Modern Insider – Online Marketing Blog

Everyone is talking about how important social media is these days but the more it grows, the more risk it brings with it. From compromised accounts to simply having an update be poorly received, the bigger the network, the bigger the impact. And while almost everyone has adopted a social media ‘crisis’ or ‘response’ plan, what happens when the lights are off and something goes wrong? Would you even know?

Take for example this tweet I made a few days ago about a @Southwest Airlines official Facebook post which linked to an incentivized offer (trial pay signups for a free ticket reward).  The post went up around 1am, got 50 or so comments attacking it as spam, a few dozen more from confused customers and was down 15 minutes later. Now I don’t know if this was done by Southwest intentionally and just a bad call or if their account got hacked, either way it was up long enough to be seen but short enough to avoid a disaster.

But let’s think beyond this 15 minute issue. Southwest’s page has over 750,000 fans (excuse me, ‘people who like it’) who were exposed to this message and could have potentially become upset with their brand. Similarly a few weeks ago @UnitedAirlines had their twitter account hacked – and ‘they’ spammed tens of thousands before it was resolved. They apologized of course but it was hours later.

At 1am it’s unlikely that a social media team is working, let alone doing full monitoring of every property which begs the question – how do you know what’s going on?

Even if you have a 24×7 support center, what would they do if the phones started ringing nonstop in the middle of the night? Or even worse, in the middle of the night before a long weekend? Who would be called…. How quickly… Why? Would someone get an alert or would it take 50 calls to start the response clock?

After seeing the United & Southwest posts (strange that it was two airlines, but perhaps that’s just indicative of who I follow) we should all be revisiting our contact plans to insure people do know when to pick up the phone and who to call. It’s also worth thinking about who can have access to your accounts… is there a European marketing team that can help in an issue? Asia?

The point here is simple – social runs 24×7 and the more you use it, the more you need to bring the entire organization in to support and monitor it.

In over a decade working on the web I don’t recall a single time where I used what was on my screen to influence a sale or even to really show to a friend. Sure we forward on messages for someone to see later but the actual idea of calling people over to see what you see just isn’t practical for a quick glance or ‘cool’ message.

The iPad changed that for me in less than a day. An interesting email caught my eye and I shared it with a marketing co-worker. She looked at the creative but was pulled in by the product, handed back my iPad and went online to make a purchase.

This is revolutionary.

While the iPad has been widely talked about for its ease of use, it’s quick access to the web, apps and other interface and usability features, the real game changer that I see it bringing is in sharing content. Let’s face it, few people take the time to zoom their iPhone in to a page to hand off or unplug a laptop to pass across the room. Where the personal computer is, well, personal the iPad is an open screen. This makes it ideal for collaboration – simple items are quickly passed along and whether that’s to show a new game, results from a project, or an email with an interesting product, it works.

If the experts are right and the iPad brings in a world of tablet computing (I for one see it happening) we can expect to see the term ‘social’ take on a whole new meaning as people share content in ways we may not have considered before. For web marketers this represents a whole new school of thought, design and even offers as we move to a world where what one person gets, others will often be shown. And how do you measure that?

It’s no surprise that over the past few months Facebook has made an increasingly strong play to try and force its users to “open” up their profiles. Facebook sees the success of Twitter and other ‘open’ networks and wants to join the party. Problem is, Facebook isn’t an open networking tool for most people – we don’t come to build a contact database of our network (LinkedIn) or build a professional dialogue (Twitter) – we come to engage with our personal connections, share content and that’s what Makes Facebook so powerful and such a great tool. It’s also exactly why people wanting to stay private.

So if Facebook wants me to open up my profile they need to stop grieving and start making the right changes.

Denial: Facebook started off believing that what I people do on their platform is meant to be openly shared.

I have a ‘no coworkers’ policy on my Facebook account which shocks people given that I ‘manage’ a  Social Media team but the simple fact is what I post on Facebook isn’t necessarily intended for my coworkers and since I can’t control what they see, it’s all or none. That’s not to say that I spend my day tearing into my company – I’m not sure I’ve ever  really commented on work – but the photos of me with my parents for Christmas or a couple college Friends on a camping trip simply don’t have any relevancy to the people sitting 4 offices down or the sales guy ‘Googling’ my name. So when Facebook told me it was ok to share it all they weren’t being honest about what their site is for.

Anger: To push people to be public Facebook moved to an opt-out mentality rather than asking users to opt-in.

