Socialmedialand

Archive for the ‘Opinion’ Category

I’ve mentioned before what a scaredy cat I am – yesterday my coworker, Dustin, told me about an upcoming social networking horror film that is being released by Dimension Films (the same people who scared me to death with their ads on Myspace.)

Hopefully I never catch a glipse of these previews or it might be the end of my career…

It's not one location anymore - it's everywhere.

Today at work we watched a webinar on mobile technology by Comcast (MMetrics) that got us all thinking about the future of mobile. As the adoption rate for smartphones accelerates, the need to adapt marketing strategies to mobile technology decreases because these phones will be able to access standard web pages. Interesting stuff. 

And what about for social media? I read this great article by Om Malik on Facebook’s mobile future that @chrisbrogan twittered about. The integration of social media with your phone contacts will further integrate those networks into your “real” life. The mobility of using your cell phone to connect to your networks when you used to need a computer will make them an even bigger part of your daily life. This exponentially expands the reach of the network, advertising on the network and the depth at which the network, and the people in it, affect you and your decisions. 

The blurring of  lines between the “real” world and technology is dizzying. Just yesterday my coworker, Brandon, sent out an email about a new mobile technology that will allow your phone to interact, through mini projectors and image sensors (that’s about as technical as my understanding goes), with the world around you. At one point the article suggests you could meet someone at a party and the phone/device would project their social profile information onto their shirt so you could access the most important information about them immediately. Crazy.

To me this further creates the need for authenticity in our world and in our lives. The time of a “public” face and a “private” face is over. Your information is public, you are public. You have to be yourself because if you aren’t, people will know. They’ll easily see you don’t match up with how you describe yourself in this or that profile and vice versa. 

This applies to brands as well. If you want a “family” business reputation, you have to act like it 24/7. If you want to be the “hip” new thing, you actually have to be hip. Branding as we know it will be forced to evolve. A “family” based ad campaign won’t give you a family image unless your company lives and breathes family and community service. Just putting a rap star in your shoes won’t make you “hip.”  And it’s seeping into politics too. We can see what our House Reps and Senators are doing, and hear what they’re thinking straight from their own mouths.

What about you? Are you ready for the real world?

Courtesy of gapingvoid

As I promised in an earlier post about Myspace’s advertising practices – here is my evaluation of the two giants of social networking from both my professional and personal view.

Advertising: Ok so if you read the post about advertising on Myspace you already know my position on this. But just to recap – Facebook has a social element to their advertising, users can vote ads up or down based on what they like (or don’t like) and they can even share ads with their friends if they want. Myspace follows the more traditional display advertising formula of throwing the most ads at the most people to get impressions based only on demographic/geographic targeting.

Friend Updates: People hated it when it first came out (and maybe they still do) but I’m a fan of the news feed and mini feed. I have a lot of friends on Facebook – ok not a whole lot but a decent amount. It would be impossible for me to keep up with what they’re all doing by going to their page and trying to remember what it looked like last in order to find out what has changed for them recently. Myspace has tried to imitate this to an extent with a friend updates section. Both allow you to customize what you see by type (more or less pictures versus events) and person. But Myspace limits the number of people you can “subscribe to” and doesn’t include an alert for commenting – I’ll talk about how difficult it is to follow conversations later. The other main thing that is lacking on Myspace is the mini-feed. The news feed gives me an overview of what’s going on in my network, the mini feed gives me an overview of that one person. When I go to my friend’s page I want something to tell me right away if there are new pictures or a new favorite song I should check out. I don’t want to have to hunt through the news feed to find her updates.

Applications: This one is seriously just my own opinion but when I set up apps on Facebook, it works. When I do that on Myspace it doesn’t. I have to admit I haven’t spent a lot of time messing with apps on Myspace because the first few experiences I had with it went so poorly so I can’t say much more than that.

