recruiters and HR people can even eek out a competitive edge by overlooking a four-year-old picture on a Facebook page and focusing on their qualifications today. After all, that’s what today’s candidates will be doing in five years when they’re the ones making the hiring decisions.

Friday, October 09, 2009

The irony of investing in social marketing while blocking your own employees

Cross-posted from Stop Blocking.

Social media as a marketing mechanism is clearly hot. I can’t scan my feeds without finding yet another report of yet another study detailing companies’ increased commitment to and investment in social media. Here are just a few:

• eMarketer reports on an The Aberdeen Group study that found 63% of companies planned to increase their social media marketing budgets in 2009. Twenty-one percent were set to boost their budgets by more than 25%. And worldwide social media advertising was expected to grow 17.3% this year to $2.35 billion.
• A study from the Association of National Advertisers revealed that 66% of marketers have used social media in some capacity this year, with Facebook being tapped by 74% of them, YouTube by 65%, and Twitter by 63%.
• Twitter is the social media channel of choice among Fortune 100 companies, according to a Burson-Marsteller study, which found 54% of these organizations active on Twitter, compared with 32% using blogs and 29% with active Facebook fan pages.
• There is a correlation between financial performance and engagement in social media among the world’s top brands, according to a study conducted by Altimeter Group and WetPaint. Simply stated, socially engaged companies are more financially successful.
• And most recently, a study from SNCR, Deloitte, and Beeline Labs released just the other day reports that 94% of respondents said that they plan to maintain or increase investment in their online communities. The investment pays off, they said, in word of mouth, customer loyalty, brand awareness, idea generation, and improved quality of customer support.

The fact that businesses are seeing tangible benefits from social media explains why investment continues to rise among most companies, even when budget belts are being tightened. Driving these results is the competitive advantage that comes from real people connecting with each another in spaces where they share mutual interests. Companies are smart enough to know that (according to research) customers want the companies with which they do business should be present in these spaces.

So it is all the more confounding that these very same companies won’t let their own employees engage on these sites.

As reported here and elsewhere, a survey of CIOs found that 54% of companies block all employees from visiting any social sites. It’s deliciously ironic that 54% is exactly the same percentage of Fortune 100 companies that are active on Twitter.

If companies block their employees from engaging, who do they think their fan pages and Twitter accounts are attracting? Think about it. If every company prohibited employees from visiting Facebook, then the only time anybody could visit the company Facebook fan page would be when they’re not at work. Given the hours most companies require of their employees, that’s not a heck of a lot of time to interact with customers.

What’s more, if the fan pages of those 54% of companies are being viewed by employees from the 46% of companies that still allow some kind of access, none of the companies’ employees are able to interact with those visitors. They can’t. They’ve been blocked.

American Airlines announced just the other day that it’s launching BlackAtlas.com, a travel-focused social network for African Americans. According to one report, “The site will feature discussion boards and blogs on which users can share pictures, video and travel stories and tips, along with rating and recommending businesses and travel destinations.”

I don’t know whether American Airlines allows its own employees to visit social sites, but with more than half of companies in the blocking camp, odds are American’s own black employees will be barred from a site where they could interact with BlackAtlas.com members and personify the airline’s culture.

Gartner, in fact, projects that 60% of the Fortune 1000 will host online communities by 2010 so they can gain information from their customer base “which can be used for short-and long-term customer relationships,” according to Garner researcher Adam Sarner.

Employees at more than half of them, though, are not allowed.

Organizations need to think more like Dell, which realized its roadblock to Facebook made no sense when it launched a green initiative on the social networking site so employees could engage and participate.

The presumption of most companies blocking access is that employees are being unproductive, wasting time. In fact, the lines have blurred so much that even an employee spending a few minutes online to take a break from work could wind up having an interaction that benefits the company.

How have your non-work social interactions wound up serving your organization?

Friday, August 07, 2009

More meaningless data on social media and employee productivity

A Nucleus Research study mangles numbers to prove that Facebook causes productivity losses while another shows employers are buying this nonsense.

