Facebook for Business

Using Facebook as a business can be an interesting exercise in anger management. Facebook is a powerful tool, especially for individuals, but it can drive an intern batty as she tries to set up new pages or migrate Groups to Pages. (Yes, Crissy, the Boxcar Marketing intern, has spent a lot of time with our friend Facebook.) Let me share our experience.

Earlier this year Facebook changed the way that businesses can network in this social space. They upgraded the Pages functionality to better house business profiles. Pages are not identical to Personal Profiles, but they do give a business more leverage than a Group.

With a Page, people interested in following your organization can become fans of your Page. On your Page, you can host photos, videos, RSS feeds, and custom applications.

Creating a Page
A Page needs to be administered by a person so start by creating a Personal Profile (for a real person because fake accounts are removed by Facebook). The Personal Profile should be of someone in your company who is going to stick around for awhile. Then follow the links to create a Page. You can change and add administrators to your Page after it is set up.

You will be asked to select what type of Page. Choose wisely because you can not change it afterward. By choosing the type of Page, you are choosing a default set of fields to complete. For example, choosing Band gives you opportunities to bring in a playlist. Choosing Public Figure - Government Official asks for your date in office.

Adding Stuff to Your Page
A Page can have all sorts of tabs, including Wall, Info, Photos, Discussions, Events, YouTube, Notes, Boxes.

Wall is where your status feed aggregates. Info is what you want to tell the world about your organization. Photos are, well, photos. Discussions are discussion forums where you can start a topic and have fans discuss it. Events is an aggregated listing of events you are hosting. YouTube is your YouTube channel. You enter your YouTube details and your videos are automatically pulled into Facebook, which is nice because it eliminates the redundancies of uploading videos to two places. Notes is for mini-blog posts or links to things you like. And Boxes is a crazy place where all sorts of things can be pulled into one spot, like videos, RSS feeds, photos, etc.

Editing Stuff on Your Page
Here is another opportunity to lose your mind. To edit most applications (Discussions, YouTube, Notes), you go to the Wall of your Personal Profile and click the “Edit Page” link on the top left. From here, click on the pencil icon in the top right corner of the application box to edit and change its settings.

You can move application boxes to your Wall or to your Boxes tab by clicking on the pencil icon next to the Application name. Applications can be either on your Wall or in your Boxes tab, but cannot be in both places at once.

To move applications around in the Boxes tab, just drag them. That is the easiest part of this whole admin experience.

Claim Your Facebook Username
Visit http://www.facebook.com/username to claim a shortcut name to your Page. Your Facebook Page must meet two requirements: it must have been live on Facebook prior to the May 31, 2009 cut-off date and have had a minimum 1,000 fans at that time.

This limitation was temporary. All Pages created after May 31, 2009 that have more than 100 fans can now claim a username.
http://www.facebook.com/help.php?page=900

Help Us Get 100 Fans so we can learn how to do more things on Facebook.
Please Become a Fan of Boxcar Marketing.

How to Use Online Video for Inbound Marketing

HubSpot recently held a webinar on how to use video for your online marketing campaigns. Here are some of their tips.

Content

There’s a content tradeoff. You can either make an informative video with lots of information for the viewer or an entertaining video that catches viewers’ attention and has the potential to go viral.

Short is sweet. Focus on the first ten seconds of your video and try to do something shocking or entertaining to rope people in.

Use an outline, not a full script. You’ll be much more engaging.

Test your video on friends and coworkers and edit it according to their responses. If they don’t find your joke funny, chances are your online audience won’t either.

Optimization

Publish and promote everywhere. You want your video found!

If you upload your video to either Visible Measures or Tubemogul , they’ll upload it to all of the different video sharing sites for you and provide you with analytics, too.

You need to decide if are you going to optimize your video for SEO (by using straight-forward keywords) or for viral (by using enticing keywords). Tip: start with a viral title to make the video popular and then change it to a more keyword-rich title to make use of its long tail potential.

Post your video on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, and your blog. Encourage co-workers and friends to post it on their blogs too.

SEO

YouTube

* Use keywords in your title and description. Include a link to your website in the first couple of lines of the description so that viewers see it when the description is collapsed.

* Tags are important. Although they’re not visible on the public video page, they govern what videos your video shows up.

* Encourage people to rate and comment on your video. Controversial content is one way to spark discussion.

iTunes

* Make sure that the title, artist and description are keyword-rich.

