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It seems like every other day, Facebook has been redoing old tools or introducing new tools to Facebook (follow Facebook marketing solutions for some of the new tools and updates for developer APIs). It’s been both a curse and blessing – having constant updates and having to constantly relearn how to use old Facebook tools. Facebook Insights has been revamped again, and here’s my attempt at explaining some of the new additions and some of their limitations.

Reading Facebook Insights (from the main dashboard)

Facebook Insights from the main dashboard of an anonymous medium-sized Facebook Page

While many “analytic experts” feel it’s safe to simply make decisions based off of the main dashboard, it’s paramount to drill into your data to really understand what’s going on. Facebook offers in their insights a dashboard, but it only becomes useful when used in conjunction with the 4 other areas of insight offered by Facebook: “Likes”, “Reach”, “Talking About This” and “Check-Ins”. I’ll be going over the main analytic from the main insight dashboard.

Talking About This: One of the biggest obvious changes to Facebook is the “talking about this” metric. This metric is viewable for any Facebook page you like, regardless of whether or not you have insights or not. If you are logged in to the page, this is reflected in the green line in the graph above. One thing to be aware of though is that this metric reflects seven days; therefore, while each person “talking about this” is unique, even though it might seem as if you have 5 people talking about something every day for a week, it could have been the same post talked about once for the course of seven days. I’m not too sure why Facebook decided to implement their metric this way, as it can be easily misinterpreted, so be careful when reading the green line.

Page Posts: The purple circles on the bottom line indicate your number of posts on a given day. Facebook encourages more posts, as they positively correlate this to getting more people talking about your page. While the more you post may positively correlate with more people talking about your page, updating Facebook too often may cause others to “un-like” your Facebook page. Nobody likes following a spammy Facebook page, so post in moderation and with consideration.

Weekly Total Reach: This metric, similar to the “talking about this” metric, takes into consideration everybody reached within a 7-day period. This takes into consideration Facebook Sponsored Stories, your own Facebook ads and updates. By simply looking at the peaks and valleys for this Insight, an obvious drop can be observed between November 12 and 13. Take a minute to consider why it might have dropped.

No guess?

Nothing actually caused it to drop. By examining Facebook Insights, you can see that the last time anybody talked about this page was on November 6th, which is shown as a steady line over 7 days.

In conclusion, you can see how Facebook Insights can be easily misconstrued. When trying to interpret your insights, it’s necessary to check the other insight pages (“Likes”, “Reach”, “Talking About This” and “Check-Ins”), to see what post might have caused someone to “un-like” your page, versus counting on your main dashboard. Each Insight tool should be used in conjunction with the other tools to portray a clear idea of what you’re interpreting.

In 2009, more than 50% of US employers blocked social media use, and 8% have even fired staff over social media misuse. Companies are treading carefully on social media use, by limiting the number of “tweeters” are allowed to tweet for the company (Telus for example), while others have completely banned social media and even personal emails (HSBC for example). Here are the top 3 reasons why your company is blocking social media:

1. Kids say the darndest things, and so do employees. I admit, this is very true. An example of such things said/done on social media is during the Domino Pizza crisis where two employees created a pizza with mucus and boogers, “fake delivered” it, and posted the video on YouTube. Darned. But on a closer look, the social media crisis would have occurred regardless of blocking social media outlets. The employees could have uploaded their YouTube video at home (which I think they did) and not during work hours. If somebody has something they wanted to say, they’d just as easily and likely do it while at home. Domino’s later figured that it was essential for them to start a Twitter account to address the issue, as the majority of complaints were via social media.

2. Productivity suffers. A University of Melbourne study shows that social networking in the workplace actually increases productivity. I admit, I check Facebook on an almost hourly basis at work (which is luckily part of my job description)! In addition, if your employee wasn’t checking social media online, they’d probably be Google-ing something else or taking a nap on the toilet. A lazy employee is a lazy employee, with, or without social media.

