Lessons from the Classroom: Facebook Business Pages, Blogging and Twitter

It began simply enough. The goal was to be able to show my Internet-based Marketing students how the new FB Business Profile Pages, Blogging and Twitter all serve different purposes to further the brand. Oh, and while doing that work in how to develop the content for each in order to achieve that mission. And...um...how to know when to use which and when not to...and do it in less than an hour.

So, here it is:

• Facebook Business Profile = Engagement
• Blogging = Expertise
• Twitter = Value

I know. That's not quite enough info is it?

Facebook Business Profile
The facebook redesign which seemed to be the bane of my students' existence has become a golden opportunity for businesses. In today's social media landscape, a brand that wants to fully engage with their customers now has a way in which to do that -- through Facebook. How? By doing the same things I can do as a person -- connect with my friends, comment on their walls, send messages, posting photos, joining groups...and my friends can comment on my posts and engage in discussions. Many others can see and take part in these discussions hence my emphasis on engagement.

Take a look at how Magic Hat is ENGAGING with their customers on their Facebook Profile Page



When you first go to the Magic Hat FB page, you come to this tab (Did I mention above that businesses can control the "landing page"?) Lot's of great pics and videos that show an exciting and interesting brand (which is what Magic Hat is all about).





So they caught my attention above. And now on the Wall I, as a consumer can comment on their status posts along with other fans and Magic Hat can respond to me directly. (Which they've done)





Is Magic Hat fully there yet? No. But as a local Vermont-based Company they are really taking advantage of a great opportunity to provide a space where they can engage with their customers and their customers can engage with the brand.

Should Magic Hat have a FB page at all? YES. Their target market is there. Their brand image fits with the FB landscape.

How should they measure their ROI? Number of fans is one simple way, but the true test is engagement. How many people are engaging on the page? How many in discussions? On events? Just like ANY site, Magic Hat should set clear objectives that are measurable so they can determine the ROI for their use of FB.

Blogging to build Expertise

My point of view on blogging is that it is not about selling. A blog is about showing your customers and potential customers who you are and what you are about. It boils down to creating a sense of expertise. Why would I, as a customer, trust YOU? Some great examples (also from Vermont, of course) include Seventh Generation's Blog: The Inspired Protagonist. I LOVE this blog. It really highlights why I have built a trust for Seventh Generation.

Here's another by local Web Development and Marketing Firm Union Street Media. If you don't have them bookmarked and aren't grabbing this firms FREE expertise (in the form of a well written, team blog with timely, important information) you are missing a great opportunity. So, why would they give this information away for FREE? Simple. Their blog shows their expertise. As a reader you learn to trust them and when it comes time to do something with your website, or enhance your Internet marketing strategy or focus in on blogging, who are you going to remember? Yep. They got you because they have shown, more than titles and puffy language, that they know their stuff.

Building Value with Twitter
Perhaps the biggest challenge right now is to address how something like Twitter can help in a brands marketing strategy. There are many words of advice out there so I'll add to the chaos (grin) with my thoughts.


There is NO VALUE in engaging in what I call "Follow Fever". You know what that is. It's a sickness that has struck many a Tweeter -- how many people can I get to follow me and how fast can I do it? Like a race. Mass follow tools are sprouting up like so many weeds. At the end of the day if 5,000 people are following you and you mass follow them back, how has that helped to increase your brand image? How does that help you reach your target market? At the end of the day you have a bunch of useless Twits (yeah, not a typo) following you for no good reason other than they might have follow fever too.


So, STOP with the follow fever. Start by assessing your brand image and how you will use Twitter to ADD VALUE for your customers, because at the end of the day, that is what it is all about.

Why would I follow anyone? I follow the people I do for specific reasons:

1. They provide valuable information for the work I do. People including (but not limited to) @rohitbhargava, @prsarahevans, @bethharte and @dannybrown and locals @gahlord, @cresmer and @rnadworny all help me do the work I do every day.
2. They expand my business and local network. Do they share my professional interests? are they in my local geographic region?
3. Are they my students or students at Champlain College?

