It’s that time of year again! It’s time for the PR, communications, and marketing world to look at the challenges and opportunities ahead. It’s time we determine what’s in store for our businesses, our industry, and our way of working.
Drugmaker Merck challenges Facebook after ‘losing’ page
The German drug maker Merck KGaA has begun legal action against Facebook after discovering what its lawyer described as the “the apparent takeover of its Facebook page”.
The webpage is being used by the German firm’s US rival Merck & Co.
Merck KGaA said that the social network “is an important marketing device [and] the page is of great value”, adding that since its competitor was benefiting from the move “time is of the essence.”
This kind of happening has been in the making for a long time and again demonstrate Facebook’s disregards for due process and communication, something fairly typical of social media platforms in general. Somehow, the basic social media rules do not seem to apply to social media companies.
As social media becomes increasingly important to communicate with and engage a company’s constituencies, social media companies will need to be more responsive and accountable, and if they want to attract more advertisers, they will have to implement systems to communicate with their own constituencies, something their customers learned a long time ago.
This event though, illustrates and reinforces the need to understand that an organization should not build their online presence and strategy around the social networks, but around something they have actual control and ownership over, their website and develop their website into an interactive platform. They then should use social media to drive traffic to their website, something Facebook has been steadily trying to curtail.
This legal action from a major companies could benefit us all by making Facebook more accountable
Big Brands Like Facebook, But They Don’t Like to Pay
Everybody wants to be liked. The question for Facebook Inc. is how much advertisers are willing to pay for the opportunity.
Facebook’s estimated market value, now in the neighborhood of $70 billion, is founded on the belief that companies will spend big to advertise on the site. Facebook’s revenues, which come largely from ads, were $1.6 billion in the first half of this year, up $800 million from a year earlier.
But most of its ads were for small advertisers, such as local businesses and small-scale websites, according to comScore Inc. Facebook is under pressure to grow its advertising on a grand scale, and to snag the sort of big brand names who now drive billions of dollars to TV, radio and print campaigns
Social Media, Ethics, Disclosures and FTC
Andy Sernovitz, shares his recommendations on how to stay safe and ethical in social media covering the latest FTC updates, the fundamentals of proper disclosure, and how to make sure your agencies and vendors comply with your standards.
REI: Going Local on social media
REI’s Digital Engagement Manager, Jordan Williams, discussed how they utilize social media sites for each REI store to develop a better local connection with their customers.
A must see for retailers and any company that ventures into social media
The days of low cost marketing on Facebook may be counted
It’s not a coincidence that Facebook first half profits doubled to $1.6B and the trend will likely accelerate. Over the past few years Facebook has been slowly but steadily paving the way for increased profitability
For the past three or so years, most of the changes Facebook has implemented have made it made it increasingly difficult for organization and brands to put their content in front of their “Fans” or as Facebook now calls them “Likes”
It started with the structure of the wall on profiles. We first saw the wall being segregated in two sets of posts with the default view to what Facebook deemed most important to users to the last change in the past month.
The latest little known or noticed change in Facebook “Pages” has big implications. As of September 30, 2011, Facebook stopped allowing pages to communicate to their “Fans” or as Facebook calls them “Likes” via messaging.
The feature that allowed page owners or administrators to send targeted messages into users’ inboxes has been removed, officially to , and i quote : ” connect with your audience in the most effective ways possible” which is through public communication on the wall.
So Facebook says. In reality, it’s been a slow and calculated approach to remove free means of communications between pages and their followers and quoting facebook again, “using targeted Facebook Ads or Sponsored Stories to help grow and highlight your message within the Facebook experience“.
If the past is any indication, we can expect that Facebook will find more ways to curtail free interactions between pages and users as an incentive to use paid Facebook advertising, coming around full circle, back to traditional advertising, only this time with a captive audience…. of advertisers.
Listen Before You Leap
Itron’s Online Marketing Manager, Michelle Jung, and Online Marketing Analyst, Dawn Shrum, discussed how they developed a company-wide listening strategy
Social Media 001: Page or Profile? That is the question
As more organizations get on the social media bandwagon, it becomes more and more obvious that there is some serious confusion as to what type of page they should use for their online presence.
Whether on LinkedIn or Facebook (Google has only allowed a few organization to test the Google + business accounts and is seriously enforcing their policy of not allowing businesses and organizations using personal accounts), users are confused, misinformed or uninformed about the differences between profiles and pages.
Few users read the TOSs and who can blame them, pages after pages of boring legal mumbo jumbo that would put to sleep a toddler on a sugar high.
Not knowing the differences can have costly repercussions.
Before going public, LinkedIn was notorious for enforcing its TOS, especially when it comes to organizations using personal profiles. Facebook was enforcing as well, but with the vastly higher number of users, enforcement was spottier.
One can expect that enforcement will become stricter again in the future as the companies start focusing again on quality versus quantity.
What is the big deal? You might ask.
The big deal is choosing the wrong format can be costly in many ways. Imagine logging on to your page only to find out that your account has been suspended and there is nowhere to turn to have it restored. Imagine having to do the work all over again, rebuild your network of followers, your content, earning comments and ratings.
What figure can you put on rebuilding your social media presence? What is the cost in term of time wasted, lost goodwill, lost followers?
The rule:
Generally speaking (most social media platforms use the same basic principle)
- A “profile” is a “personal profile”, a live individual, not an organization, not a company.
- A “page” in the Facebook lingo is for an organization, company, brand. Public personalities, artists, athletes… when using the account for business purpose should use the “page” versus “profile” for one good reason, they are usually doing it to promote their brand. LinkedIn has its own version of the “page”
Using the wrong format will also limit what you can do.
Due to their original design, pages and profiles have different built in tools and using a profile for a business entity can seriously limit your reach in term of communication, exposure, engagement, measurement and visibility and that’s the subject of an upcoming post.
Intel: Listening, Learning, and Changing
Intel’s Director, Social Media, Becky Brown, shares how Intel is listening, learning, and changing its engagement strategy to better connect with fans.
Marketers want better social media analytic tools
A recent Web Liquid survey shows that although 95% of respondents state that monitoring social mentions is a priority, only 74% have strategies in place to do so.
The most used social monitoring tool is Google Alerts, used by 59% of respondents, followed by Radian 6 with 9% of respondents.
Not surprisingly, only 23% of respondents were satisfied with to monitor social mentions and only 23% are “very” satisfied with their social media analytics tool.
In an environment still ruled by traditionalists driven by traditional metrics, analytics still are the weak link.