Links:

• Nucleus Reserach study: Productivity and Security Red Flags with Facebook Use at Work
• Only One in Three Companies Address Social Media Concerns

And, lest we forget…

• University of Melbourne research proves workers are more productive when allowed to use Internet for leisure

Thursday, February 26, 2009

Can an ad succeed even if it doesn’t generate sales?

Twitter’s 140-character limit makes it hard to have a thoughtful discussion. Brevity is great, but not for everything.

I was having one of these discussions with Rob Frankel—@brandingexpert—about whether Burger King got any value out of its “Whopper Sacrifice” campaign. This wasn’t a disagreement, just an interesting conversation. Conducting the exchange over Twitter lacked something, though. Hence, this post.

The conversation-starter was Dave Fleet‘s live tweet from something called FacebookCamp, held February 24 in Toronto. Dave reported on a speaker who asserted that pushing the campaign’s message through mainstream media was more effective than tapping into social media, despite the campaign’s focus on a social network. It was the originality of the concept that captured mainstream media’s attention and produced the coverage that made it common knowledge.

Early in the discussion, Rob noted that the campaign may have gotten widespread coverage, but its notoriety never translated into dollars.

I’m not surprised. Although the campaign apparently led some 23,000 people to dump 10 Facebook friends (which, in case you missed it, would earn you a free Whoper), that’s hardly a significant uptake for a national campaign. And while you have to wonder who devalues friendship to the point that they’d dismiss 10 friends for a cheeseburger or if those 23,000 had enough friends-who-really-weren’t-friends that they could easily spare them, that’s beside the point. The point, as Rob notes, is that the campaign didn’t generate sales, which is the goal of advertising (unlike the goal of public relations, which is to build and maintain relationships). I also recall hearing somebody on one podcast or another argue that the idea couldn’t be duplicated; if enough companies adopted a similar approach, you’d eventually end up with no Facebook friends at all.

But I thought the campaign might still have produced some value for Burger King if it helped maintain BK’s reputation as the edgy burger franchise. Before it abruptly changed the tone of its advertising, BK was stuck in the same rut as all the other fast-food chains: competing with McDonald’s image as a wholesome, family-and-community-oriented, all-American icon.

Tired of the rut and with a new CMO in place, BK decided to shake things up and concede the motherhood-and-apple-pie ground to McDonald’s. Instead, they embarked on a series of irreverent campaigns, from TV episodes with the King to the Web-based Subservient Chicken. The chicken went viral and attracted millions of visits, but I’m not sure that was ever directly linked to sales of burgers and fries.

My question is, does it have to be? Rob thinks so:

But here’s what I’m wondering: Has BK has been increasing market share gradually over the life of the campaign? Rather than impact sales directly with each ad, each web page, each campaign, has Burger King been gradually attracting customers at a slow and steady clip?

If so, then you can make the argument that the advertising direction as a whole is paying off. The immediate results of each little piece don’t matter; the sum of all the pieces is what counts.

Well, yeah, sounds good. Based on some quick online research, in October 2008, Burger King was was ranked second to McDonald’s with 15% of the market and growth on the books. But nine years ago, BK was reeling from a loss of market share…from 20.2% in 1998 to 18.8% in 2000.

The fact that Burger King’s market share is nearly 4% worst today than in 2000, it would be easy to conclude that the company’s irreverent advertising and marketing efforts haven’t paid off. There’s no evidence to suggest that other factors aren’t at play, from greater competition from more quarters to the quality and originality of the menu to the impact of staying open late. In fact, I couldn’t prove that the King, the chicken, and the rest of the bizarre BK cast haven’t kept the chain’s market share from diving even deeper.

These were the thoughts I was trying to convey in 140 characters. I just couldn’t do it. And I’m left wondering how much companies values the long-term affinity for a brand that attributable to advertising and marketing efforts even if the individual pieces don’t produce immediate sales.

Thoughts?

Wednesday, December 03, 2008

Why MotrinMoms matters

Since the whirlwind of activity that resulted in McNeil Laboratories pulling a Motrin ad campaign and issuing an apology, a chorus of naysaying has emerged that downplays the significance of the events. Some of these opinions make good points while others are just downright silly. Ultimately, though, what occurred between the brand and the mommy bloggers who launched the offensive against it is significant.

