Inline, Online, Off

On Facebook: Stay On Topic, Stay Top Of Mind

A few weeks back I was Questioning Your Question of the Day and lo! Sean Bruich, head of measurement platforms and standars at Facebook has data to back up my instincts. 

Yep, as AdAge puts it, “The touchy-feely strategy is meant to be conversational — human, even. But new data from Facebook itself tell us that what looks good on the social-media guru’s presentation deck isn’t the best approach for making Facebook work for the brand. “

Ooh I love it when data makes me right about things and like I suggested, Facebook says brands oughtn’t completely omit their seasonal, conversational posts. 

The AdAge piece goes on, “To get more precious shares, Mr. Bruich advises posting more photos and videos. Asking questions of your fans increases commenting, but not liking and sharing.  

These findings hold true across verticals. “There’s some order to this universe,” said Mr. Bruich. “There are general truths.”

Read the rest of their article, which highlights some successful question styles and conversational strategies for brands… while I sit here being smug. 

Questioning Your Question Of The Day

In response to a recent study that suggested only 1% of Facebook ‘fans’ engage, AdAge wrote:

“For a few years now, brands have been touting frothy Facebook “like” numbers as evidence of their social-media acumen. But how many of those fans are actually bothering to take part in conversation with brand

Not too many, as it turns out.”

The study from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute concluded that companies should avoid putting “a disproportionate amount of effort into engagement and strategies to get people to talk about a brand,” and instead focus efforts on ways and means to turn light shoppers into buyers. 

Let’s for a moment suspend disbelief about the study itself and consider what a Facebook engagement strategy usually starts off and what it proceeds to fall short of. 

Without getting all Cluetrain on you, the whole point of creating an online profile on a social network or online community is that it will give you an opportunity to have a conversation with your customers. And yet many woefully misguided brands (and their agencies), have created sockpuppet profiles that do nothing but blast messages. 

Oh, I know. They’re not blasting their ad copy. They’re sometimes posing questions but that’s where my gripe begins. I see it all the time: brand Facebook fan pages full of status updates posing a question of the day. And from what I see, there are two tactics:

1. Asking your audience questions about products, ideas, concepts etc, which is a really good idea. The people who respond won’t likely be new customers but some of your more loyal customers who will relish in the chance to feel heard. So this approach is awesome if this feedback makes its way back into R&D and you can thank and recognize your customers for their contributions. 

2. Asking your audience topical, seasonal, “just for fun” questions. Now, why would you do this? Is it to keep conversations going? Is it to ensure that page you’ve painstakingly created and invested all that time and money in will have fresh content on it? Is it so that your voice stays in your fans’ timelines? Is it so you can enter into some good old witty banter with your customers? I’m sure someone said that would personalize your brand, right?

If you wanted to make smalltalk with your colleagues or someone at the gym or on the train, would you waltz up to them and pose a topical teaser? It’s an extremely contrived way to try to start a conversation. Invariably the brands never go back into the comments to acknowledge or nurture deeper discussion. And yet it happens all the time on Facebook: questions of the day are posted, comments and likes are gathered and put into weekly reports, and used to inform what types of question of the day work best. 

So, this is where it all starts to go horribly wrong. Question of the day content is a self-perpetuating problem brands (and their agencies) have created for themselves. They keep doing it because now it’s a line item on a weekly report and it seems to move the needle toward garnering more of those frothy metrics. But to go back to those metrics, and the point of being there in the first place, brand managers must start asking whether what they’re trying to get people to engage with is worth anyone’s time. Theirs or that of their fans.

Seriously, go back to your social media editorial calendars and look through your questions and polls. Go look at times you’ve gone into the responses and used the question to drive a deeper discussion. 

Top of Mind, Top of Timeline: How Relevant Content Got Lost In The Stream

From Gawker’s redesign over a year ago, to Tumblr’s recent pay-for-priority iteration, and now Facebook’s post “pinning,” it’s fascinating to watch the Web’s biggest publishers try to solve the little problem they created with the rapid adoption of timelines and content streams.

