Marketingeasy Internet Marketing Explained » social media

A Marketer’s Guide to Pinterest

Lucio Dias Ribeiro — Mon, 14 May 2012 01:47:19 +0000

Pinterest is a Virtual Pinboard with over 11.7 million unique monthly U.S. visitors in January

Every time there is an online phenomenon there is rush from businesses trying to figure out what to do next.

One of the most recent phenomena is Pinterest, which received an interesting infographic animation by MDG Advertising .

In the video it is possible to get some understanding on demographics, growth and potential to expand inbound traffic from Pinterest. Did you know, 60% of the social network users are women and 80% are between the ages of 25 and 54? Another interesting fact is that Pinterest generates more inbound traffic to websites than Google +, LinkedIn and YouTube combined.

In addition to information, the video provides some useful tips to show how brands can use Pinterest.

Retail dominates engagement on Facebook

Alan Long — Tue, 08 May 2012 06:08:21 +0000

The Australian Facebook Performance Report for March 2012 reaffirms the understandings gained from the January report. In that report we highlighted the tactics and strategies used by some of the country’s most successful branded Facebook pages. Key among them was Facebook Advertising, that is experiencing enormous growth in popularity globally, the use of promotions and competitions to maintain engagement and build fan volume and the involvement of fans in developing the content with authentic and open conversation.

The ranking for March 2012 was steady amongst the five leading industries with FMCG Snackfoods having the highest volume of growth with over 300,000 new fans (‘likes’) over the four weeks of March. Retail oriented industries take up five of the top six positions, with Retail – Grocery & Alcohol being the big mover from the previous report thanks to the addition of brands such as 7-Eleven and Baker’s Delight to the analysis. This coincided with the demise of Air Australia / Strategic Airlines in mid-February, causing Travel – Airlines to move down to seventh position.

The addition of CUA in the Banking & Financial Institutions industry supported its one position upwards move to the ninth most followed industry. All industries grew their volume of fans (‘likes’) highlighting the Facebook users willingness to engage in mutually beneficial support of specific brands that relate to their lifestyle and how they view themselves.

click to view larger table

The highest relative fan growth was experienced by some of the less followed industries Travel – Accommodation (+20.9%) and Pharmaceutical (+14.5%), while Automotive increased by 13.0% and the most followed industry, FMCG – Snackfoods, was able to increase their fanbase 11.9%. No surprise that the two fastest growing industries also experienced the highest engagement rate, as growth was underpinned by promotional and marketing activities across a multitude of brands, Travel – Accommodation with 6.1% and Pharmaceutical with an engagement rate of 5.2%. Retail – Grocery & Alcohol and Automotive also had standout engagement rates of 4.4% and 4.1% respectively in highly competitive industries with strong promotional and marketing activity support driving the performance.

Data for this report was collected on February 28, March 6, 13, 20 and 27. Please review the methodology at the rear of the report for a clear understanding of each metric. To download the current report and be notified of future reports go to w w w . f a c e b o o k . c o m / f a c e b o o k – r e p o r t to register.

16 tips in dealing with crisis on Facebook

Lucio Dias Ribeiro — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 22:59:02 +0000

Facebook hands every user a megaphone, it can be very challenging for businesses to manage their image if something goes wrong or if they find a very vocal user. But just as social media makes marketing more authentic, it also enables businesses to respond to crises in an especially effective manner.

A recent report by Altimeter has revealed that globally most companies have adopted social media without adequate ongoing management, leaving them open to alarming exposure and potentially uncontrollable risk.

The trick, of course, is knowing what to do and when. Here are some tips for using Facebook to manage different types of crises:

Figure out what the problem is. Assess the nature of the feedback and then determine the validity of the feedback.
Before you say anything on social media, take into account everyone who could be in your audience, not just the people you know for sure are in your audience. Think about any media representative? Any client or supplier? Remember, not everybody thinks exactly the same way you do.
Before you open up any type of social media forum, have guidelines in place that lets people know that certain types of speech aren’t going to be tolerated and that the platform is being moderated. It also gives you directions for different situtation eg. what happens when someone mentions a competitor.
If you find yourself getting emotionally involved in something online, take a step back. Don’t let commenters get you riled up as you could end up saying something that you regret.
Think about who is doing your social media postings. An intern may be comfortable using Facebook and Twitter, but are they the right person to be representing your brand online? It is easier to teach someone who knows your brand/business about social media than it is to teach someone who only knows social media about your company.
Set up (but review constantly) multiple administrators on all social media accounts just in case you can’t get in touch with someone when you need to – or they leave the company.
Make it easy to do the right thing when you are setting up your policies.
Own a mistake and do it quickly. Don’t try to hide from it. It’s not going away.
Have a friend or an editor check things out. It might seem funny to you, but it may not be to everyone.
Understand that you can’t control social media. Instead, you can prepare for. Be ready to react and take ownership when something does happen.
Don’t be insulting or come off defensive. All it takes is one bad post to create a social media nightmare.
Remember, most of the time is not personal.
Have your PPC campaigns ready to go in case you need to intercept uninformed users to any website with your version of the facts.
Have you media person trained for Social Media videos and responses.
You DON’T need to have the last word.
Engage customer services and corporate affairs at the begin. They WILL help you.