3. Social networks are dangerous and consume bandwidth. Yes, social media consumes bandwidth, but so does emailing – we still do it. Printing consumes ink and paper – we still do it. Social media? We should still do it. It’s cheaper than printing and can get your message across just as effectively as emailing.

And besides the point that I could ramble off with a dozen points on why your company should find value on being active in social media, there’s really one that blows the rest out of the water:

There’s a conversation on social media – quite possibly about you – and you’ll have no way of engaging in it or defending yourself in it without being in social media yourself.

Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the art of optimizing your website so that it takes the highest possible spot on a search engine result page (SERP). So say for example, if you look up “DDA” on Google.ca, you’ll get the “Developmental Disabilities Association” site as the top result on the SERP, and not the Delhi Development Authority or the Danish Design Award websites. Marketers carefully select keywords and optimize their site to receive these top spots on the SERP.

News Feed Optimization

Much like SEO, News Feed Optimization (NFO) is an optimization process to get the first spots on a news feed (such as Facebooks, but will undoubtedly expand to other platforms as social media proliferates). Many marketers believe this will replace SEO, as the world wide web, becomes the world wide social web. Developers and businesses are looking of ways to have their content frequently show in their fans’ news feeds, which is completely outside and irrelevant to Google search rankings. It is an effective way to have your fans organically promote and advertise for you instead of constantly having to “push” content yourself.

SEO versus NFO

As more of the web turns from just a web to a social intertwining web, one would believe that NFO becomes more and more important. I agree on that, but some marketers believe it is more important than SEO. Let’s logically think through the process of where SEO and NFO might be used. Say I’m interested in buying a new computer, what factors would I need to consider in my purchase? Price, brand, speed, all sorts of dimensions. Where would I look to find this computer that fits my requirements? Likely through searching. Would I use Facebook for my computer purchase? Probably not. If somehow some tidbit was optimized on my news feed and immortalized to the time I was about to buy a new computer, that might change things. News feeds are dynamic, and can easily be ignored and forgotten. For example, the average amount of unique comments I receive on my Facebook status updates is 6, and I have approximately 600 “Friends”. That’s 1% of all my “Friends” that are engaged in my on-goings on Facebook. That, coupled with the fact that approximately 0.2% of Facebook fans ever do a repeat visit on a page they’ve “liked”, indicates there’s general under-engagement on Facebook news feeds (or maybe just mine). Optimizing your news feed might get you that extra day of recognition, but who will really remember it one week from now? Of course, different industries that require more marketing impressions before a successful conversion is made will value that extra long-forgotten subconscious impression, but in general, don’t spend so much time on NFO when people will be looking for you on search engines instead.

In a 2011 article from the Harvard Business Review titled “What’s Your Social Media Strategy”, a myriad of ideas both recast and new are presented. One particular anecdote presented in the beginning of this article is rather insightful, shown at the top of the infographic below in quotations. Although this article doesn’t specifically focus on e-banking, and rather than premises the rest of it with a poignant anecdote, it’s been quite an inspiration for the infographic below, with the help of eMarketer.com (click here or the graphic below for a larger version):

In regards to the Harvard Business Review article, it provides some insights on categorizing different social media strategies into 4 distinct segments – not necessarily exhaustive though. The four are: 1) predictive practitioner, 2) creative experimenter, 3) social media champion and 4) social media transformer. HBR offers a tool to help evaluate your strategy for social media.

The reality of the situation is that organizations rarely will fit perfectly into one of the four aforementioned roles (elaboration on roles at the bottom of the infographic), but instead float in and out of them. Some organizations will begin as creative experimenters and move into predictive practitioners and so forth.