Who don't I follow?

1. Anyone who is a "self-proclaimed" expert/wizard/maven/guru...etc.
2. Anyone who doesn't tell me who they are.

For a business, the value of Twitter is that you can reach out to customers who are passionate (either really really happy...or really really unhappy) in a way that brings value to the relationship. ComcastCares is a great example. Customer Service via Twitter. Provides VALUE for the customer. JetBlue is another example that provides the customer service access via Twitter. Locally we have some great examples of value creation through our Print News Media from Seven Days and the Burlington Free Press who are both utilizing Twitter in interesting ways. This was clearly evident today in Vermont during the veto override of the same sex marriage bill. Historic day in VT and Twitter is how I followed the process thanks to @shaytotten.

Another great local example of a company that is adding customer value through Twitter? Magic Hat! Their recent "Twitter Taste Live" event where they had several of their brewers available along with a Beer critic Tweeting Live responses to customers questions as they all sampled beers from the Spring Fever Pack. Um WOW! Great way to provide extra special value. Not only do I get my beer, but I get to Tweet about it with other people and learn great information.

How do you measure the ROI on something like that? How many people participated? Was there a spike in sales prior to the event? How many people blogged about it? What kind of "buzz" (yeah, I had too) did it create?

So there you have it. Why I think FB is for customer engagement, Blogging is for building expertise and Twitter is for creating customer value.

One final point that I made to my students was that if your brand is using any combination of these then they should all be linked to each other.

Social Media Analysis: The blogs of two would be "top dogs"

In honor of Blog World Expo...which I am NOT attending (follow the Tweet Stream here) I thought it would be fun to add another in my series on Social Media and the Presidential Campaign and how they are using their "official" blogs to communicate with you and I -- the people of this great nation.

First and foremost let's get really clear on what a BLOG is.

According to Knol (Googles response to the academic backlash against Wikipedia) poster Duncan Riley,

A Blog is a website that consists of text, images, media objects and data, arranged chronologically and underpinned with a content delivery system which provides the ability to deliver content frequently and with little skill. Blogs have a strong focus on building meaningful social connections or virtual communities on any and all subject matters.

This works pretty well for my purpose today, which is to examine the blogs of Barack Obama and John McCain. That last sentence, in particular about "building meaningful social connections" is pretty key.

How are the campaigns using their blogs? How are they using technology to "build meaningful social connections"? Well in past posts I've highlighted how both campaigns are tossing out the MySpace and Facebook links and creating social spaces within their own sites. I've show how the campaigns are fumbling (like the text message VP announcement of Obama) and how they've nailed it such as McCain's site redesign or Obama's fun ring tones. It leaves the sense that the campaigns are innovative and are using technology to leverage their messages in new and engaging ways.

Or not.

First of all staffers are doing the blogging. Ok. I get it. Barack and John are busy guys. They have TV appearances and the same speech to deliver in every "battleground" city all over the country (well, not here in Vermont). They have snarky ads to approve (snarky, my new word of the day...had to work it in here), and fingers to point (ok, now that's me being snarky). There's no time to draft a blog post that personally reaches out to your constituents and the voting public. Those ads are just plain good enough. Um. Yeah.

I've been subscribed to the Obama Twitter for some time and I get a tweet every time there's a speech in some town (usually in Michigan) directing me to their site to watch the live speech. Ohhh Ahhh.

So why am I being so cranky about this? It's because it drives me crazy that they aren't using their blogs in a way that bypasses all the traditional political idiocy. Want some examples? Of course you do!

Obama

1. Voices for Change: Teresa in Michigan. A political sob-story about a troubled American. Nice touch at the end of the post -- a big red DONATE button.
2. Barack Obama on the Terrorist Attack in Pakistan. Copy of their official statement. Same thing I'll hear on the news channels and at those speeches.
3. Democratic Radio Address: Senator Obama on the Current Financial Crisis with a link to the radio address (wonder why this one didn't come through on my Twitter!).