* Use an appealing image to stand out on the search page.

* Ask viewers to review your video to increase its popularity.

Analyze

Analytics are crucial! Why make a video if you don’t measure and track its success?

Use YouTube Insights or Blip.tv Stats to see who’s watching your video and what they’re finding engaging about it. You can also use Visible Measures or Tubemogul, to see your analytics across multiple video sites.

For more information watch the full webinar and download the slides.

Looking for related information? Check out Steven Witten’s article Six Degrees of YouTube, a case study of online competitive video dynamics, which looks at how YouTube’s ‘related videos’ list gets built and the effect this list has on a video’s popularity.

5 Myths About Social Media

Boxcar Marketing has been out and about on the speaking circuit lately and the following myths keep presenting themselves. Let’s dispel them, shall we?

Myth #1: Social media is a marketing strategy.

Social media is not a marketing function; it’s an overall high-level business strategy that supports your organization’s goals.

Myth #2: It’s all about the online tools.

Social media is not about sending out electronic press releases or setting up a Facebook page. It’s about how we can use the tools to engage with our community. For example, how can we use electronic press releases to capture the attention of a new audience or how we can use Facebook to encourage social interactions that build loyalty and connections to the company and between community members.

Myth #3: Building online communities requires tight control and management.

Nope. You always have people out there talking about you; it’s called word of mouth. In traditional approaches, we make sure that people have a positive experience with us at all levels, from the person who answers the phone to the customer service to the follow-up afterwards.

The same is true with social media strategies. Relinquishing control does not mean abdicating responsibility; it means that you control the things within your control. You set the stage and the conditions that allow for your organization and community members to thrive. That way, people have good things
to say.

Myth #4: Social media is time consuming.

The key here is practice. The first time you do something it takes time. The first press release you ever wrote, the first job description for a new hire, the first report, whatever it was, you were doing something new and you needed to be slow and methodical in your approach. But as you gained experience, things got faster and easier. The same is true with the web. It’s just practice.

Myth #5: Your audience isn’t online.

The average Canadian spends close to 43 hours per month online. And it isn’t just young people who are spending time online. The latest Interactive Advertising Bureau of Canada report (PDF) showed that in May 2007: 29% of age 50+ web users visited a social media site in the last month versus just 8% in September 2006; 72% of 20-29 year olds had visited a social networking website, up from 44% in September 2006.

For more information

Read the Harvard Business Review article Getting Brand Communities Right by Susan Fournier and Lara Lee. The site also includes a great quiz to help you determine if your business is social media ready.

How to Get Marketing Budget from Your Boss

In tough times, it is even tougher to secure your marketing budget because most companies see marketing as an expense rather than an investment.

It is easy for managers to slash marketing budgets when they do not understand how marketing affects the health of their organizations. Your job is to build an understanding of what value marketing brings to the organization and how marketing affects the health of the organization.

How do you do this? You need to understand what type of manager you have.

Types of Managers

1. The German Shepherd.
Intent on business, these managers are direct. They defend their territory and state opinion as fact. They are responsible for the pack but can be impatient, demanding and blunt.
Approach: Be brief, be brilliant, be gone. This type of manager likes to win. You have to present alternatives so that he or she can make the choice. That said, you can guide them by presenting the alternatives clearly and the potential value or gain for each. Visuals and graphs work well for presenting the numbers. Show vs. tell, then get out of the way.

2. The Jack Russell Terrier.
Ready for adventure, these managers are friendly, excitable and animated. Entertainment is the key. They do not focus on details. They are more interested in the friendly chatter than getting down to business.
Approach: Schedule time for chatting and let this manager speak. High energy and being upbeat, even when presenting challenges, is key. This type of manager also likes to be the center of attention so show how your marketing ideas will help achieve popularity and recognition.

3. The Basset Hound.
Mild mannered, these managers like safety and status quo. They appear calm and do not get easily excited. New ideas make these managers uncomfortable. They like to blend into the group rather than stand out.
Approach: Ask specific questions to establish this manager’s true needs, then provide support. For those who prefer to endure, stubbornly sticking to the path of least resistance is the natural choice. You must figure out how to change the path and gently coax along other followers. Make sure you listen carefully and ask specific questions.

