Archive for October, 2012
Facebook, You’ve Failed Us
Oct 31st
By Neicole Crepeau, Contributing {grow} Columnist
There is an unsettling buzz about the future of Facebook. Some analysts report that Facebook usage is declining, or at least slowing in some parts of the world and if that is true, it is a problem of Facebook’s own making. The company has made two critical mistakes: It stopped focusing on core customer needs and it has ignored its business partners.
First, serve your users
Facebook is foremost a place to connect with family and friends. That was its premise at the beginning and it is the reason most people are initially drawn to the network. Secondarily, Facebook provides a place for self-expression. Thirdly, it provides a place for users to discover content. Yet, for some years, Facebook has failed to effectively innovate on any of these fronts!
As Facebook has moved through its IPO, it has increasingly lost focus on serving its primary customers. Instead, it has been sidetracked by the need to monetize its user base through advertising and to extend its influence outside of Facebook itself, via its Open Graph protocol. That distraction is evidenced by repeated privacy snafus — Facebook erred on the side of data gathering and data use, at the expense of its users’ privacy, thereby weakening their trust.
No doubt, it’s a fine line to walk: making money while providing a great, free service. But it has worked for Google. For all Google’s faults, it has steadfastly remained an ever-improving search engine and has easily kept the number one spot. If Google failed to be a good search engine, it would lose its user base and therefore advertisers. Their revenue depends on a great product. So does Facebook’s.
Facebook is a subpar utility
Facebook’s user interface has always been subpar. It’s amazing that a company so successful has been unable to focus on creating a stellar user experience.
It hasn’t offered significant new user-focused features in some time. Ticker and Open Graph were clearly built more with an eye toward data gathering and opening up additional promotional avenues rather than improving the user experience. Users weren’t crying for Facebook to automatically report the minutiae of their lives on the Ticker. And while personalization sounds good, when the result is websites using your interest information to promote certain deals over others, personalization is just another form of advertising.
If Facebook were truly focused on their users, they would have found new ways for us to find our friends online and connect with them in the moment. They would have helped us find new friends with similar interests. They would have given us greater control over what appears in our feeds, instead of forcing us to rely on Edgerank, which is used to serve advertiser’s and Facebook’s interest over ours. They would have implemented something akin to G+ Circles ages ago.
The back is turned on business
Facebook also should have focused more effort on their business partners and helped them better connect with consumers in innovative and fun ways. The missed opportunity on this front makes me especially sad.
Zuckerberg and his gang spent so much effort getting businesses to build Facebook pages, amass followers, and create tabs and apps for them. They have managed to make us all believe that a Facebook page is practically a requirement for any business, and that having a large number of followers is the badge of a “real” company.
But they’ve been slowly undermining businesses who have invested in these pages. They changed the structure of pages and took away the ability to make a custom tab the default landing page. They’ve always restricted the ability of businesses to reach customers directly via Facebook. And they are using Edgerank to reduce visibility of business posts while simultaneously telling page owners they can pay for greater visibility. Their efforts are designed to push businesses to pay for advertising on the platform.
Facebook sold us on “engagement” but failed to provide businesses with tools and methods to truly engage consumers. While Facebook touts comments and likes—and its Timeline has delivered increases in those—what ultimately counts is whether people go to their own website or eventually make a purchase. Comments and likes don’t mean more money.
Some third party companies, like Wildfire, have entered the Facebook app market, providing tools that work within the limited confines allowed by Facebook. Yet, Facebook could have developed exciting new tools itself and created interfaces that enabled businesses of all sizes to easily create custom tabs and application to reach consumers in ways that were exciting and desirable to those users, while also beneficial to the businesses.
For example, when Facebook Social Actions came out, I thought it created some interesting business opportunities for letting users express their individuality in a way that happens to also increase the likelihood of click-throughs to the business website. A win-win for users and businesses. But now, the feature seems all but abandoned by Facebook.
Yet, with a little effort, they could have offered an interface to help businesses of all sizes create social actions without having to hire a programmer.
If Facebook was really dedicated to better serving customers, they would have a research group that would have come up with ways that businesses could interact with customers, ways so compelling that customers would promote or advertise these business themselves—because it made them look good, feel good, got them swag or discounts, added new features to their Facebook page, or was just plain fun!