McCain

1. Weekly Radio Address with link to the audio file.
2. Report on a McCain-Palin Event in Minnesota. Yeah. Picture of a big crowd. Update urges me to go to the action center to "take action".
3. Report from a McCain-Palin Event in Iowa. No pictures of this one.

Not one of these things brings me closer to understanding either candidate. I'm being refed and recycled the same stuff I can get anywhere else.

So what SHOULD they do?

Leverage the technology of course. Write something PERSONAL and PERSONABLE and not handled. For example wouldn't it be nice to go to the blog and see that Barack has written something like this:

Between speech stops and trying to figure out how to best address the folks in *insert struggling town here* as we watch the financial crisis unfold. This isn't about fluff like "from wallstreet to mainstreet". This is a financial crisis unlike any we've seen and it will be my job to take the reigns and make a difference. How will I do that? We need to protect the taxpayer and the homeowner. We need to make sure retirement plans are strong. I plan to examine.....insert actual stuff here... Well...times up. The bus has just pulled in to *insert town here*.

So that just took me about 2 minutes.

Imagine going to the McCain blog and reading something like this:

And you folks don't think I know how to use a computer! I'm very troubled by the economic issues we are facing. Just a few days ago, I said the fundamentals of our economy were strong. And then overnight we face perhaps the biggest financial crisis of our country. Like you I am saddened and more than a little frustrated. I believe in free markets and do not like to have too much regulation, and yet, there are times when we have to step in and now is clearly one of those times. In my speech in *insert town here* in the next hour, I'll be outlining what I think should be done. Yes there will need to be regulation and yes there will need to oversight but at the same time it is vital we strike a balance.

But I don't think I will ever see any of this.

Why?

Because they are afraid. All of them -- you know the them I reference. The handlers and advisers and dare I say PR and Marketing folks (shame on you!) who want to control everything. Script it all. Avoid room for mistakes.

Blogs are there to build connection and what these campaigns are doing is just using a space on their website to allow a group of people to write stuff that is all about give me money and here's my new attack ad and here's this sob story so you should vote for us...

Sigh.

No innovation here.

Of course, perhaps there's nothing wrong with this at all and I'm just a naive, out of touch academic who has no real understanding of the political process.

Blogging comes to the Olympics

I signed up to be part of a "social media experiment" kicked off by Marketing Guru Rohit Bhargava on August 6th with a post he wrote calling on volunteers to re-post, re-purpose and link to his Olympic postings.

The goal is not really to promote the games...really (smile). It's a sponsorship gig with Lenovo who has created a site called The Voices of the Olympic Games. It's an international blogging community that is writing about all the different events. Who are these bloggers? Well they are the athletes themselves!

I LOVE THIS. Really. It so changes the event which has for so long been tied to TV, quick interviews after the contest/competition and then odd sportscaster commentary (ick). Although thanks to NBC at their Olympics site I can still watch Bela Karolyi "go wild" for Liukin. Anyway to get the full voices and experiences of different athletes is really great and it's what social media has brought us. No longer do sponsors provide on-site shwag -- they can now create a full online community where the athletes themselves provide the content. Nice.

So I have been lax in my postings to Rohit's information as part of the social experiment. Today I make up for that. Here's a quick synopsis of the things you can read about if you want more depth and more diversity in your Olympic Coverage.

The two blogs to check out are Influential Marketing and the Catchup Lady where you can find a series of great posts that include:

1. Secret Things Only An Olympic Athlete In Beijing Would Know (Rohit)
2. Notes from inside the Olympic Village (Rohit) and
3. Kleenex premiering an Olympic Documentary -- this one is cool because it will be release as a trailer in theaters as Rohit wrote, "Check out the trailer for "Let It Out" below - its actually really good and will be premiering for a limited engagement in theaters in 25 cities starting August 13th across the US. It will also be available on www.letitout.com from August 14th. To read more real athlete's stories, visit Lenovo's Voices of the Olympic Games (link to http://summergames.lenovo.com)!"
4. What the Olympics are All About (Kaitlyn aka the Catchup Lady)
5. Super Fan on the Move -- great shots of fans in the stands from the Catchup lady.