4. Border Collie.
Sharp as tacks, these managers focus on the details. They ask questions, study the implications and analyze information to the point of perfection. They can be standoffish.
Approach: Provide the facts and plenty of background detail. Avoid personal issues and feeling intimidated. Be calm and measured in your response to questions. These types of managers need all the information before being able to make a decision.

CBC: Marketing During a Recession, The Upside of the Downsize

Monique Trottier and Jeremy Lim were guest for On the Coast yesterday with host Stephen Quinn.

Listen to Monique on CBC (MP3).

On the Coast was covering aspects of the recession this week and Jeremy and I were asked to speak about marketing practices during the recession. The introduction to the session mentioned that FedEx is offering free resume printing and Hyundai is willing to buy back cars that were purchase before a layoff, and a fellow in North Vancouver has opened up his aikido classes to the unemployed, who can attend for free.

A couple of examples I didn’t get to mention are below:

Kodak: Web and tv ads for their All in One Printer position this product as one that uses “fairly priced ink”. One of the tv taglines is “if you don’t have ink, you don’t really have a printer.“

Coca-Cola: Offering a 16 oz coke for 99 cents in the US. The food industry is using smaller packaging, volume and weight in order to drop prices but still make margin.

WebEx (online conference calling): Ran tv ads in the US with messaging on “spend less time travelling.“ The ads were clearly aimed at cost cuts to travel budgets but the messaging focused on the positive, which is business travel can be a pain, it takes you away from your family, it can set you back in terms of the amount of work so why not relax, stay in the office and still get the face-to-face time.
Need tips for weathering the economic crisis? Check out the February Underwire newsletter.

And if you’re interested in further articles, here are a couple that the CBC producer Michelle Eliot and I were talking about in advance of the interview:

Forbes on the unemployed and marketing opportunities.
BrandWeek on marketing to the unemployed.
Web-Strategist on social media marketing being up during a recession.

Listen to Monique on CBC.

SXSW: Change Your World in 50 Minutes: Making Breakthroughs Happen

Change Your World in 50 Minutes: Making Breakthroughs Happen
Monday, March 16th at 03:30 PM

PRESENTERS
* Kathy Sierra - CreatingPassionateUsers

DESCRIPTION
Gain real-world ideas for markedly improved productivity from an industry expert and passionate speaker who always inspires SXSW audiences.

MONIQUE’S NOTES

There’s you. There’s your goal.
Between in the brick wall.

Incremental vs. Breakthrough
Today is about when incremental stuff doesn’t work. You need to do something drastic.

Incremental = Arms Race

Sometimes you’re in a quality arms race, or a features arms race.

Google pages are an example of the marketing, whuffie, etc. race.

So how do you get past that wall?

Breakthroughs:
ideas
performance

Your users need breakthroughs. In order for you to breakthrough, you might have to find ways to let your users make breakthroughs.

[how to be an expert graph]

WOM vs. WOO
Word of Mouth vs. Word of Obvious

You could sit at home, quietly kicking ass. But someone kicking ass is better than someone who says they are.

Are your users tuck in “P” mode? i.e., how many people have SLRs, and how many people are stuck in program mode, they don’t know how to do it.

Sometimes you’re stuck in program mode not because you don’t know how to get out of that mode but because they don’t know why they want to.

Sometimes you’re stuck in program mode because you don’t want to upgrade. You don’t want to suck again.

Anyone can compete
Sometimes you don’t have to change the product, you have to help people kick ass better than your competitors.

But we have to get to know each other first.

1) iPod Playlist and ... [your real playlist!]

2) Pick one of these Flight vs. Invisibility

If the person next to you also has this superpower, you need to find someone with the other. Sell them on the superior superpower.

What superpower do we give our users?

What are we giving them as a superpower? What do you provide for them as a superpower? And how does this change what you do?

Picture it on the suit. What would you put there?
Pivot-table Man

Auto-correct Spelling Man: This is not a superpower.

Think about super-hero action figures. Would it work?
My First Scoble.

Twitter Man?
Doesn’t look like a superpower. But it is.

Motivating ... because it’s good for you ... Productivity Man? Lamest thing to say.

VCs say “what problem do you solve” and we think about increasing productivity. People want something better than that. Productivity is the broccoli.

What superpower do I give? What do I put on the suit?

