Lee Aase | Social Media University, Global (SMUG)

Target Misses on Facebook Page

The Minneapolis Star Tribune reported yesterday on another big-brand misstep in social media, as a firm hired by Target to manage its Facebook page and its “Rounders” program asked its compensated advocates to conceal their identity when interacting on Target’s Facebook group. As Jackie Crosby wrote:

The hubbub began in early October after Siman received a Rounders newsletter as Target was launching a new Facebook page. Like many companies now setting up sites on Facebook and MySpace, Target hoped to get people talking about new products, get feedback and continue to find ways to promote its hip image.

“Your Mission: Try not to let on in the Facebook group that you are a Rounder,” the newsletter read.

“We love your enthusiasm for the Rounders, and I know it can be hard not to want to sing it from the mountaintops [and in the shower, and on the bus]. However, we want to get other members of the Facebook group excited about Target, too! And we don’t want the Rounders program to steal the show from the real star here: Target and Target’s rockin’ Facebook group. So keep it like a secret!”

Target’s vendor, a New York firm called Drillteam, obviously botched this on several levels. It’s bad enough to fail to remind people who are receiving inducements that they should be transparent about it. But to actively encourage your compensated advocates to “keep it like a secret!” and then, as Crosby reports, to wipe incriminating comments off your Facebook page, is extremely bad form.

Target is a generally highly regarded corporate citizen. They ran into a serious problem, though, when their marketers (or at least the vendor they hired) didn’t trust in the good will they had already built.

Social media can be a great way to show the good will you’ve developed, and to grow that good will when you have people who think highly of you sharing their opinions in public. It’s a good idea to provide a place, as Target did through its Facebook group, where that sharing can happen.

Offering inducements for positive comments was a big mistake. As is often the case, the coverup was worse than the original crime. Organizations getting involved in social media need to be absolutely transparent about it. Their first priority should be creating a great customer experience. Then if they create a social media outpost, whether through Facebook or a blog, they should trust that the good work they do serving customers on a daily basis will be reflected in the conversation that ensues.

Attempts at manipulation, and especially aims to disguise that chicanery, will almost always backfire. If Target knew what drillTEAM was doing on this project, then Michael Rubin is right when he says “this is much worse than a faux pas.” And it is an interesting double standard when compared with Wal-Mart.

Andy Sernovitz has further guidance on how marketers can stay out of this trouble, and Kaye Sweetser has the full story; it was her student that broke the story.

In this case it was about six weeks from the time this appeared in on Professor Sweetser’s blog until it made the Star Tribune, but this is another example of how badly done social media eventually will have mass media repercussions.

Technorati: Target, Facebook, drillTEAM, flog, social media, Rounders, marketing

Sorry, Cory: Facebook More Like the Phone than Friendster

In InformationWeek, “How Your Creepy Ex-Co-Workers Will Kill Facebook,” Cory Doctorow predicts Facebook’s demise because

Having watched the rise and fall of SixDegrees, Friendster, and the many other proto-hominids that make up the evolutionary chain leading to Facebook, MySpace, et al, I’m inclined to think that these systems are subject to a Brook’s-law parallel: “Adding more users to a social network increases the probability that it will put you in an awkward social circumstance.”

…

For every long-lost chum who reaches out to me on Facebook, there’s a guy who beat me up on a weekly basis through the whole seventh grade but now wants to be my buddy; or the crazy person who was fun in college but is now kind of sad; or the creepy ex-co-worker who I’d cross the street to avoid but who now wants to know, “Am I your friend?” yes or no, this instant, please.

It’s not just Facebook and it’s not just me. Every “social networking service” has had this problem and every user I’ve spoken to has been frustrated by it. I think that’s why these services are so volatile: why we’re so willing to flee from Friendster and into MySpace’s loving arms; from MySpace to Facebook. It’s socially awkward to refuse to add someone to your friends list — but removing someone from your friend-list is practically a declaration of war. The least-awkward way to get back to a friends list with nothing but friends on it is to reboot: create a new identity on a new system and send out some invites (of course, chances are at least one of those invites will go to someone who’ll groan and wonder why we’re dumb enough to think that we’re pals).

You can read the rest of the article here, but I think Doctorow (not a Facebook friend, and I’ve never beaten him up, either) is mistaken in his analysis. When he says “every user I’ve spoken to has been frustrated by” the problem of the Biffs of their past

coming Back to their Future, it suggests to me that maybe Cory flocks with some nervous birds. His reported experience doesn’t match mine at all, and my 40 or so co-worker friends on Facebook have a different story, too. Many of them are amazed at the people with whom they have reconnected. And on the few occasions they’ve gotten an unwanted “friending,” they just ignore it. Some are more active on Facebook than others, but none have felt the need to pack up and leave.

If it really was a 1-1 ratio of pleasant relationships renewed vs. creepy reminders of the past for “every user,” Facebook wouldn’t be growing at its phenomenal 3 percent per week. This is just the hyperbole of a columnist who makes a name by being controversial.

Facebook is much more like the phone than it is like Friendster.

There was a time when the telephone had lots of potential to put people in awkward social circumstances, during the party line era. Before the technology evolved to allow each family to have its own direct line and number, particularly in rural areas, several would be joined on one line. Each house had a different ring (or number of rings), but it rang in every house on the circuit, so you never knew for sure which of your neighbors was eavesdropping. See an Andy Griffith Show rerun for examples.