“Threading” of Conversations: This is a big pet peeve of mine on Myspace. It is so hard to follow a conversation! Facebook added the “wall to wall” function a long time ago allowing you to see both sides of a conversation in one view (as long as you are friends with both parties – this maintains privacy). In addition, on Facebook you can “comment” on just about anything anybody does at this point and that string of comments is easily tracked from each participant’s feed. If you see something a friend wrote on another friend’s wall on Myspace you have to hunt through their wall to see what the response is. This slows down the rate of communication. Let’s say they’re talking about what they want to do on Friday and I know of something going on – I have to go searching around to see what the other person said to see if my idea even makes sense. It just makes things inconvenient when it doesn’t have to be.

Design/Customization: Myspace allows a lot more customization. Over and over I hear this as the main reason people like it and I totally understand it. It really is your space. You design it. You customize it. You can do almost anything with it. Facebook is more like a glorified form that you fill out. I get that. But I have a type-a personality and I’m in love with organization, so the clean cut format actually appeals to me. But Myspace has come out with a version of that too. They have a new profile tool that lets you easily customize your page without all the fancy HTML stuff which made it a lot nicer for people like me. Kudos.

Search: I like that Facebook uses real names. That makes things easy. If I meet you and you say your name is John Smith, I go to Facebook, type that in and like magic there you are (except if your name is actually John Smith – then you’re there in a huge list of other people that I’d have to filter by location, school, age, etc.) But if I do the same thing on Myspace…hmmm maybe, maybe not. Depending on your privacy settings, depending on if you used your real name at all. The idea of the “display name” confuses me a lot. A name that you can change whenever you want just makes things hard. Even a user name that isn’t your real name but stays the same (like AIM) makes more sense. I look at my Myspace friend list and can’t figure out who half the people are, then when I go to their profile I realize that it’s one of my good friends who just randomly changed her name to some obscure line from a song. How was I to know?

Commercial Pages: This is a toss-up for me and the reason why professionally I never make the mistake of writing off either of these sites (although, personally, I’ve clearly made my choice for a favorite:). I would say (and feel free to disagree) that Myspace is better for anything that is artistic or creative while Facebook is better for anything corporate. If you’re a band and you need a page to show off your music, style, and post upcoming events I’d say go on Myspace without hesitation. Same for comedy, movies, etc. If you’re a brand like Target or Crest or GM, I would say create a Fan page on Facebook. In reality you might want to consider doing both but this is just how I would prioritize.

In the end it’s pretty simple to choose a network. For your personal profile pick the one that fits your needs best. For your brand/corporate profile, pick the one that your customers use. And you can always maintain a basic profile on both networks (and a few others, like LinkedIn for example, if it makes sense) and then use your favorite one as your main portal. There are lots of apps available that help you integrate your networks together so you can mainly operate out of your favorite one. Maybe I’ll write a quick how-to on that for a future post…

Ok, I think that about covers it. Give me a comment if you disagree with me (which is fine, like I said this is all just my opinion) or if you think there’s a section I missed.

Ok, fair warning up front: I’m a much bigger fan of Facebook than Myspace. I believe that at work I’m fairly unbiased about social networks and chose the platforms that fit the needs of the client, and more importantly, the client’s customers. As far as social marketing goes, I agree with Jason Falls that strategy does come first before minor details like which network to focus on.

But right now I’m talking about my personal life. And in my personal life I prefer Facebook. I won’t get into why right now (although, now that I think about it that might be a fun post for the future) but I still maintain a Myspace profile mainly because Myspace Music is a great way to follow local bands and I have a few friends who are exclusively or mainly on Myspace.

But recently Myspace has REALLY upset me. The big difference in Facebook v. Myspace to me right now, in this moment, is the way they do their ads.

When you go to www.Facebook.com you see a clean login page with no ads. When you go to www.Myspace.com you see this:

If you ask me - this ad is what is uninvited. I didn't ask for this...

<– This ad is completely unacceptable to me. I scare very easily, I do not watch scary movies – ever! In fact the last time I ever saw a scary movie all the way through was over 5 years ago. That’s right, no Saw 1-4 for me.  The worst part is, if you mouse over the ad the image flashes to this:

 

This made me scream outloud the first time it flashed on my screen. But only a little scream...and only the first time...I swear...

The previews that come up on TV are bad enough for me. In fact I do everything I can to avoid those commercials as well, mute and close my eyes, fast forward, change the channel for 1 minute – whatever it takes. Because that kind of imaging scares me. And I don’t care what that makes people think of me (ok a little bit – but not enough to suck it up and watch it.)