2. Superset Game
If it’s you (little dot) vs. competitor (bigger dot), then think about the bigger thing that is inclusive of both. Taking on the bigger thing is more motivating. What cooler thing is my thing a part of?

i.e., I sell kitchen appliances. The cool thing is people are cooking, not this utensil is cool. If you blog about your company, that’s likely not the coolest thing you could be writing about. Users want to hear about cooking.

10,000 hours
Intimidating? It really takes 10,000 hours to be amazingly good. It takes years. That’s not acceptable if you’re in your 50s. LOL. How do you shrink that? How do you see the patterns and take short cuts?

1. Learn the patterns
2. Shorten the duration

Reduce to 1,000.

[Chess grandmaster can recall one graph vs. the other because one is from a real game. This is pattern knowledge. How can you capture it?]

4. Deliberate Practice

Kicking ass in

< 1,000 hours can happen if you do deliberate hours of practice.

After 1-2 years, experience is a poor predictor of performance/expertise. (10 years vs. 1 year repeated 10 times)

What do experts do?
Tiger Woods pop quiz: how much practice time on weaknesses vs. strengths?

He works on his strengths.

Help your users deliberately practice. Offer exercises, games, contests, tutorials that support deliberate practice of the Right Things.

How do you construct this? Where there's an education field, you can find the answer.

Where is the sell-by-date of "solutions"? The first pages that come up can be soooo last month. These things might not work anymore. When you organize bits of knowledge, guess at the sell-by-date. Or at least make someone be responsible for smelling the milk.

5. Make the right things easy and the wrong things hard
Think about this.

Make it easier for users to have a breakthrough than to stay where they are.

Treadmill gathering cobwebs? It’s not in the corner because you don’t use it, you don’t use it because it’s in the corner.

If the exercise bike is in the corner, you don’t use it because it’s in the corner. Put it in the middle of the room. Remove the comfy seats and leave the bike.

6. Get better gear (and offer it)
Sometimes spending the extra money is required to make it good. It works better in a profound way. WOO.

“The tablet changes lives.“ Drawing with a mouse is like drawing with a bar of soap.

Find, make, offer higher-end gear that bumps them to a new level.

7. Ignore standard limitations
The Cluetrain Manifesto and the Clueless Manifesto.

Don’t be limited by limitations. Learn. What would it be like if I didn’t know what it’s supposed to be?

8. Total Immersion Jams
16 hours over 2 days vs. 16 hours over 2 months

Concentration, processing, down time. Ad Lib Game Development Society is a group of people (game developers) who program games over a weekend.

Always
Be
Closing

You had to come out with 3 songs. The goal is not to be good. The goal is to get something done. You have to ship.

The Shoot Out: 24 Hours Film Making Festival
Right before the shoot, you have to pick 5 things from a list and 1 thing has to be within the first 30 seconds.

“The surest way to guarantee nothing interesting happens is to assume you know exactly how to do it.“

Less *Camp, More *Jam

Sometimes if we want a breakthrough, we have to go do stuff. Look at the Jam model and it’s development. Get people together to build something.

Change Your Perspective
Don’t make a better [x], make a better [user of x]

What will make them better? What changes affect that ecosystem positively?

Really think about whatever your product or service is.

What movie are your users in?
The user’s journey: call to action, refusal, enter special world, allies and mentors, enemies and bad things, more bad things, the hero’s reward.

Who are the mentors?
Is tech support Yoda or

Your company is to your user as ___ is to Frodo.

Think about what movie are your users in?
What movie do they want to be in?

(and don’t forget the soundtrack)

If you can figure out what the movie is, then you have the narrative of your journey.

Indiana Jones model?

ThemeSong AIR App. Every time you walk into a room, it plays your theme song.

Want incremental improvements? Ask your users.

If you want to make breakthroughs? Ignore everybody.

Hugh MacLeod’s next book “Ignore Everybody.“

Listening to users: what they say vs. what they REALLY want

Individuals vs. consensus

The Featuritis Curve: You can pass over the peak without noticing in an attempt to satisfy everyone.

You can ask other people’s users. At some meta level, this thing looks like that thing.

12. Be Brave

Concept car. Actual model. What happened to the fantastic idea? Fear takes us to the actual. Someone’s risk aversion is what leads to the actual model.

Another way we screw up is that we are too afraid. The ease-of-use police step in and give us easy to use, i.e., squeaky toys instead of the German Shepard. Hey, sometimes things are hard to use.

