Digital Minds Forum

Recently, at various events, seminars and even out with friends, I’ve been asked “what’s the next facebook?” and, do you know what, I had no idea!

So it got me thinking, and kept me awake, and then got me a bit frustrated and tired, and then something clicked and I thought “you know what, I think facebook is the next facebook” – because nothing, in the foreseeable future, is going to replace facebook – why would it need to?

So maybe the question was wrong… perhaps it’s about the next ‘killer’ social app? What will be the next new network, toy or tool that eats into our time and becomes part of our connected digital culture? (Read more…)

We’ve made quite a lot of the potential of social media for business on this forum, however, many organisations adopt a head in the sand approach and blanket ban internet access to any social media url. One college I taught at banned their music students from accessing MySpace in college, other organisations are paranoid about the effects of negative online chat or the amount of staff time that they perceive would be wasted Facebooking and Tweeting.

Thankfully not all organisations are so blinkered. Here is a helpful list of social media policies from a variety of companies. You might also find the book Naked Conversations by Scoble and Israel interesting if you’re trying to convince your boss of the benefits of blogging.

Gill Kelley kicked off a discussion about using Facebook in your business recently so I thought I’d share how I’ve recently been using it.

CIM’s Shape The Agenda paper “What hasn’t happened yet. The shape of digital to come” March 2010 states that:

People tend to stick to the same five or six sites that they know and trust. Within these small ‘villages’ the marketer is replacing the shopkeeper – offering the customer things they might not spot themselves….

With people self-selecting the villages they inhabit, marketers need to ensure they have a presence in those places, rather than trying to drive customers to their own sites, which is increasingly a much harder proposition.

What this basically means is that we have to seriously rethink our SEO fuelled “come visit my website” strategies and instead think long and hard about how we can go out to where our people are, where they feel comfortable in a community of trust.

Before you begin I think you’ve got to embrace the new social media paradigm of Giver’s Gain – this is not pushy, hard sell marketing, its about getting alongside customers, understanding them and providing them with interesting, stimulating content and conversation. So you might not end up discussing your own products much at all, instead you could be facilitating a discussion about issues in your industry, pulling together a round-up of all the relevant industry blog posts, filming an interview with a leading guru.

Anyhow, back to Facebook. When I teach social media, most of the students in the room are members of perhaps one or two online communities – LinkedIn (which they see as not much more than a place to promote yourself when looking for a new job – such a shame, LinkedIn has so much more to give) and Facebook (which they see as a place to connect with friends and offering little for business).

Think of your own usage of Facebook. Have you ever clicked “like” on something other than your friends’ comments? Are you intrigued by the pages some for your friends join? Have you got so engaged in a discussion that you’ve started commenting with complete strangers? If the answer so far is no, then I suggest that a) you will at some point soon and b) as marketers you really should start doing just that.

A few ideas for using Facebook for business:

1. Register your Facebook username – I’ve got www.facebook.com/musicademy for my Facebook fan page and www.facebook.com/mariemusicademy for my personal profile. @mariemusicademy is also my Twitter name and the login normally I use whenI comment on blogs – I shouldn’t need to tell you why that all makes sense
2. Start a Facebook fan page for your company/brand. (Facebook stopped using the word “fan” a little while ago by the way. If you don’t know how to start, go to my page and scroll to the bottom left hand corner – there’s a link to “create a page for my business”) DON’T fill it with loads of tedious stuff about your products. Make it fun, intriguing and with lots of industry relevant stuff too. Think about what your customers are likely to want to click through.
   Make sure you have plenty of content before sharing it. You can add photos, video clips, discussions, links to other Facebook fan pages and lots more.
   Once you have some fans (people that have clicked “like” on your page) then any updates you post to the page will feature on their own Facebook wall. How brilliant is that?
3. Use Facebook Notes. Once you’ve got your fan page up and running, you can use it almost as a substitute blog. The Notes function is really easy to use and you can even have it import your own blog from elsewhere so again your blog updates will go straight to your “fans” walls.
4. Promote it – we did a very low key promotion – added it to our “contact us” page, wrote a blog post and newsletter article for our regular subscribers and include a link in each e-newsletter. Plenty of people still prefer to have a weekly e-news from us rather than daily Facebook wall posts. But for those that inhabit the village that is Facebook, its been a really good way of interacting
5. Make sure you update the above regularly and if you’re stuck for ideas, take a look at a previous post I wrote about newsletter content
6. Learn from it – what are people “liking”, what are they saying? Ask them questions and give them feedback.

NOTE – NONE of this is difficult or requires any serious technical or html skill. If you’ve managed to get yourself on Facebook in the first place you can manage the above. Good luck and perhaps share what you have created in the comments below.