The article seems to suggest that companies should begin as predictive practitioners though, which doesn’t seem to be the most intuitive starting point. Predictive practitioners are very focused in their areas of specialization for particular purposes, and thus, can miss other social media opportunities and synergies within an organization. For example, during the first year of my MBA, I was exposed to some interesting methods of social media in HR. And in fact, the article alludes to the extensive internal communications, organizational behaviour and change management aspects prevalent in the role of a “social media transformer” – it’s something not only you embrace, but your entire organization as a whole.

The implications to marketers in this article is that successful marketers should be moving towards the goal of becoming “social media transformer”. What this article overlooks; however, is the fact that not all organizations and industries are equal and not all can become social media transformers. While B2C businesses can quickly and easily engage their customers on social media channels (such as American Express’s Facebook page), this does not work for small B2B businesses with specialized parts that never see end customers.

Overall, the article is an interesting read as the author suggests businesses need to create specific strategies aligning themselves to one of the 4 previously mentioned roles. But in doing so, one should be cognizant that not all businesses and industries react to social media the same way.

Back in July, I was asked this question about SEO:

Is it better for SEO to select only one category for a blog post, or can you select multiple categories?

Blogs, such as this one, can select multiple categories to belong to. For example, this blog post is categorized under “SEO” and “marketing”. The good part about being in multiple categories is that a visitor can easily find what they’re looking for. Say for example, you’re writing a blog post about a luxury automobile that’s being released only in Europe. Your blog might categorize your blog post on this car under “luxury”, “automobiles” and “foreign news” say for example. So a visitor coming to your blog can easily find your blog post by filtering for any of those categories. Or, if they’re just interested in foreign news, they will be able to find all your posts tagged under that category with one simple click.

That was the good side; the bad part of multiple categories is that you can be penalized by Google for categorizing a blog in too many different categories. By having the same content filed under multiple areas, it may be classified by search engines as duplicate content. When search engines find the exact same content in multiple areas of your website, there is a chance your site may be penalized in search ranking.

In conclusion, used sparingly, tagging categories to a blog post is fine. However, by tagging a blog post into multiple categories for the purpose of increasing SEO when someone is searching one of your categories is a poor idea for visibility.

The past two evenings I’ve been instructing for the adult media relations class at BCIT as a guest instructor. I’ve been asked by the classes to share my presentation, so I’ve included it below via slideshare with notes.

The presentation consisted of many brief slides that acted as talking points to actual social media cases, which might make each slide confusing to somebody who did not attend the actual lecture. For that reason, I am including below some of the speaking points, videos and cases used in the actual presentation (apologies, some of the information that was shared varied from class to class).

The first video that was shared was Social Media Revolution 2011. For people who are inclined to learn more about the evolution of social media, there are other similar videos with insights on the social media-scape of 2009 and 2010.

The presentation for the evening focused on 4-types of social media. YouTube (and online videos in general), blogs, Twitter and Facebook. The first case I shared was on Perez Hilton and Will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas. This brought up the topic of the role of the blogger (or microblogger in this case) and the ethics behind it. Are you operating as a civilian reporter or a civilian vigilante? Are you reporting professionally or reaping personal gains through your role as social media “reporter”? Ultimately, what are your motives in social media and how does this reflect on your credibility and integrity? Keep in mind that there are no real checks and balances in social media – you can be your own boss and no editor will be clamping down on you.

Next (slide 8), we briefly analyzed a case on one of the most famous Google Bombs – rigging the billion dollar Google search algorithm to return the official biography of President George W. Bush from the White House webpage, when searching for “miserable failure” on Google. This is a show of social media used against you. If you don’t use social media, others will use social media for you, and sometimes on you.

On slide 10, we moved on to discuss the case about United Breaks Guitars (click the link in slide 10 to view the video). The takeaway from this case was how quickly and easily an innocuous song can transpire into a PR nightmare. While this case originated in social media, within weeks it moved into mainstream media.