Ford: if I asked my users, they would have wanted faster horses vs. cars.

The assumption of that is it’s lame to have faster horses. But hey, look at the dead pool. The recreation horse industry in the US is worth $40 Billion annually.

Etsy.com the theory here is that these crafts are obsolete. Make magazine becomes one of the best things O’Reilly is publishing.

Can obsolete be refashioned in a new way?

14. Change the EQ

Price, Number of Features, Quality, Service, Performance.
See each as a slider. Here’s how products compete. This is the incremental competitor game.

Don’t just do the mixer. Add new sliders that normally aren’t considered. Meta-cognitive, Pain, Engaging

[In Vancouver, the art gallery, salsa dance room, cafe. Experience beyond the standard.]

i.e., picking a dentist. If you have dental fear, look for “cosmetic dentistry”. Because you don’t have to go there, they actually make the office look nice. Like a spa vs. an institution. Learn from this.

What did Gary do?
Episode418.mov

Gary Vaynerchuk, what new sliders were added here?
Action figures
Personality
Fun
Break the model

Look at people who’ve had a breakthrough. What’s on those sliders that no body had? What are the new labels to add?

15. Don’t mistake narrow for shallow
LOLCats + translation, 52,000 google pages

LOLCats translates the Bible. People take things that are ridiculously narrow and it’s not shallow.

PassiveAggressiveNotes.com is a favourite.

Literally, A Web Log

All these people looking for misused quotations.

Think of the sites you killing yourself laughing over. Think about what matters. Those things matter.

16. Be Amazed
Conan amazing video.

SXSW Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Web

Saturday, March 14th at 01:00 PM
PRESENTERS

  * Christina Wodtke - Boxes and Arrows

DESCRIPTION

Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Web, Second Edition introduces the core concepts of information architecture: organizing web site content so that it can be found, designing website interaction so that it’s pleasant to use, and creating an interface that is easy to understand. This book helps designers, project managers, programmers, and other information architecture practitioners avoid costly mistakes by teaching the skills of information architecture swiftly and clearly.

Behavior is a function of the person and his or her environment
b=f(P,E)

The social web is all about attention. Is anyone loving me up?

Gene Smith

http://shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html

Use usernames. Taking a username means that you invest in it.
Own your words. You are responsible.
Social systems work on building reputation, esteem ... You need the username to have an identity.

Think about the default avatar and how you can coax stuff out of people. George W Bush avatar is a good thing to change.

If my website was a room, what kind of room is it. Let context drive the questions.

Presence
We don’t want to feel alone. Signs of life on a site are important: last uploaded, basecamp uses collective guilt by showing the last time logged in.

Reputation
Reputation systems can be offensive to a small group. BoxesandArrows.com initially tried this and in a small system where people are recognizable, then you don’t need this. In a sample like eBay, this can make more sense. Digg had a leaderboard of top diggers: anytime you have this type of “competition” then people will start to abuse the system.

Cost to Join
That “cost” can be simply filling out the registration form. Yes, I want to join the group = yes, I’m likely to do the next thing too.

Norms & Caretakers
If you think about your IA don’t forget the human beings who are going to be in this space. The group decides on the norms. Every group creates their own cultural rules and you need humans to help support or discourage positive/negative norms. You have to get humans participating. For example, if you go through “food” on Flickr, you can see the veneration and vilification that occurs in social networks.

Relationships
In small groups, it’s easy to interact. Think about going for lunch with a couple of friends vs. going to lunch with everyone in the room. How do you dial down/up the noise, how do you decide who you want to pay attention to. On the web you need to find ways to do this too. Flickr users have flipped Family for Friends. Friends are the family who you restrict viewing to but Family is the friend who have full access and can see exactly what you’re doing. Admins give labels.

People needs stuff to do, but sharing (gifting) is different. Non-profits send mailing lables because of the obligation of a return gift. This occurs in social sites. If I share a story, you feel obligated to return it. (MT: I think this is why the 25 Things Meme worked.)

Question: When you’re designing a social space, how can you integrate all the various groups, i.e., tween site and you hope the moms will join.
Answer: If you’re designing a social space for a variety of people, imagine it as a party. If the tweens are at a party, are they hanging out in the same room as the moms? Unlikely. Go into the psychology of these groups. Look for the real-world equivalent and see if you can create a site that mimics that behaviour.

Dana Boyd