Facebook Notes Replacing Blogs?

I've been comparing three corporate blogs that we manage, one for SAP, one for McAfee, and one for VMware.  The blogs are technical and its been challenging to drive significant traffic to the blogs.  In addition to traffic, we also report on number of interactions and links.  

The comparison is especially interesting since the SAP blog is actually a set of Facebook Notes.  We created the blog on the SAP Crystal Fan Page.  As we would expect, the level of interaction on Facebook Notes is much, much higher than the level of interaction on blogs.   What we can't track on the Page right now is how many views each post gets.  According to my research, the per post analytics for Pages is only available to authenticated Pages with more than 10,000 Fans.

Since we only have 5,000 Fans for the Crystal Page right now, it seems like we may not be able to get the per post analytics for several more months.

In the meantime, the interface to create Facebook Notes is improving.

Although the ability to dramatically improve interaction is enticing, the lack of analytics and SEO optimization of Facebook Page Notes is going to hamper migration from blogs to Notes for some time.  Wordpress and Blogger will remain the primary platform for short pieces of corporate news distribution in the coming months.  However, I feel that the lure of interaction metrics will eventually tip the scale in favor of Facebook Notes.  However, that may not occur for several years and by that time, there may be a better blogging platform with improved features to foster interaction.

Process Versus Individual Craftsmanship

On my way to the airline gate at Honolulu International Airport, I stopped by the newsstand and picked up a copy of  Shop Class as Soulcraft by Matthew Crawford.  This turned out to be a wonderful little book about the value of different types of work.

Crawford makes the point that many types of office work involve repeating small, discrete tasks.  Often the work is boring and doesn't challenge people.  For some types of office jobs, the work resembles an industrial assembly line.  Despite the lack of a moving conveyor belt, many office jobs are reduced to a discrete, repetitive task such as inputting numbers into a computer or filling out forms.

Crawford's point is that many manual jobs such as motorcycle repair or installing electrical wiring involve a craftsman-like approach that allows the same worker to start and finish the job.  Such jobs start with the identification and understanding of a problem and require the same person to develop the solution and execute on the solution to completion.

Modern office jobs may break up the problem analysis, solution development, and execution into different people.  For many workers, this segmentation makes the execution job less fulfilling. 

Although this is a trend, I also believe that a parallel trend is to give office workers greater autonomy, allowing them to contribute to more steps in the entire process.  

Even though Crawford's book deals with abstract concepts of workflow, I think that it would be good reading for any person developing complex social media campaigns.

Dangers of iPhone Apps in Marketing

My sister recently started using Foodspotting, a new location-based social networking platform based on food and pictures.  The browser-based application looked great.  Foodspotting hired Egg Haus to produce the iPhone app for service.  Egg Haus is an interactive advertising agency in San Francisco that has many large clients.  Unfortunately, when I went to download the iPhone application, I noticed that the Customer Ratings gave the application two out of five stars, based on 2,651 rating.  Wow, this is kind of a bummer for Foodspotting.

I decided not to download the application.  This is a case where the ability to have customer ratings is giving the site and business a negative image.  If Foodspotting didn't have an iPhone application, they might enjoy an improved image.  Not only is their web site better designed than the iPhone application, there is also no obvious way to rate the web application.  

Foodspotting should engage in a big campaign to collect private feedback from a large group of online feedback prior to releasing the next version of their iPhone application.  By testing their product in a public area with ratings, they are creating a public image problem for themselves.

People Leaving Facebook Over Privacy Perception Problems

People are leaving Facebook due to concerns over privacy.    Mashable ran a survey that showed that 30 percent of people were thinking of leaving Facebook over fears that the company might share their personal information.  In total, 43 percent of the respondents indicated that they might leave Facebook due to privacy worries or confusion about the large number of changes Facebook is making to their privacy settings.

Some of of my personal friends are leaving Facebook.  Yesterday, I got this message from surfergrrrl,  another surfer in Silicon Valley.

Because Facebook no longer respects the privacy of my data and doesn't allow me adequate control over its use, I'm deleting my account. When Disapora comes online, I'll probably give it a go.

