Facebook Pages: Easier Said Than Done

By Mark Evans in Social Media 7 Comments Tags: , ,

Over the past couple of months, I’ve spent a lot of time working on Facebook Pages for clients. To say the least, it has been eye-opening, educational and enlightening.

From the outside looking in, creating a Facebook Page is a straightforward process for companies that want to establish a bigger digital presence. With Facebook having more than 600 million registered users, Facebook Pages have become increasingly irresistible. In some respects, it reminds me of when I was a reporter in Hong Kong in the early-1990s when China was starting to open to foreign companies. In theory, China was extremely tempting given the large number of consumers. The reality, however, was that getting a foothold was a huge challenge.

When it comes to Facebook, many companies are jumping into Facebook Pages because, well, they want one. After all, everyone’s getting one, and no one wants to be left behind. But one of the biggest problems with Facebook Pages is the ease of getting one. A few clicks and you’re good to go.

Well, not really.

Creating a Facebook Page is the easiest move, which explains why there are so many of them. The challenge is the next steps – and I’m not talking about creating content and engaging with your fans…er, I mean “Likes” (Editor’s note: “Like” is downright goofy.)

The most important consideration with a Facebook Page is deciding what to do with it and the features it needs to have. While an out-of-the-box Facebook Page is fine if you want basic functionality, the real magic starts when a Facebook Page is customized. This mostly involves the creation of tabs that provide a Facebook Page with more ways for consumers to engage and use it. It could be e-commerce, contests, videos, activities or online services. The nice thing about a Facebook Page is the creation of tabs is up to your imagination.

So if you buy into the idea of custom tabs, the next decision is deciding what they are going to be and how they are going to meet the needs of your target audience. To make that happen, these tabs need to be developed using FBML, Facebook’s version of HTML. It takes planning and time to develop tabs so they do the job and engage users. As important, tabs should have a process that get people to do something – be it visit a Web site, make a purchase, enter a contest, “Like” or share with friends. They can’t simply be fluff with no upside for companies.

Now that you’ve created the tabs, the focus needs to move to content – contests, videos, photos, polls, update, links, etc. – that engage users and, as important, encourage them to come back on a regular basis. To make this happen efficiently, it is important to have an editorial calendar aligned with your marketing and sales activity. An editorial calendar offers structure so content doesn’t need to be created on the fly. While being flexible and engaged is a good thing, it also helps to have a plan of attack so content can happen on a sustained basis.

As well, a Facebook Page needs love and attention. It can’t be allowed to operate as silo-ed activity that is somehow able to support and promote itself. Too often, companies create a Facebook Page, and then expect the word to beat a path to its door. In reality, a Facebook Page is like any other marketing activity; it needs to be promoted in lots of other places – Web sites, marketing collateral, business cards, e-mail signatures, packaging, etc.

Finally, a Facebook Page needs to happen pretty much every day. It needs a person or a team to create content, engage with users, and promote it on daily basis. It’s a lot of work and not terribly sexy but it’s a key ingredient – along with customized tabs, an editorial calendar and marketing support – if a Facebook Page is going to be anything more than just another digital entity.

What Happened to Paperless Billing?

By Mark Evans in Venture Capital 3 Comments Tags: ,

In theory, paperless billing makes a lot of sense for consumers and companies. Consumers get their bills quicker and have less paper cluttering their desks, while companies can save a lot of money by reducing their printing and mailing costs.

The only problem is paperless billing hasn’t been embraced as enthusiastically as you might expect. It’s one of those solutions addressing a major problem, only to see consumers say a collective “meh”.

Maybe digital bills don’t resonate because when it comes to paying them people like to “see” the details. Maybe it has to do with the fact people file their bills for taxes so having them in a folder on your computer isn’t as user-friendly.

The tepid enthusiasm for paperless bills hasn’t stopped companies or companies providing these services from pounding away on the benefits of going digital. A good example of these efforts is Doxo, which raised $10-million to expand its paperless billing service. (Source: TechCrunch).

Maybe Doxo has a “secret sauce” that will make paperless billing more user-friendly or accessible but the reality is you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink – and consumers, to date, have not shown much interest in drinking in paperless bills.

Is Foursquare Interesting or DOA?

By Mark Evans in Social Media 1 Comment Tags: , , , ,

I have a love-hate relationship with Foursquare.