The point is that this is my social network, I should be in charge of what advertising is shown to me. When I go to Facebook, as I already mentioned, no advertising is shown to me until I login. At that point I’m targeted geographically, demographically and psychographically (based on keywords in my profile.) But that’s only the half that decides what options are shown to me. After that I’m able to vote up and down the ads I’m shown and basically choose my advertising options. So if I’m shown something like this I can vote it down and eventually not see it anymore.

If you think about it that makes sense for the advertiser as well. I dont know how much DreamWorks is paying for this but I’m sure it’s a lot because it’s the whole top half of the Myspace homepage and it’s there (trust me) every single time you visit it. But every time I see it, and drive up their impressions, it’s not doing anything for me. There is no way I will see this movie. Not. In. A. Million. Years. So why doesn’t Myspace let me opt out of seeing this horrific image? (I searched but couldn’t find the parental guidance rating – I doubt it’s PG13 though which is a whole other issue.) Then after I opt out of this ad, they can use the space to show me ads that might actually have some effect on me. Of course this assumes that they wise up and move advertising into the site and off the login page. Or at least keep the login advertising more general. Please.

It all goes back to permission based marketing. I’ve accepted that I have to deal with imaging and messaging in ads on TV, radio, print, and outdoor that I don’t necessarily like. But when it comes to the internet, especially my social networks, I’m getting used to being in control. We’re all getting used to being in control. Ask my permission before you show me an ad like this, at least give me an opt out. The result will be that you get a better targeted audience for your ads which could actually lead to a sale or conversion, and I’m much happier about visiting Myspace.

What do you think? Am I way off base?

Careful not to seem robotic...

Imagine yourself at a party. You walk up to the host to say hello and thank them for having you:

You: “This is a great party. The food is delicious, thanks for having me.”

Host: “I’m hosting a party right now but I appreciate your comment and will respond to you soon.”

You: “Um great…”

OK, I admit that example is extreme, but I think automating your twitter account has the same effect. Twitter is a way to personalize your brand and make you seem more human to your customers. Automating that only takes you back to where you started. It’s like the invention of automated phone trees all over again, “Please hold, your tweet is very important to us. Your tweet will be responded to in the order it was received.”

I realize that last paragraph was pretty harsh and it sounds like I’m condemning all Twitter tools to the proverbial tool shed in the sky – but that’s really not the case. Tools in and of themselves aren’t bad – they’re simply tools that allow you to perform a certain function easier. It’s how you use the tools that counts.

There are a few versions of various Twitter tools out there (and some that even aggregate them into one massive account manager) so let’s talk about them as categories rather than specific sites.

Auto Reply: You could set this tool to respond to any @ message or D message with your preset reply. Kind of functions like an out of office but with the frequency of an away message. I understand the need for this if you’re going on vacation or an extended absence (could you just tweet your vacation schedule in the first place?) but other than that I don’t see the value. If you’ve simply stepped out for the day – don’t alert me, just respond to me tomorrow. I don’t expect my twitter friends to respond immediately. In my opinion this is the one that can sound most like an automated phone tree if misused.

Mainly  – as a Twitter user I see a huge possibly of these “away” messages beginning to clutter my feed and annoy me with alerts from my desktop/phone apps. Most of them are @ replies, so if I’m friends with both parties I’ll see the away message as well…multiply by number of friends in common and number of days you’ll be away and number of people who regularly write you messages, repeat for each friend using the service and add the totals together…depending on how popular this gets it could get hairy.

Auto Follow: I’m torn about auto follow. On one hand brands should follow most people who mentions their name, even if it’s negative. On the other hand – if you auto follow you’re kind of missing out on seeing what people are saying about you in the first place. And if someone just purely hates you, following them could set them off. I say use this feature with caution. Go ahead and set it up if you feel you really need it, but make sure to allot some time throughout your day/week/month to go explore who you’re following and what they’ve said about you. And unless your brand name is extremely well known – consider whether this feature would really save you that much time anyways.