The big debate around privacy hasn’t come from the features Facebook has added but rather from making people click something to not participate. It’s a difficult line for a website as you want people to adopt your new tools and options but at the end of the day pushing things in to get a change just makes the problem more visible. When poor Sally finds out her Dad saw her photos from Spring Break she gets mad. Forcing people in doesn’t solve it.

Bargaining: After the push back, Facebook started reaching out to get the community “buy-in”.

Bringing users into the discussion to comment on privacy changes and policies was an important step in Facebook realizing that they, like every community ever run online, are subject to the whims of their users. Unfortunately it’s not as simple as asking – changes have to be implemented and with 400 million users there are a lot of voices chiming in.

Depression: Every time Facebook runs forward it’s followed by a period of stillness, sometimes even stepping back.

When the beacon system launched it was a failure. Users were upset and blogs / media had a field day writing about the risks and horrors that would happen (like the girlfriend who finds out she’s getting proposed too). Facebook dropped it. And this trend  has continued as changes are met with periods of retraction and often silence.

Had they started with a dialogue, listened and implemented ideas they may have been able to drive the tool forward in a positive, accepted way that grew the community.  

Acceptance. Give me the tools to put up my own gates on every piece of content.

Facebook has gone through the first 4 stages of grief, or in this case, evolution – it’s not unique to them and frankly with a site so big it’s to be expected. And things are good for Facebook, it’s growing at an insane rate, loved for the most part, driving business for companies and the sky is the limit. So let’s open it up. I’m ready. But first I need a change.

Make open be something on my terms. I’m fine sharing that I have a profile, I’d like to have my coworkers and colleagues join me, to share with them and even let the world open. But I need to get the right to decide what and where. I need Facebook to accept that not everything on my page goes out.

This doesn’t mean I want to be able to ‘untag’ myself from photos and content. I want my friends to see the silly face photo another friend took when we were stuck at the airport. But I don’t want everyone to see it.

Let me, let us all opt content in such that friends see everything (like they do today) and my ‘limited’ profile sees what I add. New tagged photo from Mexico? I do nothing and it stays hidden. New tagged photo from the European meeting? One click and everyone sees it.

And don’t just do this for photos – let me use the same filtering concepts you give me for brand pages on my status updates, events, etc. When everything I post can be selectively controlled I’m ready for the world to see my page, or rather, the page I let them see.

This week Google introduced a new feature to AdWords – search funnels. Search Funnels measure the sequence of searches made by a visitor over time and leading to a conversion. This means that rather than attributing a search to just the last keyword, which can often be the second or third click made, you see the whole history (assuming of course that the user didn’t clear cookies or change computers).

Example click path

-> Weight Loss Programs (’first stop’) 

-> Supported Weight Loss (’second stop’)

-> Weight Watchers Trial (’last stop’)

When put together this is a powerful tool for helping advertisers understand how campaign elements work together to create a sale rather than just focusing on the ‘last stop’. This becomes essential in optimization as the ‘last stop’ approach often results in turning off important influencers and actually reducing sales without knowing why.

This will revolutionize search

While search funnels are by no means new and several enterprise tools have offered it for years, having this open to every AdWords advertiser with conversion tracking enabled is a game changer just like Google Analytics changed how the world tracked and optimized.  Right now there’s a limited number of sites with access to these deeper level insights and that’s helped them lead while others have turned off ‘poor performers’. As a no [additional] cost option, this will allow everyone access to understanding the relationships that exist, or don’t exist, in their AdWords campaigns. Once these relationships become clear sites will have a whole approach to investing in keywords and measuring optimization just like one gets when they adopt a life time value or long term customer metric rather than single order.

Expect competition to increase for broad terms

Today advertisers are hesitant to heavily invest broader terms that “don’t perform” but since many categories take evolutionary steps with users starting at a high level and narrowing in over time, search funnels will represent a huge change. Once advertisers are armed with sequence data it’s likely that we will see search competition increase as advertisers move to address the keywords that are creating those future sales. Of course we may also see a decline in the specific keywords which are being given too much credit as well.

The concept of  “conversion rate” will evolve

Google Search Funnels also bring in some other useful features like campaign insights, impressions, and time to conversion from the initial click. Under the ‘last stop’ measurement methodology conversions generally occur fairly quickly in a number of hours, perhaps a bit longer. Once sites start looking at the long term funnel the very idea of a conversion rate will be shifted. Sites currently tracking their sales daily are limited by the idea that people work in quick windows but when the full story is unfolded it becomes clear that people are taking more time than reports are giving them credit for. Longer conversion times impact across the board from how long you save carts to when you send out abandoned checkout emails.

