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Conversify is a social media marketing agency. We help companies and organizations market their brands, services, products, issues and causes using social media tools. We believe that social media tools are transforming the way we communicate to a much greater extent than the way the web and email changed our organizational landscape in the mid-‘90s. Social media tools are changing the way we interact with our customers, constituents, donors, volunteers, employees, and any other stakeholders in our companies and organizations.

Conversify will help you understand what these social changes mean and will walk you through a thoughtful strategic planning and implementation process to help you integrate new tools into your communications and marketing mix.

Call us and pick our brains. We love the conversation.

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Facebook Raises Interesting Questions

Have you noticed something new lurking on your homepage in the last few weeks? It might be the new Facebook Questions that has been rolled out onto many accounts (officially launched July 28). So, what’s it all about?

It seems that Facebook’s new Questions are, basically, just like Yahoo! Answers or LinkedIn Answers. In short, any Facebook user can ask questions by clicking the “Ask Question” button on their homepage, and the questions are then added to friends’ profiles similar to how one posts something on someone else’s wall.

Here are some features of Facebook Questions:

• Updated Homepage (obviously): Facebook Questions changes the homepage (or at least mine has) adding a new button up at the top of the homepage where you update your status, post a link, add photos, etc. This is apparently rolling out more slowly world-wide. I have custom settings, but I’m not seeing anywhere I had to enable this specifically, and it literally appeared overnight about a month ago (in usual Facebook style) with little fanfare. As well as appearing on the top of my Facebook homepage, it also asks questions on the bottom right of the main homepage although so-far they are seemingly irrelevant. These may be targeted or from contacts and subscribed Pages.
• Polling: Fairly obvious and probably the most useful for business and company Pages. Being able to get an answer to the likes of ‘Which of our new coffee roasts did you like best: Zimbabwe Dark Roast, SerenaGold Organic or Organic Guatemala Antigua?’ for a small local coffee shop with passionate followers has tremendous value. For any business, the ability to ask quick Page questions to glean opinion – and indirectly highlight new popular product etc. – could be VERY cool.
• Photo Questions: Let’s say your out-and-about in your local park, and you snap a quick mobile picture of a dog, but you’ve no clue what breed of dog it is, you can post the picture on Facebook Questions saying “What kinda dog is this!?” and hopefully crowdsource a reply. For businesses, you could post a design you’re working on and simply ask the crowd “What do you think this is?” or “What do you think to this colour?” for instant feedback.
• Question Tagging: Facebook seems to be making a big deal of tagging questions based on category or topic. The plan appears to be to make finding questions/answers an easier and quicker deal by letting you look up posted content on ‘skiing’, ‘Colorado’, ‘cooking’, ‘chickens’, ’80′s British kids TV’ or other questions by relevent topics.
• Question Browsing: Facebook described this as “a roulette-type feature that allows users to browse Facebook’s eventual mountain of Q&A.” Here we have a “Questions about” drop-down menu, under which there’s a feature called “Everything” that lets users sift through Facebook’s questions content.
• Following: You can follow specific questions to get updates and new answers.

Interesting and maybe with some business opportunity, I think you’ll agree.

It’s way too early to tell how widely used Facebook Questions will become. Let’s not forget Google’s Answers (or Buzz or Wave), but it’s certainly got it’s place in the right campaign and it’s coming to a homepage near you. I’m looking forward to seeing what people will do with it.

Have you tried Facebook Questions yet and if so, how are you using it?

Build It, and They Will Come

I want to warn you: If you want your sales to skyrocket or you want everyone to be aware of your product tomorrow, social media might not be the right marketing method for you. I have many VPs of marketing assuming that if they employ social media – and only social media – within a month, they will have a Facebook Page Fan base of 10,000. I point out that only 4% of Facebook Fan pages have a Fan base of 10,000 and above.

One has to have a little history in the Internet world to truly understanding this phenomenon. Let’s use a real life example. Back in the early 90s, if you created a Web page, you were pretty much guaranteed a fast audience. Why?

Here are three reasons:

1. Because there was no where else to go.

Consumers adopt new mediums before advertisers do, therefore the first to market in new technology has an advantage because their more conservative competitors are not there yet. [Tim Bray calculated that there were only 90,000 Web sites in 1995. http://mundi.net/maps/maps_002/]

2. Because new things are cool/attractive.

As with any trend or new technology, social media follows the Technology Adoption Lifecycle. Statistics show that the Late Majority is now adopting social media. The innovators were adopting social media back in the late-90s before the term “Social Media” was even developed.

3. Because they often offer solutions to problems.

I remember distinctly in 1996 going to Barnes and Noble in NYC and not being able to find a book about the political situation in Guatemala. (Don’t think I am all that erudite. I was intrigued by a cute architect who was Guatemalan.) I got to chatting with a fellow customer in the store, and he directed me to a website called Amazon “where you can buy any book you want.” Wow! Over the next 14 years, I have spent in excess of $1,000 annually on Amazon! (Sometimes –ahem- well over.)

The same parallel can be made for social media. When the “Will it Blend?” campaign launched, it was new and exciting and innovative (brilliant, really), and there wasn’t very much else to watch on YouTube. So it took off.

But we have passed that point. Social media has hit mass numbers and now, your conservative competitors at a minimum, have a Facebook Page. You have competition. Just putting up a Facebook Page or sending out a Tweet is not going to get the over-the-top response your early adopter cousins had.

You need a social media marketing plan and implementers of your plan who know what they are doing.

Have you built it, and the people just aren’t there yet? What are you doing to change that dynamic?

What Social Media Marketing Objectives Work

Social media is a phenomenal way to

• Capture an interested customer so you can engage with them later.
• Talk with them (really, they won’t bite!).
• Educate them about your product.
• Turn them into loyal consumers.
• Learn more about your audience.
• Ask them to them tell you why they are loyal and how to keep them loyal.
• Help you build your product, improve your product and innovate in other ways.
• Have your loyal fans evangelize your product.
• Solve customer problems right when they know they have one (customer service).
• Be ready in case something you do produce becomes ‘viral.’