Of course I would be remiss if I don't include links to our own local athlete blogs that are sponsored by local news organizations:

1. Carissa Gump (Vermont Born Weight-lifter) blogging for the Free Press
2. Jaime Brassard (WPTZ Photographer) is blogging for WPTZ

Don't know of any others.

Anyway, that it for another post on the Olympics and Social Media. Oh wait...one more thing...

If you are a facebook user, you should check out the "Bumper Sticker" application. Whole lots of people have created bumper stickers that include Olympic Athletes -- several nice ones of Michael Phelps. Now that's viral eh?

Writing a blog post on a Blackberry

Funny story. I wrote what follows on my Blackberry this morning using my thumbs and a QWERTY keyboard...

Yep. My foray into "Crackberry" land continues. I'm
experimenting with Blogger and my Blackberry. Why? Um...well I
suppose I could pontificate on the importance of academic pursuit of knowledge...but really, if the truth be known I'm killing some time before a massage (grin).

This also begs the question of blogging on an itty bitty qwerty keyboard. Clearly I need a vacation!

However the possibility for on the go blogging and up to the minute reporting is pretty heady. Time for me to do a little research on this area. Good voice recognition software coupled with a Smartphone that has video capabilities and localized "reporting" will be on the rise...and the marketing implications are wicked cool too!

So there I sat in my car working my thumbs in a frenzy. I was quite proud of my post and then I scrolled to the bottom and clicked on "post" then headed into my massage (it was good, by the way).

Forgot about it.

Then tonight as I'm checking up on things I go to the browser in the Blackberry, and there is my blogpost. Sitting there. Not having gone anywhere. Stuck...not even in cyberspace, but more like in no-berry space. sigh.

Perhaps snail mail would work better (grin).

Oh...and that part about vacation? Off I go. I will NOT be trying to post from my crackberry during vacation. Perhaps I'll have a "crack" at it once again when I return.

Welcome to the "New" Academy -- Prof's who use online tools

So I'm not alone. Ok...I knew that really, but more and more I'm reading about College professors in disciplines other than Business (and there are not many of those either) who are using tools like Twitter and blogging and social networking to connect with their students and to write about their own experiences.

Yes, there are many who are playing around with podcasting at iTunes U, but recent items from the Chronicle of Higher Education have provided some other tidbits.

Like the emergent media Prof. who is now posting video on how he uses Twitter, and then there is today's article from the Chronicle where theologist Dr. Brandon Withrow writes about the pitfalls of faculty writing their own blogs -- who knew? Certainly not I!

It would seem that those of us who are utilizing these new tools may be running into some type of "hiring bias" ... hmmm.... better not tell Prof. John Rogate from here at Champlain -- he's created a whole virtual Champlain College in Second Life.

Bottom line, we are out there and we are experimenting and using these tools for ourselves, to connect with students, and to provide insight in the classroom. We have to. We are educators and we not only need to know about these tools, we need to help our students understand the ramifications of using these tools as well.

Teaching about Social Media in the classroom

It is no secret that I'm a college professor who teaches a series of classes in e-Business Management and Marketing at Champlain College. One of the classes I'm currently teaching is an online course that lasts for five weeks. Online Visibility is the subject. Here's the "official" course description:

Creating online visibility for a business, service or product is becoming more complex as more and more tools become available. Moving outside the realm of advertising and building websites, this course will provide students with hands-on experience in using the web to disseminate information about their product or service in this examination of PR-oriented online tactics. E-mail marketing, RSS feeds, news release distribution, viral marketing, and referrals will all be explored and utilized as students disseminate information utilizing online tools.

One of the key components of the course is setting up blogs so that students can explore the use of RSS Feeds, subscription and the effect of linking and tracking key words in order to measure online visibility.

Students create blogs for their business, organization, business idea and even a hobby. Part of the work is learning how to write for the blog, link, track success, and see what happens when others subscribe and mention their blogs.