Hopefully more to come

There are of course some short comings to the tool that will hopefully be addressed down the road and you will certainly see other analytics tools talking about. Mainly you are limited in what is tracked — ads must be on Google’s network, within 30 days and through paid search. This means you won’t fully understand how a third party campaign influences search, if user’s are migrating from different search platforms or if organic is influencing the process. Hopefully Google will address this in time and bring in more data points to address a more “360″ approach to the campaign funnel equation.

Get all the details at http://analytics.blogspot.com/2010/03/new-in-adwords-search-funnels.html

Study social users and you’ll immediately find that what they’re looking to be engaged with through interesting content, events, photos and yes, contests. Contesting has long been used by brands looking to participate in user based communities as it offers a simple way to build discussion and potentially even capture customer data.

Of course with thousands of brands competing for the attention of the hundreds of millions of social users it’s easy to get lost in the dust, or even worse, turn a good program into a disaster with a logistical problem. So before you start in on a contest of your own here are 5 tips to get you going in the right direction.

1. Contest frequency is as important as prize value.

While users love the big prizes these are your fans and they want to participate. Brands that understand this successfully capture a lot of attention and day to day growth by giving away something here and there rather than waiting months to do all inclusive, super expensive giveaways.

Alternate between the big giveaways and the simple ones. Depending on your brand a t-shirt can get nearly as much response as a premium product. And the more often you give, the more people look.

In the example above Hot Topic drives great fan response and keeps people logged in by handing out movie tickets and other small ticket items one at a time, randomly.

2. Keep your contest on facebook, use apps to extend it.

While it’s easy, and generally a good idea, to do a simple video, photo or even “like” contest you want people giving something back to you and you don’t want to force them to leave your page to do so (that would reduce the interest and buzz). Whether it’s a few pieces of data, a survey response or virally spreading the giveaway, the basic contests are limited and you have to go jump outside the box to get richer tools.

Wildfire is one of the more popular apps offering a variety of features from basic data capture through to a fully co-branded sharable experience. This comes at a cost but if you’re expecting a larger response you want the email optins, the fans, the branding space.

Just don’t try to force people through long forms or to share the contest, never works in the long term.

3. Spell out all the details in your head & then to the user.

Individually people tend to be forgiving but in mass they can be easily upset and downright underhanded. You want your contest to be airtight so everyone has a good experience… fans take these things very seriously and confusion leads to disgruntled response, emails and other unneeded negatives. Keep it all positive and airtight so no one feels cheated in the end…

To be sure you’re got think your contest through at length yourself and then share it with a half dozen co-workers to see what they think.

• Is it easy to enter? If so, is it easy to game?
• Is there a way to figure out who entered? If not how will you get an answer?
• Do people know who can enter and who cant?
• Are the rules easily found to clarify things? Are they broad enough to cover an issue? Fraud? Cheating?
• Do you have a way to contact the winner? That is an important one.

4. Take advantage of profile targeting & avoid upset users.

Since contests are rarely open to, or intended for everyone when it comes to ads or a post to your wall this feature is truly invaluable in facebook contests.

Use profile targeting (country / demographics) wisely and you can minimize upset fans who are not able to enter. This becomes essential as your page grows from country specific to global and fans feel left out.

You can also accelerate your growth finding well suited users and driving them over to your page. And since you’re fan page is where the contest takes place people can fan you in the same ad – double win.

5. Don’t “set it and forget it”

Your first few contests will have hiccups and users always have issues. Don’t leave your fans hanging and guessing… jump in and help. This not only solves problems but enables user to user assistance as fans find a solution and share it with others. There’s nothing worse than turning your computer on after a long weekend to discover the great promotion you did failed. Your users will be on 24×7, don’t forget that.

And remember to always K.I.S.S. (Keep it simple, stupid). Just like no one reads an entire web pages, users get bored with long posts, want to find a simple method and want a simple answer.

This is the golden rule of just about anything in social but even more so in contests. People’s attention spans online are short, as is their willingness to put up with barriers or issues. When you want to get people involved you want to get a lot involved and the easier it is for everyone to participate the more will.

As a final suggestion, never forget about the wall – that’s the most valuable real estate in social marketing and where you should be aiming to get. So in every giveaway be sure you’re aware of how your promo can, or can’t get you in that space.