Instead, Facebook has chosen to focus on features that benefit advertisers over features that truly benefit users. It’s chosen to focus on fairly traditional advertising, which users hate and businesses find largely ineffective in the social space. Facebook has turned its back on the businesses that have invested in pages and left them to vie for visibility with the same old standby of posting pictures and comments. In so doing, Facebook is creating its undoing.
Neicole Crepeau is the Senior Marketing Manager at Vizit Corporation, and blogs at Coherent Social Media. She’s the creator of CurateXpress, a content curation tool. Connect with Neicole on Twitter at @neicolec
The ultimate content marketing challenge
Oct 30th
The other day I was a witness to content marketing murder.
I was eating breakfast in a hotel dining room which was partially occupied by a BNI networking meeting. A local marketing “expert” was describing how he propelled a new dentist’s office to the top of the Google rankings through his content marketing genius. His story went like this:
“I found that one of the most popular search terms in the dental category was asking about dental care for children. So we created three videos answering those questions. Then we made very small changes to those videos that resulted in 50 more videos. By placing them in many online channels, we actually created 300 different content placements from the original investment in three similar videos. We now own the first nine spots on Google for this search term.”
Here is the sneaky little secret of content marketing. You don’t need to have the best product or service to win. You don’t need to be the best marketer to win. You don’t even have to create the best content to win. You just need to be first and overwhelming.
This is something that bothers me about the SEO-driven content marketing system. There seems to be such a huge advantage to the first-mover who creates a steady stream of content that I’m not sure there is a cost-effective way to catch up. I know some commenters will say that the key is to create even better content. But we all know that better content can’t win if it can’t be found in the first place.
So here is the ultimate content marketing challenge — what if you DO have the best product but you’re second to market? How do you cut through the persistent clutter of determined SEO gamesters to even have a chance in the search ranking war? What if you’re very late to the party and you’re getting your ass kicked?
Image courtesy BigStock.com
8 ways blog writing is unique
Oct 28th
There are many great writers who have unsuccessful blogs. Here’s why. They may be great writers, but they are not great bloggers. There’s a big difference. Here are eight ways that blog writing differs from how you might write in school or at work.
1) Headlines matter. A lot.
Nobody is going to sit by the fireplace with a glass of wine and relax with a good blog post. Blog readers are SKIMMERS. More than likely they are scanning their inbox or blog reader to figure out what posts are worthy. So a headline that says “My views on soap” or “Thinking back” are not going to cut it. You have to GRAB ‘em and make them read. Here are characteristics of great headlines:
- Catchy
- Descriptive
- Accurate
- Contains keyword
- Tweetable (short)
Also, any headline that indicates a numbered list is going to attract more eyeballs. Busy readers like lists.
2) Write upside down
In school, we are taught to write linearly. A beginning, a middle, an end. That does not work on blogs. You have to tell the ending first. I call that writing upside down. Busy readers are going to be bored and frustrated if you don’t tell them exactly why they are there and what the pay-off is. So start with the end … and then explain it.
3) Keep it short.
You have to EARN the right to go long. If you are Malcolm Gladwell, you have earned the right to go long. If you are just starting to build your audience, don’t challenge them with long posts unless it is something extraordinary. Somewhere between 500 and 1,000 words is golden.
4) Use sub headings
A sub-heading is like a mini headline – like what you see above this sentence. Subheads draw attention down the length of the blog post and breaks up the block of gray. This is especially important in a challenging reading environment like a smartphone.
5) Use your original voice
In journalism school I was taught to keep my “voice” OUT of my writing. Just stick to the facts. The best blog writing weaves your personal narrative into the discussion and lets your personality shine. When somebody wants to write a guest post for {grow} I challenge them to write a post that ONLY they could write. Dig deep. Be you. That is the heart of originality and that is the source of blogging success!
6) Keep it RITE
This is easy to remember. Try to make every blog post R- relevant, I – interesting, T – timely and E – entertaining. If you can do that consistently, you will be creating share-able blog content.
7) Be conversational.
Throw the rules out the door. Write like you speak. Even. If. It’s. Choppy. After you have written your blog post, read it out loud. If it doesn’t sound like you simply talking to your audience, lighten it up. Just tell them the story.
8) End with a question
Twitter for president. A {growtoon}.
Oct 26th
Join the growtoonists each Friday for a humorous take on marketing, social media, and current business events.
Kacy Maxwell is a guy who loves his work, family and a good challenge. See more of his cartoons at EverythingIsMedia.com.
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