On one hand, I think it’s given location-based services a bad name with its goofy badges, the silly “Mayor of” feature, and the lack of traction when it comes to creating a platform that businesses can leverage. On the other hand, Foursquare now has 6.5 million users, two million check-ins/day and 420 million check-ins since its launch.

So the challenge and question is what to make of Foursquare. Is an interesting enough service to include as part of a social media strategic plan? Or is a niche service with limited appeal as a marketing and sales vehicle? My sense is its remains the latter even though many companies would love to use Foursquare if there were better services to meet their needs and goals.

The biggest problem for Foursquare is many companies don’t consider it a serious part of the social media landscape. Second, there’s still little clarity in terms of how to leverage Foursquare aside from offering coupons to people who check-in. This means companies are looking for substance or ideas before committing to Foursquare, which has to compete with blogs, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube within a social media strategic plan

Perhaps Foursquare’s efforts have been focused on growth, which is impressive in the scheme of things but no where near the expectations it was the next Twitter when it launched in 2008. Foursquare was going to take the world by storm, and provide social media users with a real way to leverage location-based services.

To date, Foursquare is a niche service in a market that many still believe has huge potential. The idea of being able to deliver the right service or content at the right time at the right place is the “Holy Grail”. This explains why there is still optimism about the LBS market and, as important, the entry of new players such as Facebook Places.

While still in beta and, unfortunately, not in Canada, an intriguing new LBS start-up is Bizzy.com, which combines LBS with personalized recommendation for places to eat, shop and play based on places that you like. Bizzy matches this information against other people with similar interests to generate recommendations about other places you might like. Having not used the service after discovering nothing was available for Canadian cities, it is impossible to declare whether Bizzy is the real deal but what is interesting is the idea it generates insight and ideas based on information you provide – as opposed to simply having to check-in to places you visit.

My take is 2011 will be an exciting year for LBS but it is possible Foursquare won’t come along for the ride. With the ubiquity of smartphones and the growing popularity of tablet computers, there is a growing population looking for better, more interesting and more useful LBS services. If a start-up can create a service that does a good job of meeting demand, the LBS world could be their oyster.

More: Mashable has a short post on how Foursquare has now been translated into five more languages.

Huh? Twitter Didn’t Buy TweetDeck?

By Mark Evans in M&A, Social Media 3 Comments Tags: , , ,

One of the games Twitter-watchers like to play is creating lists of the company’s potential acquisitions now that it has gazillions of venture capital cash. The lists includes TweetDeck, TwitPic, TwitVid, Seesmic and HootSuite.

TweetDeck can be crossed off the list now that it has been purchased by UberMedia for $30-million. For people not familiar with UberMedia, it’s owned by Bill Gross, who started a search company called Overture. And for those of you not familiar with Overture, it created the pay-per-click model that Google “borrowed” to give itself a business model.

Without much attention, Gross has started to build an intriguing portfolio of Twitter products that now includes UberTwitter, a popular Twitter app for the Blackberry and iPhone; UberCurrent, a tool to follow influencers on Twitter; and Twitdroyd, a popular app for Android phones.

The sale of TweetDeck, which has raised $5-million in venture capital, begs a few questions:

1. Why didn’t Twitter buy TweetDeck? Given the declining use of Twitter.com, which is still far from user-friendly despite the recent overhaul, it would have made a lot of sense to buy TweetDeck, the world’s leading Twitter platform. For my clients, it’s the way that I suggest they publish and monitor Twitter, mostly because of how it allows for multiple columns to track keywords. I also like how TweetDeck can be used to publisher updates on other platforms such as Facebook, Foursquare and LinkedIn.

2. If not TweetDeck, are there any start-ups that Twitter is interested in buying. Maybe it’s Vancouver-based HootSuite, which is seeing strong growth in terms of users and revenue. HootSuite has a good relationship with Twitter, and it was picked to showcase Twitter’s Promoted Tweets feature.

3. So what does Bill Gross do with TweetDeck, which has been searching for a business model since it was launched to instant acclaim in 2008? Does he start to insert some kind of advertising into the application, including in-stream advertising? Does he create an enterprise version of the product to compete with companies such as HootSuite and CoTweet? Does he create a premium version of TweetDeck with more features? You have to believe there are many people who would happily pay a one-time fee or maybe an annual subscription to access more features.