Dynamic, real-time content publishing and the ability to keep landing pages alive with fresh news, pictures, polls etc sounded like a killer proposition for brands, marketers and publishers: (arguably) great for SEO and awesome for stickiness and engagement, it seemed like suddenly everyone was embedding modules for scrolling feeds into their sites or completely flipping over to hosting and publishing on blog platforms. 

Thinking about all of those brand managers and their agencies: this gave everyone lots to do. More content means more copy to be written, creative to be designed and coded, photos to be shot, watermarked, and uploaded … ooh and the metrics and reporting! Ravenous and demanding, agencies, brands, and publishers have been fiendishly creating their own standards for publishing frequency and so-called experts have garnered plenty of attention coming up with recommended number of posts per day… I mean, you have to keep those audiences engaged with constant, new stuff, right? right? 

Well, turns out not quite so much. I’m not suggesting real-time publishing is bad or necessarily reductive — and I passionately agree that if you do commit to owned media publishing, you ought to keep things current. But importance and relevancy isn’t always about the newest, latest, and freshest. 

If you’re an apparel brand, for instance, and your sales are in same-store decline or you just launched a new SKU via a promotion on your Facebook or blog, it’s shocking that a “fun” and almost-always only-tangentially related question of the day should bump your conversion-driving story down or off your page entirely. Yet this happens all the time. 

Campaigns and big news stories cost and create a lot of revenue and they dictate their own timelines. As much as tagging and linking and other taxonomies have been created to keep important content at the top of the page (or timeline), these hacks have been cumbersome for many people working with other people’s CMS and platforms. 

What the social networks are doing from a product standpoint recently should be very welcome to agencies and brands, in particular, as well as independent publishers. Giving the people who are creating all of this content more sophisticated controls in a next/new/now environment will likely make advertisers and audiences stick around.

Oh, and we’ll discuss the whole Question of the Day thing another time.

Gap, DVF, and Nordies Shut Up Shop on Facebook

Facebook storefronts seemed like an interesting proposition to a number of high-profile retail and apparel brands last year. And I applaud the brands and their agencies for their willingness to experiment with creating e-commerce experiences inside of the world’s leading social network. 

However, according to Sucharita Mulpuru, an analyst at Forrester Research, “There was a lot of anticipation that Facebook would turn into a new destination, a store, a place where people would shop.

“But it was like trying to sell stuff to people while they’re hanging out with their friends at the bar.”

Bloomberg has the story

The truth is, pop-up stores have worked in skate parks and other unlikely social spaces in the physical world, so why not see if online social networkers are in the shopper mindset, too? 

As these brands pull down their apps and get back to their ‘question of the day’ conversational marketing tactics on the service, I imagine this story will ricochet around other retail brands and their digital agency partners this month. F-Commerce plans may get scrapped in favor of Pinterest boards or Polyvore contests and rightly so. If our job is to carve out a slice of a marketers budget to try something and see if it sticks, to be disruptive and play with technology-based innovations, then I actually hope to see more articles like this. 

Good for GAP and Nordstrom. Where next? 

On Liking: Where Engagement And Conversion May End

On the heels of yesterday’s link: Does ‘Liking’ a Brand Drive User Loyalty? comes this rather startling article via Investor’s Business Daily, quoting Forrester analyst, Brian Walker on the current state of social media and sales, “It is a customer-acquisition tool, but it’s not as effective as search and email marketing.”

The article (and the full report) is full of interesting and provocative statements and definitely a suggested read to social media marketers and brand managers, before you go off writing another Question of the Day for your Facebook fan page.  

A 2011 report by Forrester analyst Sucharita Mulpuru for trade group Shop.org found that 68% of U.S. retailers say that if Facebook went away, it wouldn’t hurt their Web sales. And 77% said the top benefits of Facebook are brand building and as a way to listen to customers. Only 1% said it helped them get new customers.