Side note on auto follow: one of the big predicted trends for 2009 is cleaning out your follower list so I don’t think this will catch on except as a way for brands to build a following.

Blog Feed/RSS: This service will automatically tweet whenever you update your blog. OK sounds good – I normally tweet to update my followers when I’ve written new content because I realize they may not be checking daily (and they wouldn’t want to miss this one!) But something about this feels a little more spammy. I follow some great bloggers, @ChrisBrogan and @JasonFalls for starters, and every time they tweet with a link to their blog (which is relatively frequently) they write a unique message that summarizes the post, mostly with a witty comment and a link. It’s called a hook people. A preview. A snippet. Without it how would I know whether I really want to read it? Yes I know it will generally write the headline, at least up to the character limit cutoff, but it’s not the same as a personalized summary. If you just spent all that time writing a post, will it kill you to write an extra line and copy/paste the URL in? Again, there are exceptions. If you’re CNN, or the Huffington Post,  for example and you want to tweet an alert about every headline, of course that’s too overwhelming to do manually. Or if you have a blog with several contributors but only one Twitter account. But if you can count how many times you write a blog post per day on your fingers, this just seems lazy to me. Harsh? Maybe.

Auto Post: Is something really cool coming up that you want to tweet about but it’s not convenient to write about it at the time or you’re afraid you’ll forget? You can use auto post tools to schedule when a tweet you’ve pre-written should be twittered. I see some benefit for this for brands – set up the tweets around a huge product launch so it’s one less thing to worry about during launch time. Maybe you write tweets updating people on the schedule of a large event you’ve planned as it happens. Maybe you have a “joke of the week” or a “thought of the week” that you do as a regular segment and you don’t want to forget your great idea so you write it down earlier and set it to send at the regular time. Fun holiday idea: set a “Happy New Year” tweet to post right at midnight! Just don’t abuse it. Part of the fun of getting updates from an event is that you know what’s actually going on, not just what was planned (that’s available in the posted schedule anyways right?) Use this one when you need it but make sure to also post genuine “this second” information because that’s part of the appeal of Twitter.

Mass Message: This just sounds like spam. It makes me nervous. Everything you tweet is publicly visible to everyone you follow, so why use this feature to mass message them? Is it because the direct message will show up in your followers’ email inboxes? Is that so you can get around the spam filters they use? Reflect on these questions before you use this tool. I know I personally wouldn’t want a bunch of email messages from the brands I follow, especially after #TwitterSecret reveled that they can be over 900 characters long! If this happened to often I would unfollow. Harsh again? It’s all about permission marketing – don’t send me stuff I didn’t ask for – simple!

Auto Message: This is just a simple message that you set up to say hello to a person when they follow you. For a large brand I don’t think this is tragic – you do want to say hello to people and sometimes it’s unrealistic to be able to handle the volume of followers. Make sure to spell check the message and go for it. For smaller brands I don’t think this is necessary. Part of the appeal of a smaller brand is the personal touch, take a second to at least notice their name and read their short bio. Write one way to customers and another to employees and yet another to industry peers. This just lets them know you really noticed them and are genuinely wanting to hear from them. I would argue for larger brands that level of personal attention is possible with dedication and will you get you a considerable amount of goodwill. However I realize that even if you do take the time, what you end up writing can sound canned anyways. Sometimes after you read their profile the best thing to say is still simply, “Hello, thanks for the follow!”

So that’s my summary of the benefits and pitfalls of various types of automated Twitter tools. The most dangerous of all though is a combination of the above. I would hate to see a brand think, “Oh we need to get into this Twitter thing,” sign up for an account and then set up an automated manager to take care of the account while they continue to ignore what their customers are trying to tell them. That scenario completely bypasses the social nature of Twitter and turns it into a mere billboard on the information highway.

Keep in mind that your goal, always, is to connect and communicate (both ways!) with your customers. Using these tools to further the reach of that connection is great, using these tools to fake that connection is not. In fact it may lead to a backlash that causes more damage to your current customer relationship rather than strengthening it.

Did I miss anything? Skip something? Am I just plain wrong? Tell me what you think in the comments.

* image found at http://justlooking.recursion.org/2004/May/21#madison-rules