I'm still on Twitter,  LinkedIn.com, and blogging my surf adventures

Aloha

After I asked surfergrrrl about the situation, she sent me this email:

i was irritated that facebook made changes that took some of my private information public, forcing me to opt out to reprivatize it, but the system's so complicated to control now that i'm not sure i got everything. i made changes after i read this in the NY Times.

but then I read this and found I'd missed some things.

even today, when i went in to delete my data before deleting the account, i found a few random corporate "friends" that i couldn't figure out how to remove. i was hoping fb would fix all this, but they don't seem to care. so now I'm waiting for diaspora.

Influencer Marketing Applied to Twitter

Among the large global brands we work with, some social media marketing programs have evolved to resemble public relations programs. 

We're dividing work on Twitter into two different buckets for 1) influencer marketing and 2) customer marketing.  To directly reach the customer, Twitter management services involve building the follower base and putting product and company information on the feed.

Using Twitter for influencer marketing involves identifying people with the greatest reach to the right target audience.  For example, a Twitter influencer list might consist of 20 people that have influence in a specific industry such as enterprise software for iPhones.

The influencers can be found by analyzing the online use of three groups people:

1. Employees at the company
   
2. Partners, resellers, trainers
3. Industry experts that produce many Tweets, blog posts, or forum posts.

Once the influencers are identified, there are a range of PR and social media techniques that can be used to build a strong relationship.

Influencer marketing on Twitter is an evolution of Twitter feed and content management.  It's only in the last few months that we've seen significant contracts that focused specifically on influencer marketing for Twitter.  I expect this portion of our business to grow significantly.

Why is Social Media Not Public Relations Today?

I've got questions.

Over the past year, dozens of tech companies in Silicon Valley like Cisco, McAfee, SAP and VMware  hired me as a social media consultant.  I got contracts with their product marketing or global marketing groups, not their public relations department.

My first question is, "Hey, I'm a PR man working at a PR firm.  Why isn't this contract with the PR department?"

Many of my Silicon Valley marketing friends asked me a very similar question, "Should the responsibility for social media be handled by PR or product marketing?"

Friends at Google, HP, and Oracle asked me this question and until today, I always said, "social media should fall under PR."

Then, my friend, a bigshot in PR at HP, challenged me.  He suggested that I look at marketing services as either customer marketing or influencer marketing.

I looked through a year's worth of social media service contracts and categorized activities as either customer marketing or influencer marketing.

Excluding monitoring and strategy development, more than 70 percent of social media services bought in 2009 were for customer marketing.  My work on blogs, Twitter and Facebook was primarily designed to first attract and then communicate with customers.

"Aha," I thought.

Influencer marketing, getting people from the community to create unique content for us, was only a minor part of the services sold in 2009.  The activities to make information go viral are still very much in development.  Since Page One focuses on B2B social media, our 2009 clients were primarily interested in publishing their marketing information on sites they controlled.  This meant that we got paid to manage Facebook Fan Pages, blogs, and Twitter and filled these channels with information that was directed at the customer.

However, there appears to be big changes in 2010.  Already, our clients are asking for more activities that create interaction and target influencers for content creation.  Recent contracts have balanced customer marketing and influencer marketing at roughly 50 percent for each type of activity.
Perhaps by the end of 2010, we'll see influencer marketing comprise the majority of social media activities.  If this happens, I expect that I'll see more contracts with the PR departments of Silicon Valley companies.

ITMemos, a New and Free Resource for Buzz Campaigns

ITMemos is a new free service that provides information on technology awards, speaking opportunities and editorial opportunities.  Although there are many other services out there, ITMemos is free, supported by ITDatabase, a research tool for tech industry marketing and PR professionals.  Over the years, I've used a number of PR tools and services to track awards and speaking opportunities.  I've found all of them lacking.  ITMemos is a nice, concise listing of events and opportunities that is both useful and free.  In addition to the web site, ITMemos also offers a free bulletin service that automatically sends you updates by email.

Social Media Listening Software

Here's a nice summary of 26 tools used for social media listening.  At Page One, we're paying for Radian6, eCairne, and Sysomos.  However, I often find myself turning to Google search first.  It's fast and the search box is right in my toolbar.  In the last project we did for SAP Business Objects, my colleague Susan also relied on manual searches within forums and sites like Facebook.  One of our clients is using Cymfony and having some problems getting it to produce the types of reports that are useful for social media.

Related to monitoring is response and interaction with the online community.  Recently, I've been going back to the basic PR approach of finding a small number of highly influential people in the social media space and focusing interactions with these people. 

If anyone has experience with social media listening tools, please send me your experiences or leave a comment below this post.