The arguments against it fall into four camps:

The mommy bloggers who were offended were dopes who are unable to laugh at themselves.

It doesn’t matter if you don’t get why some people were offended. Other people probably don’t understand why you’re offended by some things that offend you. If you’re not able to put yourselves in somebody else’s shoes and perceive the world through their eyes, you need to find a job doing something other than marketing or PR.

One of the fundamental skills of anybody working in communications is “boundary spanning.” At least, that’s what the PR academics call it. The following is from “Excellence in Public Relations and Communication Management.”

The dominant coalition needs information to help make decisions. That information frequently is provided by boundary spanners, individuals within the organization who frequently interact with the organization’s environment and who gather, select, and relay information from the environment to decision makers in the dominant coalition. Communication managers and public relations practitioners are among an organization’s designated boundary spanners.

Boundary spanning, which organizations need, is kinda the opposite of dismissing a population in your environment because you think they’re stupid.

Nobody got offended until one person Twittered her objection to the ad. Everybody else just piled on. Without the original tweet to kick things off, the ad would have gone unnoticed.

So what? That’s how these things work. It’s how they’ve since long before Twitter, the Web, even email. We’re social creatures (which does, after all, help explain the rise of social media) and we like to express our opinions to others. An ad is never viewed in a vacuum by everybody who sees it; we’re always biased when a friend says, “Have you seen that offensive TV commercial?” When I had a few drinks with him earlier this year, advertising exec John January told me there’s always been a feedback loop in advertising: People who don’t like your ad will let you know, and always have, even when it meant sending a letter.

For all the uproar, McNeil’s bottom line won’t suffer.

True, but that’s because McNeil responded. It would be different if the company had dismissed the objections and continued to offer the video or, worse, followed it up with another one that struck the same nerve. Eventually, a lot of people would have found it a simple matter to express their dissatisfaction by switching to Advil.

Mommy bloggers aren’t representative of Motrin’s consumer target.

I’m not sure this is true to begin with—I haven’t seen any studies that compares the values of mommy bloggers to mothers in general—but even assuming it is true, mommy bloggers do wield a certain amount of influence over those who read their content. And if reaching out to influencers is a good idea, it must also mean that pissing them off is a bad idea.

But putting these arguments aside, and recognizing that the whole case study will probably end up nothng more than a footnote in the history of business engagement in the online world, there are still valuable lessons to take away from the MotrinMoms experience:

1. A lot of people outside the U.S. had never heard of Motrin before this dust-up. Now they know it as the brand that insulted mothers. Even brands never get a second chance to make a first impression.
2. Among the top 10 Google results for “Motrin” are a blog post about MotrinMoms and one of the parody commercials uploaded to YouTube. The record of this story will live on for decades, discoverable by anybody searching the brand name.
3. Over 1,300 people have joined Facebook group titled, “Babywearing isn’t painful. Boycott Motrin for saying it is.” One comment posted to the wall: “Joining this group was the easiest part of my day. Not only do I believe in (and practice) babywearing, but Motrin does not do an effective job of pain relief for me (AKA I have been “boycotting” it for years).” That’s more bad word of mouth the company could have avoided.

McNeil does seem to be serious about learning from the experience. The original apology posted to the website was a graphic. I read a few criticisms of that approach, and now the follow-up to the original message is text that can be copied and pasted. The mere fact that there is a follow-up post suggests that McNeil (or at least Marketing VP Kathy Widmer) is moving up the learning curve pretty fast:

We are listening to you, and we know that’s the best place to start as we move ahead. More to come on that.

In the end, we have been reminded of age-old lessons that are tried and true:

When you make a mistake - own up to it, and say you’re sorry.
Learn from that mistake.

Ultimately, the reason Motrin sales won’t suffer is that the MotrinMoms episode was pivotal for McNeil. I wouldn’t be surprised to see them hosting a group of mommy bloggers for a summit, as GM and other companies have done. It wouldn’t be the first company to build a reputation for its commitment to real conversation with audiences from the ashes of an earlier reputation for lousy communication; think Dell and Sun.

So I’m not so quick to shrug off the incident. There are useful lessons to be drawn from it.