So this post, besides setting the context for what we are doing and why, is part of the assignment I gave the class. Today I have successfully signed up for almost everyone's blogs and they are ported into my NetVibes. And now I'm doing part two of the assignment, which is to write about each blog and see what gets picked up!

The first blog to get picked up in my Google News Alert for "Champlain College" was Welton Mountain Tech. This blog emphasizes the challenges facing web security. In one of the posts, the blog linked to Champlain College and mentioned one of our faculty, Gary Kessler.

Another blog in the class features a tribute to the Red Sox -- I believe they are a soccer team, right? This blog, aptly entitled Just another Red Sox Fan, portrays the interests and links that one who follows the Red Sox might care about -- the post that provides links to other sites might be useful to some.

Vermont UnBoxed is a blog that supports a business idea of one of the students to have a website where people can order and learn about vermont-made products. While the website is still an idea, the blog is "real" and this post on a local farm stand is one way to highlight Vermont at its finest.

If you are interested in BMW's then the this blog from our resident BMW Ethusiast provides some questions about where to find parts and the experiences the blogger has had with rebuilding and updating the cars.

Another business idea for creating more opportunities for people to find their favorite movies can be found at K Movies. The idea behind this blog is to link it with a website and drive people to purchase movies. While there isn't a website yet, this experiement will surely reveal some of the opportunities and challenges that come with linking e-commerce to blogs.

The world of Online Education is examined in the Continue Your Education blog from Champlain College's own Division of Continuing Professional Studies. One post highlights some student work at the South End Art Hop from several weeks back!
Another addresses the use of Web Analytics -- and links people to one of our other one credit classes in..Web Analytics!

Advice on Online Visiblity comes in many forms. In How to Acheive Online Visibility for your Business the focus is on advice for highly specialized business to business clients so they can augment their personal selling with a push from the web. It's a tough nut to crack for B2C -- imagine the challenges with B2B! Branding is important no matter what, so this post should resonate with many!

What an amazing array of options -- don't you just love the Blogsphere?

News and News...What is News? Or...Pitfalls of "Wondering" on the Web

Have you been paying attention today? I got my first inkling from the Chronicle of Higher Ed in the Wired Campus Blog of the Chronicle of Higher Education: there may be a digitial divide in social networking sites -- Facebook is for the well-to-do, upper middle class while MySpace is for the lower income, immigrants and non-college bound.

The observations actually come from danah boyd, a PhD student who is studying the implications of social networking and she dropped this little social/class bomb in a posting on her blog on the 24th of June. (she blogged today about the reactions that's she's received -- both good and bad).

It's an interesting observation that she makes here but as she says, it is but an observation and her blog essay about it shows that she's still trying to understand if there is something there or not. She provides a brief history and really more of a discussion about the evolution of the two social networking sites. Interesting that in the military, soldiers on on MySpace and officers are on Facebook -- hmm....but actually...this isn't my point about posting this information here.

Rather, I'm really interested in how information gets picked up and spread around on the web and what is NEWS. Where Danah is looking at Social Networking and Teens, my marketing interest is really about "getting the word out".

Two days ago she posts this thoughtful, questioning observation piece, which is more of a "Wondering" than anything else...and she even writes in her blog from the 24th that:

Over the last six months, i've noticed an increasing number of press articles about how high school teens are leaving MySpace for Facebook. That's only partially true. There is indeed a change taking place, but it's not a shift so much as a fragmentation. Until recently, American teenagers were flocking to MySpace. The picture is now being blurred. Some teens are flocking to MySpace. And some teens are flocking to Facebook. Which go where gets kinda sticky, because it seems to primarily have to do with socio-economic class.

In the blog essay she further points out:

I have been reticent about writing about this dynamic even though I've been tracking it for a good six months now. I don't have the language for what I'm seeing and I'm concerned about how it's going to be interpreted. I can just see the logic: if society's "good" kids are going to Facebook and the "bad" kids are going to MySpace, clearly MySpace is the devil, right? ::shudder:: It's so not that easy. Given a lack of language for talking about this, my choice of "hegemonic" and "subaltern" was intended to at least insinuate a different way of looking at this split.