Direct lines made all the difference in creating some privacy, and as the number of people with phones increased the potential number of connections, the growth of the telephone accelerated. (That, incidentally, is why the Zune was a bomb; Microsoft touted the ability to share songs wirelessly, but that’s useless if none of your friends has a Zune.) But as phones have continued to evolve, so that now families like mine have six cell phones and no land lines, this is the way everyone communicates, whether by voice or by texting their BFFs.

Likewise, as Facebook continues to grow by 250,000 people per day, it becomes increasingly likely that you will be able to find and connect with long-lost friends. Or as Jeff Jarvis notes, younger people probably won’t lose touch with high school and college friends, unlike their parents’ generation.

Facebook’s privacy settings, if you take time to adjust them, have largely solved the “party line” problem. And when Facebook implements different categories of friends, a process that surely is underway, its “social graph” will recognize the fact that one label doesn’t fit all. Nick agrees.

Cory may even want to include his seventh-grade bully among his “acquaintances” if Facebook develops such a category, so he can keep tabs on Biff’s whereabouts. But I don’t understand why he should be so mortified about ignoring a friend request or “unfriending” someone. Does he think that person will seek him out for a physical pummelling?

Facebook’s pending multiple categories of friends, each with different user-defined levels of personal disclosure, will give the fainthearted an angstless way to move people into a more distant orbit without ejecting them from their personal solar system.

Facebook has billion$ of reasons to not become the next Friendster, and I’m pretty confident that Zuckerberg and Co. are learning from the mistakes of others and will build in the multiple friend levels that will make Facebook an important way for almost everyone to communicate. You’ll go there because your friends are there, and because you don’t have to hang out with those who aren’t your friends.

Packing up for a different social networking site may be an easy way to avoid an unpleasant social situation, but it still takes effort. I’m confident Facebook will do what it takes so people won’t feel a need to abandon the links they have in Facebook.

Technorati: Facebook, Cory Doctorow, InformationWeek, social networking, Jeff Jarvis, MySpace, Friendster, telephone, cell phone

Facebook: Importing Blog Posts

I recently got a good question from Aruni Gunasegaram, asking how to import posts from her blog into her Facebook profile.

I look forward to learning more about facebook from your blog. I really need a crash course. The problem for me and the social networking sites is that there is so much information out there that trying to learn it all while at the same time launching a high-tech business is not proving to be very effective. I guess I’ll just learn as I use it! Some things about facebook are intuitive and others are not. For instance, how do I add my RSS feed for this blog to my profile? I’ve seen a few other people who have done it, but I haven’t been able to figure out how to do it myself yet!

It’s pretty simple, and I actually do it in two ways. The first is through the WordPress application for Facebook (since my blog is on WordPress.com), but here is the more generally applicable method that will work for you, no matter what blogging platform you’re using.

Here’s the full explanation for how you do it; the shortcut version is in the next paragraph. In your Facebook provile, in the left navigation, click more to see all of your applications, then click the Notes application, and in the right side click “Edit import settings” under Notes settings, and you will be able to choose an RSS feed to import into your Facebook mini-feed.

Or, if you want just the direct shortcut, click this link: http://www.facebook.com/editnotes.php?import

This is where you enter the RSS feed from your blog so it will be automatically imported. (Or if you’d rather just automatically import my blog posts, you can use the feed URL pictured above.)

Then, in your Mini-Feed you will see something like this:

The top half is what is imported directly by the method I describe above, while the lower half is what the WordPress application does.

This is a really helpful way to keep your Facebook profile fresh with a minimum of effort. You can focus on writing for your blog, and let Facebook’s automatic import feature post it to your profile. The beauty of Facebook is that it makes connecting with people easier. The last thing you need is to have to take time to enter the same information in multiple places, or to remember to post a new blog post to your Facebook profile. Hopefully having this tip will help you automate what you can, which will free you for the more interesting and higher-level interactions you can have in Facebook.

Technorati: Facebook, blog, wordpress, wordpress.com, importing

Facebook Demographics Don’t Matter

In what may become a series of posts related to “things about Facebook that don’t matter” (which started with advertising click-through rates), here’s a link to a blog post (via TechCrunch) that outlines interesting demographics of Facebook users, including the fact that nearly two-thirds are women. In one sense that’s important to know, because for some decisions (e.g. health care) women are the primary decision makers.

But in another sense it doesn’t really matter what Facebook’s overall demographic breakdown is, as long as there is a significant number of people that might be interested in your product, service or organization.

So even if, for the sake of overstated argument, 90 percent of Facebook users were under 30 (they aren’t, but just bear with me), Facebook can still be a good place to reach an older group.

Why? Because Facebook is not primarily a mass medium. It’s a personal, conversational medium.

So, for example, if AARP wants to reach “U.S. Americans” over age 50 to become members, it would currently find over 377,000 people fitting those criteria in Facebook. Unlike mass media, in which you pay for the entire audience, AARP could advertise just to those who could qualify for its programs. And with the pay-per-click advertising model, the costs would be low. You’re not only not paying for the other 50+ million users who don’t fit your demographic; you’re also not paying unless those who are in your demographic click the ad.

Would Facebook be the cornerstone of an AARP membership marketing strategy? Certainly not. But it could be one element. And as Facebook membership continues to grow across all demographics, it can be a good way for all kinds of organizations to engage with and create a relevant community.

Technorati: Facebook, demographics, AARP, advertising, marketing, PPC