Cheers

Lucio

Alarming report: Brands leaving themselves exposed through social media mismanagement

Lucio Dias Ribeiro — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 22:24:57 +0000

The report, released 5 January 2012, highlighted that in the global proliferation of social media adoption, enterprise companies (1000 employees or more) had an average of 178 social media assets, with varying degrees of management. Such large numbers of assets present considerable coordination issues, but of more concern was the revelation that only 25% of companies offered training to their employees. The result – uninformed representatives engaging with customers on behalf of brands.

Another key failing highlighted was the lack of a business strategy – while 70% of global brand managers stated that their social media efforts met their business objectives, only 43% had a strategy in place detailing how.

“This report validates our concern that there is a considerable lag in the perception of social media as a serious media channel”, said Lucio Ribeiro, Managing Director of social media agency, The Online Circle.

“We consistently see companies, big and small, leaving themselves open to risk. Social media is not a playground. You can also waste a serious amount of money aimlessly ‘playing’ with social media!

The industry has ample intelligence and experience. Combine this with powerful insights into online behaviour, and sophisticated management tools and metrics, and we’re getting very savvy. It’s almost reckless not to be taking this environment seriously.”

Social media crisis costs to business

Symantec estimated (July 2011) that the global average loss from social media gaffes for business is $4.3million (USD). Their survey of enterprise companies found that the top three social media problems that led to crisis were:

too much information shared by employees in public forums (46%)
the exposure of confidential information (41%)
an increase in exposure to litigation (37%).

Over 90 % of survey respondents who experienced a social media crisis also incurred costly consequences including:

reduced stock price (average cost: $1,038,401 USD)
litigation costs (average: $650,361)
direct financial losses (average: $641,993)
damaged brand reputation/loss of customer trust (average: $638,496)
lost revenue (average: $619,360 USD)

In an early report, Altimeter indicated that social media crisis has been on the rise since 2001, yet 76% of these could have been averted with ‘proper’ social media investment (August 2011)

“We’re used to being approached to help recover businesses from crisis as a result of them not managing their social media effectively,” added Ribeiro.

“While individual details are protected, I can say that our work alone has addressed many online brand protection issues that have cost businesses many tens of millions of dollars. We’d rather such otherwise well managed brands adopt the cheaper, more effective and less damaging strategy of being on the front foot – to be on top of their online presence through good management early on.”

The social media experiment is well and truly over

Confirming that the ‘experimental’ period with social media is over, apparent laggard Proctor & Gamble finally conceding last month that Facebook and Google can be more “more efficient” than traditional media (January 2012) with the layoff of 1,600 staff. This social media trend is not about to slow down.

“Given our extensive experience in mitigating crisis through responsible social media management, we feel a sense of urgency in better informing brand managers,” said Ribeiro. “We’ve just released the latest training Social Sessions: Responsible Social Media, to advise brand managers of industry best practice: what we deal with on a daily basis. At a minimum, we’d like to see managers focussing on these five key areas…”

Top 5 things brand managers should be managing in social media now:

A social media strategy based on business objectives aligned with appropriate metrics and goals
An annual social media audit plan including, as a subset, regular Security, Design and Function testing (SDF)
Staff social media Policy and Guideline documents, along with moderation guidelines for daily moderation of assets (owned and earned)
Staff training and certification for regular asset managers (owned, earned and pirated)
A crisis management plan including risk assessment, escalation procedures and contact detail

Twitter’s New Page Design Targets Brands

Lucio Dias Ribeiro — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 05:45:06 +0000

A popular discussion in the office today has been around Twitter’s new interface design and its move to attract a wider audience.

Twitter yesterday released a new page design that incorporate a friendlier user interface, which offers more opportunities for brands to promote themselves. The new Twitter design offers brands the capabilities for a cleaner and more emotive look and feel, with the potential to appeal to an audience previously intimidated by the Twitter format.

The major layout changes for all users – now consistent across web and mobile – include moving the timeline to the right hand side of the page, and allowing media to be displayed within tweets, rather than confined to an often messy URL and then redirecting users from the timeline.