And today, June 26th ...well here are just some of the news sources who have picked this one up -- and they are referencing her research. Interesting. She says herself this is but an observation and a question and she's trying to figure it out. So here's the listing, and some of the quotes from what they are writing about...I expect we'll see this on the nightly news very soon...

• Information Week: "MySpace and Facebook have come to reflect class divisions in American society, according to an informal research project. Since Facebook opened up last September, ongoing press coverage of MySpace as a dangerous place and Facebook's positioning as a home for those with elite aspirations have help create a socioeconomic divide between the two sites, argues Danah Boyd, a Ph.D. student at the School of Information Sciences at University of California at Berkeley. " <-- a least they got it close to right!
• TechNews World, e-Commerce Times: "Social networking sites MySpace and Facebook may seem fairly similar from the outside, but the two sites are increasingly splitting along class lines, according to a new report."
  
• Hindu News, The Age in Australia, The Guardian: "In a paper this week, Ms Boyd said typical Facebook users "tend to come from families who emphasise education and going to college. They are primarily white, but not exclusively". MySpace, meanwhile, "is still home for Latino and Hispanic teens, immigrant teens" as well as "other kids who didn't play into the dominant high school popularity paradigm".
  
• GameShout: "MySpace and Facebook are more and more splitting along class lines according to some U.S. academics. ... Boyd submitted a paper this week ..."
  
• CRN Channel Web: "New research into social networking sites claims to have uncovered sharp online class divisions. The college educated turn more to Facebook, according to the report, while MySpace caters largely for those who leave school early. A preliminary report from a six-month research project by the School of Information Sciences at UC Berkeley carried out by PhD student Danah Boyd found the class divide between popular social networking sites MySpace and Facebook.
  
• BBC News: "Fans of MySpace and Facebook are divided by much more than which music they like, suggests a study. A six-month research project has revealed a sharp division along class lines among the American teenagers flocking to the social network sites.
  The research suggests those using Facebook come from wealthier homes and are more likely to attend college. "

These are just some of them...of course the headlines range from the sublime to the ridiculous such as:

• Facebook for "goodie two shoes", MySpace for "burnouts"
• Still using MySpace? You low-rent good for nothing loser...
• Are Facebook Members Higher Achievers?
• MySpace is Las Vegas, Facebook is IKEA
• Why MySpace is for freaks and Facebook is for preps
• Class war hits social networking sites
• MySpace Is Bart, Facebook Is Lisa

So how does one go from posting a simple observational paper meant to provoke conversation -- and possibly insight among a fairly small group of people to a "published paper" that is a "preliminary report of research findings" or the "result of a 6 month study". Well I guess you start by being a prolific blogger who is seen as an "expert" and then you post your thoughts...sit back and wait... Then watch and see as this is picked up...not just in your backyard but all over the country! and...the World. From New York, to California, to the UK, Australia and India, from websites and blogs to news sites. Of course these stories are also being DUGG....

Does ANYONE check the original source anymore? Do people who are writing actually COMPREHEND what they are reading BEFORE they post?

Danah...good luck. I think this is but the begining of the tide.

Using Blogging to Create Online Visibility

Well, believe it or not, one class is done (Social Networking...see the post below) and another is in full swing. I'm now teaching a class in Online Visibility through our e-Buisness Management program here at Champlain College. This is the second time I've taught it and one of the things I'm learning about teaching this topic is the challenge in writing a blog that is intended to provide information at the same time it is intended to help you get found online.

There's more to it than Marketing text that tells people about your company. The real focus should be about providing information that allows individuals to find out more about what a company does well through the advice they provide. Information that is useful is what will be linked to and will provide opportunity for others to seek out your organization.

Utilizing the right keywords in combination with providing useful information is how a blog will assist your online visibility. Avoid the superlatives and the reprint of the "about us" from your website -- put your energy into something that provides value and it will come back to you through links and the search engines.