Do you want to be microfamous?

There is an excellent article in Wired’s February issue addressing social media and how it can evolve into, well, something quite introverted. The article uses an example of a Ms. Evans. She started using Twitter as a grad student – with an interest in poetry her updates were topical to what she was interested in. As such, her following grew slowly with people who were interested in similar things. Interaction is frequent, people comment on posts, ask questions, Ms. Evans replies – it’s a tight little community.

Then Ms. Evans gets the idea to post a short, 140 character recipe. Next thing you know she has 13,000 followers interested in food – a slight diversion from her original use for Twitter. As the following grows, something interesting happens. When you see a person with 100 followers on Twitter they seem more approachable. You see a person with 20,000 followers, if you do in fact have a question, you tend to presume the person wouldn’t reply to your question if you did happen to ask it. So you don’t…and social media just becomes, well, media.

The concept applies to Facebook as well. Amass a group of 500 ski enthusiasts and you can talk about the best mountains, the best days, post photos, share stories, etc. Let the group grow to 15,000 and suddenly people are selling ski equipment, posting “lost and found” information, etc. Ironically enough, the Facebook group starts to take the form of a dynamic newspaper! The founder of the group questions how he or she should interact with this new organism – there’s no way to cater to everybody!

Take a good look at your social media presence and ask yourself what direction you want to go in. Is it really that valuable to reach 10,000 Twitter followers if you no longer receive feedback? Do you really want to be “microfamous”? After all, celebrities are constantly complaining about all the attention they receive. Popular Twitter users might not make the television news, but one consistency remains,  the larger audience will always be the less forgiving audience.

Social media advertising strengths

On September 1st comScore released some information stating that social media websites, like Facebook and MySpace, are responsible for over 20% of online display advertising in the USA. As an online marketing consultant living in Kelowna, which is a relatively small town in British Columbia, Canada, social media sites are an extremely valuable tool to make use of when targeting ads to a small region. Smaller cities don’t always have that go to website. The newspapers that still exist often don’t grasp the strengths of the Internet entirely, or haven’t priced their ad rates according. For radio, a website is typically there to  support the station, and in many cases, are often reiterating news based off of partnerships with newspapers.  In a general sense, neither of these mediums have really stepped up to the plate to deliver a powerful online component. TV stations are improving as video becomes more feasible online, but, at least here in BC, local television is struggling.

So if you want to drive local visitors to your website, where can you turn? Facebook has a number of ad targeting features, such as target by connections, or target by birthday, to name some of the newer options. These targeting features can often provide insight into your business. For example, tracked properly, you might find that a specific age group tends to spend more time on a specific page than another age group. To speculate, let’s say you own a flower shop. You run ads targeted at men and women separately, and I can guarantee each group would treat your website differently. The men might be more inclined to look at pre-made bouquets, or may be interested in signing up for “important day reminders” as a safety net, just to prevent forgetting that special day two years in a row. Whereas the women might want to build a custom bouquet, because they already know exactly what they want.

Or maybe, as the flower shop owner, your website only has 1 of these functions. You built a great system to promote your pre-made bouquets, and you notice men from Facebook are converting at a higher rate than women. Not only are social media sites a great way to target your ads to a specific geographic area, but it’s easy to see how targeted advertising can drive sales as well as help your website progress and evolve over time (with the right insight).

Facebook privacy for Canadians

As a follow up to my last two posts regarding targeting options available through the Facebook ads platform, Jennifer Stoddard, Canada’s privacy commissioner, recently stated that Facebook doesn’t meet Canadian privacy law standards. The complaint raised is focused on the default privacy settings of a Facebook account, the collection and use of data for advertising purposes, and the disclosure of personal information to 3rd party developers.

Personally, it’s the information available to the 3rd party developers that worries me. In most cases, we’re openly providing the data to Facebook. I don’t mind that my birthday is posted, and I don’t mind if an advertiser targets me on my birthday. If I did mind, well then I shouldn’t give Facebook my birthday details, should I? That’s a choice I made when signing up to Facebook. For the early adopters, the Facebook applications that run rampant now never existed. At the end of the day, Facebook shouldn’t ever be a burden to it’s users. If it’s too hard to delete an account, that’s a problem. If privacy settings are too complicated or buried, that’s a problem. In my opinion, a Facebook account should be locked down by default. But if that had been the case since the beginning, would Facebook be as successful as it is today?

As far as the privacy commissioner’srequest – Facebook was given 1 month to comply with recommendations. That deadline was on August 17th, and itworldcanada.com reports that discussions between Facebook and Canada are going well. Right now the Stoddard has Facebook’s reponse in hand, and has 15 days to review and reply. I’d like to get my hands on both of these documents…

Brandividuals

A brandividual is a person that represents a company online through their own personal name. For example, Matt Cutts has built a brand for his own name. Anyone involved in web knows his name, you don’t have to say “you know, the guy from Google” to explain who he is. His Twitter account is #mattcutts, not #GoogleEngineer. David Armano of Critical Mass coined the term brandividual and in an AdAge article states:

“For some, the idea is scary — the melding of our personalities with the companies and brands we work for. Call it whatever you want; I believe we’ll see more of it.”

I think he’s right, it’s only going to become more common as social media plays a larger role in marketing. I see it in my own world working with Big White & Silver Star Ski Resorts. I started our Facebook groups a few years ago, and they’ve become a significant part of our web strategy. When there was a couple hundred members (and most were my personal friends anyways) sending mass messages from my personal account didn’t warrant a second thought. Now however, with our Facebook groups collectively sitting at over 5,300 people, when I send out a mass message my inbox is inundated with messages. I didn’t consider this as “building my brand”, so I created Facebook accounts for our resort mascotts (The Loose Moose & The Silver Fox) and now send the messages from those accounts.

It does make things a little more complicated when there’s turnaround within a company, but I also think it makes a company look more transparent and more friendly if they put a face and a name behind the communication.