We also went on to discuss the Domino’s Pizza YouTube crisis on slide 12, which escalated via YouTube. As Domino’s spokesperson said in an interview with the New York Times:

We realized that when many of the comments and questions in Twitter were, ‘What is Domino’s doing about it’ ” Mr. McIntyre (Domino’s Spokesperson) said. “Well, we were doing and saying things, but they weren’t being covered in Twitter.” By Wednesday afternoon, Domino’s had created a Twitter account, @dpzinfo, to address the comments, and it had presented its chief executive in a video on YouTube by evening. (Note that @dpzinfo’s old tweets have been deleted and is no longer an active account)

Finally, the last case that we discussed was the Andrea Wallace and UCLA case. I’ve written a blog post about it before, which can be viewed here.

In closing, we discussed best practices for pitching to the media, both social media and traditional media.

I know the above slides and abridged notes are somewhat vague, but for those that were present at BCIT – I hope this blog post serves as a refresher to all the topics covered.

Currently, I’m in Hong Kong, and will be staying at the W Hotel Hong Kong - a “small” upgrade from my modest apartment back home. Hong Kong, a city of culture based on a dichotomy of opulence and impoverishment, can best be described as the bastard child of Vegas and New York. The poor, the wealthy, and the bad traffic – all of that and much much more. Ironically, instead of simply enjoying the luxuries of Hong Kong on my vacation, I’m questioning just exactly how marketing of luxury products and services differ from other products and services.

Luxury goods can simply be defined as non-essential products or serviced, often sold at a higher ticket price. Having some clients work within the realm of luxury brands, I sometime get asked the question whether or not marketing (or advertising) is really essential to the sales of their luxury brand? After all, doesn’t advertising your brand on the side of a bus or on a corner of a magazine cheapen and dilute the brand? Quite honestly, it may, but with careful consideration, it does not. Advertising is essential for your luxury brand for the following reasons:

1. Luxury brands need to refresh salience. They’re often purchased less, and for that reason require more “touch-points” (or impressions) before a purchase, as consumers fall in and out of a category need.
2. Even though luxury brands are expensive, they still need to reach broad audiences. Although the wealthy as individuals may purchase more luxury goods, there aren’t as many wealthy people. Therefore, large quantities of sales come from the everyday person completing the occasional transaction for a big ticket item (for this reason, media that only targets wealthy people might not be of much advantage).
3. Your luxury brand is luxurious because it has a differentiating edge that the common brands don’t have; however, the public cannot know this without your advertisement. It’s great to be the best in your class, but without sufficient marketing, no one will know or be attracted to your brand.
   

   Unless you tell people your hotel is underwater, nobody is going to know to book a room at an underwater hotel

While some marketers believe that a luxury brand’s clout can carry its sales, it often isn’t enough when it’s the everyday person buying your products (excluding veblen goods, yachts and the likes, of course). Keep in mind that marketing of luxury brands is just as important as marketing of non-luxury brands.

There is no such thing as bad publicity except your own obituary.

In a integrated marketing communications class, one of the topics we delved into was the concept of “no such thing as bad publicity”. At face value, that line is quite false. You open the papers and read multiple stories about how this business or that business is facing a crisis, how someone just lost a limb, or some other crisis. From a public relations standpoint though, you can always shine light on bad publicity to enforce the good. We’ll take a look at a time tested and true case, the 1982 Tylenol Case.

1982 Tylenol Murder Case Study

In late 1982, Tylenol was linked to the cause of death for a myriad of people in the Chicago area. Unbeknownst to Johnson & Johnson, cyanide was slipped into the bottles of Tylenol causing people who took the pills to die. Johnson & Johnson issued a nationwide recall of Tylenol and worked with police enforcement to alert the public to avoid consuming Tylenol. Johnson & Johnson further offered replacements to people who had already purchased Tylenol.