The new look standard Twitter page for The Online Circle client Cadbury Dairy Milk Australia

At first look for brands, the most useful changes seem to be in the ability to promote rich media tweets to the top of the timeline and take advantage of an increased header presenting a banner-style space. The addition of rich media within the tweets, especially the promoted tweet which will fully display the content, allow for a better display of brand personality and presence. Interesting to note, this brings Twitter more in line with current offerings of Facebook and Google+.

The new look branded Twitter page, for 1 of 21 partners involved in the launch: Coca-Cola.

The new features for brand pages were released in partnership with 21 brands including Coke and Disney. Twitter state “We will slowly roll out enhanced profile pages to a wider audience of brands in the coming months”. At this stage the changes seem to be only available randomly once the application is downloaded, even with logging in and out.

More info about the changes to the interface:

Twitter services are now arranged intuitively across 4 sections: Home, Connect, Discover, and You. Home is simple and similar to the original design. Connect makes follows, mentions, retweets and favourites more accessible. Discover is a new customised section that ‘learns’ about users search habits: collating content of potential interest to users under hashtag search terms used prior. You is the new profile page, that more clearly displays lists, favourites, follows, interests and rich media.

We’ll keep you updated with further opportunities for brands. For now, download the app (iOS or Android) for your new Twitter, and read more about the standard changes: http://fly.twitter.com/#

Facebook rolls out secure browsing changes. Here is how to save your app

Luis Fernando Tinoco — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 05:01:09 +0000

It came with five days of delay, but today (05/10) Facebook has followed its roadmap announced last May and rolled out important changes to apps and brand pages tabs.

This set of modifications only affects apps’ background coding – there is no interface change (visual) or new user facing feature, and for this reason it is not getting much media attention.

But the Facebook changes are drastic and, in simple words, will make you app unusable if not followed through.

Just test it yourself.

This morning, a number of high profile pages were presented with the warning below instead of their glossy app tab.

Facebook Apps on non-secure server are now being blocked for a big number of users

The main breaking change is that all apps have to be stored on secure servers – those with a valid SSL certificate installed.

From now on, when a user with secure browsing (HTTPS) enabled, and that is the default setting affecting the majority of people on Facebook, lands on a tab stored on a non-secure server, the warning above is presented.

Even though savvy users may find a way around it, there is no easy link to proceed and access the app anyway.

More than that, Facebook hasn’t ruled out banning the app altogether, even for users not on secure browsing, as the safety of personal information is more and more sensitive to the social network.

“We may announce other steps in the near future that will limit the distribution of Apps on Facebook that do not support Secure Canvas or Page Tab URLs”, the company has announce on its Developers blog.

If your app has been impacted by the secure browsing issue, the solution is not too hard to implement.

The 2 steps – The Online Circle‘s suggestion to accomplish the fix:

Purchase of an SSL Certificate and installation on the server where the app is stored (or migration of the app to a secure server);
Update of the apps settings on Facebook to reflect the new secure URL.

The secure browsing change is not the only breaking modification introduced by Facebook today.

The other changes are more likely to impact only complex apps, but may still be causing your tab to malfunction or totally disappear.

The links below will provide plenty of resources and documentation to understand the issues and act on it when appropriate.

And this is not all.

A new 12 months schedule of major changes has also being announced. The mark-up coding language used by hundreds of thousands of apps around the world, FBML, will be no longer supported from 1st January 2012 and totally phased out by 1st June 2012. So if you want to keep your audience engaged and protect your investment on Facebook apps and landing tabs, go on and make sure your provider is up to date with the rapidly shifting platform changes happening on the world’s biggest social network. Or drop us an email at The Online Circle, we would love to help your page!

Facebook next on the hit list

Lucio Dias Ribeiro — Tue, 16 Aug 2011 05:36:29 +0000

THEY are at it again, fresh from attacking the Syrian’s Ministry of Defence website the notorious hacking group Anonymous has announced that their next target will be the social networking giant, Facebook on the 5th of November.

The group of hackers has claimed participation in nearly every recent prominent hacking attack of this year. They have successfully executed attacks on 70 law enforcement websites and the Sony Playstation Network.

This recent interest in Facebook may be a result of the organisation’s recent announcement that it plans to create its own social network site called AnonPlus. After the group’s Google+ account called “Your Anon News” was taken down, they began fleshing out AnonPlus.com that has been described as a “new social network where there is no fear…of censorship…of blackout…nor of holding back.”

But an Anonymous spokesman said that even heads of the group were unsure how seriously to take the threat since the organisation doesn’t have a strict command structure and members usually mask their identities. “I found groups of people who say we absolutely are and have a trick up our sleeves, and others that say it isn’t us and that this is stupid.” said the spokesman.

But, as with all Anonymous messages only time will tell if this announcement is real, fake, just a message made by a single member to rally the rest of the real Anonymous troops or just a “keyboard hero” that claims to be from the infamous organisation.