4. With TweetDeck off the table how long will it be before some of the other popular publishing applications – Seesmic, CoTweet, HootSuite – are snapped up?

For more thoughts on the UberMedia-TweetDeck deal, check out Louis Gray, who notes that it took less than 1,000 days for TweetDeck to go from “public consciousness” to acquisition. Business Insider also has some thoughts.

No Social Media Success Without Execution

By Mark Evans in Social Media 3 Comments Tags: , , ,

Over the past couple of years, I have talked and worked with lots of companies excited about the potential of social media. Fuelled by this enthusiasm, they create detailed strategic plans and set themselves up on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, et al.

Then they run into a serious hurdle: who’s actually going to make social media happen tactically on a day-to-day basis. It is one thing to have a master plan but if no one is going to execute on it, the plan is not worth paper it’s written on.

As a social media consultant, it is always disappointing when a client doesn’t or can’t execute on a strategic and tactical plan. In some ways, I feel as I’ve let the client down by not making it abundantly clear about the commitment needed to do social media. But sometimes even the best intentions – and plans – don’t work because the reality of doing social media on a regular basis is dramatically different in reality than practice.

Too often social media strategy gets too much attention while tactical execution isn’t focused on enough. This means that a strategic plan is not just about creating and launching social media services but developing a plan of attack, hiring the right people to make social media happen on a regular basis, and giving them the education, training and tools so they can be as successful as possible.

Tactics is the part of social media that is crucial but doesn’t get as much attention as it should be it’s not as sexy as strategy or the cool services. Tactics is grunt work, it’s blocking and tackling, and it’s a game in which victories are measured in inches rather than miles.

Many companies who want to get into social media don’t truly appreciate the work that goes into day-to-day tactics. One of the key hurdles is finding the right person. Often, they believe that a junior person who knows how to use the social media tools can operate their campaigns. But they soon learn that using the tools is only half the battle; good social media tacticians also have to be good writers, communicators and thinkers.

At the end of the day, social media strategy has a relatively short shelf life before tactics starts to impact everything you do. Sure, strategy can be tweaked and re-calibrated but once social media has been launched, the execution of tactics will determine whether what a company does is successful or not.

Too many companies consider tactics to the less glamorous cousin of strategy when, in fact, tactics is as, if not more, important.

(Note: This post originally appeared on the Sysomos blog)

The Groupon Bubble is Going Burst

By Mark Evans in Social Media 26 Comments Tags: , , ,

Right now, Groupon is the cat’s meow – a fast-growing business with a valuation of apparently $6-billion. It’s the hottest thing (aside from the iPad) in the high-tech world, and attracting scores of wannabes.

But for all of Groupon’s success, it makes me nervous. Why? I’m not convinced Groupon has staying power. Sure, it’s uber-popular but how much longer will consumers be captivated by the flurry of deep-discount offers hitting their inboxes? Groupon is a novelty, it’s entertainment but is it the future of e-commerce?

My take is probably not. My sense is Groupon’s popularity and star power has peaked even though sales may continue to grow for awhile. I think consumers will start to lose their enthusiasm for group-buying as they discover that while the deals may be on the surface attractive, the number of services and products actually used is far from what they purchased. In other words, the numbers don’t really work.

At the same time, I believe many companies will start to question the attractiveness and economic sense of group-buying services. It’s sexy right now to give it a whirl but is there really a healthy ROI in offering discounts of more than 50% for products and services. Do enough customers who take advantage of these offers become regular customers to justify the cost of using group-buying services?

In fact, the entire group-buying phenomenon is fascinating and bubble-licious at the same time. It smacks of the original dot-com in which scores of start-ups launched themselves into a marketplace only to see the market suddenly retract.

For consumers, group-buying is attracting because we’re still getting over from the hangover of the economic downturn. Many people are still trying to behave like they should be frugal, although this doesn’t mean doing anything drastic like cutting off your cable or eating all your meals at home.

Groupon and other group-buying services let consumers eat their cake and have it too. They let people believe they’re saving lots of money while still satisfying their need to buy stuff – much of it they don’t need. When the economy starts to see a firmer recovery, you have to wonder if the allure of group-buying will begin to fade.

If I were Groupon’s founders, I would have taken the $6-billion offer from Google in a heartbeat. A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, and my take is the group-buying “bird” is going to fly away.

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