To me, this is the worst type of crisis possible as it involves the loss of human life; however, Johnson & Johnson manages to turn this crisis into an opportunity to shine. The Washington Post gave positive coverage to Johnson & Johnson for how they handled the disaster and applauded them for their response. Johnson & Johnson further established strong relationships with the FBI and Food and Drug Administrations. Despite losing a significant amount of market share, the next year they rebounded past their previous mark, by introducing capsules in a new triple-sealed packaging.

Crisis Communications

Disasters are something that I unfortunately have to deal with quite a bit in my current field. And although sometimes the media is simply fishing for a sensationalized fantastic story full of drama from a disaster, I’m able to avoid these stories (sometimes) by remembering a few key tricks:

1. Ask yourself this – is there something good to promote? Say for example there’s a fire in one of your office buildings (no questions about it, this is a crisis), instead of communicating all the monetary damage that the fire has been caused, can you bring light to your buildings efficient fire-fighting protocols? The fact that nobody was hurt? Or maybe how well practiced your employees are in the case of a fire? The story doesn’t have to be about how terrible the flames were and how much of the building will cost to rebuild, but it can be about how well the situation was handled.
2. Where is the media? Instead of simply picking up the phone and answering a call, can you make sure you’re on site, at the scene of the incident to ensure that the media is not picking out your staff or employees for quotes? Do you have a protocol in place for the given crisis? If you don’t, you better get one.
3. Can you tell the story first? With the advent of social media, it’s easy to get your story out there before someone else gets the story out. Take for example the plane landing in the Hudson – a spectator got the story out before the media did. If you can get your story (or press release) out first, it will be the one that the media follows.
4. Finally, ask yourself, what is my relationship with this media outlet? I’ve found that reporters who you have a rapport with, will wait on you and do their best to cover the story as accurately as possible. Others on the other hand, will do the best to make your story seem as newsworthy as possible.

Hopefully those tips will help you avoid and manage your own crisis communications!

First, a quick apology for a lack of blogging lately. My past few weeks have been fraught with helping to organizing the CT200h launch party at Regency Lexus, moving, and assembling IKEA furniture. And now to the blog post about our favorite, Rebecca Black:

YouTube “sensation” Rebecca Black, went from unknown to trending on Twitter overnight, thanks to her hit YouTube single “Friday”. Not because it’s an amazing song, but because of the poor singing and utterly hopeless lyrics (sidebar: my personal favorite lyrics of her song are “Tomorrow is Saturday / And Sunday comes after…wards / I don’t want this weekend to end” – talk about brilliance).If you haven’t heard “Friday” before, the below is what propelled Rebecca to a life of both fame and fortune (as shown by her “1-week and now a millionaire status“).

Now after viewing the above video and the hundreds of Rebecca Black parodies on YouTube, I began feeling terrible for young Rebecca. A young not-so-talented artist’s career, ruined and ridiculed for the rest of her life. Or is that the case?

I Want to Know Who Does Rebecca Black’s PR

Yes, the title of what I want to speak to next is exactly the above – I really really really want to know who does Rebecca Black’s PR! After being ridiculed as the “world’s worst singer” and having her video dubbed as the “world’s worst video”, one would think there would be little chance of survival for Rebecca; but Rebecca has managed to show her face alive and well in public with both style and grace.

First, Rebecca shows up on Good Morning America for an interview. She also announces during her interview with Jay Leno that proceeds from her song Friday would go towards Japan. A nice move to make people hate her a little less.

Rebecca then goes as far as to making videos on FunnyOrDie.com making fun of her own music video. Here are a couple:

Rebecca changes her overnight one hit wonder status, to a sustainable and on-going revenue and status generating machine. Instead of fading away into darkness after being ridiculed (a la taciturn Tiger Woods style), Rebecca brands herself as someone who isn’t afraid of making fun of herself. Instead of crying at this would-be public relations mess, she turns it into a party. As much as I hate her song, I admire Rebecca Black for her tenacity and her ability to make fun of herself and stand strong in the face of challenges. What a brilliant move that keeps her moving towards positive publicity.