All Posts Tagged With: "Facebook"
Facebook Social Plug-ins & The Marketer’s Plight
Unless you think 400 million (and growing) deluded people are wrong to have joined an online community called Facebook, you should pay attention to what Facebook says the future will look like. Watching some f8 video coverage is a good place to start.
Popularity: 14%
FanTools for Facebook from Four51
Social Media and Marketing Management from Four51
Okay, here we go again….
Just like 10 years ago when Four51 paved the way in e-commerce, we’re now leading the way into the rapidly growing social economy by introducing Four51 FanTools for Facebook. We’ve been working on social media for the better part of a year. And now we’re excited to unveil Four51 FanTools for Facebook. Our ultimate vision is total social media and marketing management via support for the most popular social tools.
Here’s what we’re doing…we think these tools will help your business thrive in today’s 24-hour marketing cycle. We’ve reached an age in which instant marketing on Facebook, Twitter, and in the Blogosphere can work seamlessly with more traditional printed and branded communications tools (direct mail, brochures, promo items, etc.).
You now have the ability with the push of a button to post, tweet, update, blog. And with Four51’s widely embraced e-commerce platform you can now synchronize these real-time social media channels with the traditional marketing mix. Online and offline: fast, synchronized, cohesive.
Simply put, Four51 FanTools for Facebook allows brands, their agencies, and their sellers in segments like retail, franchising, distribution, and manufacturing to quickly and simply implement a Facebook Fan page strategy. And in doing so, get a head-start on competitors in building your (or your client’s) dynamic, vital social communities, comprising customers, prospects, partners and other important participants.
Four51 focused its initial launch in the social economy on Facebook for one simple reason: it’s huge. This is a market of 200 million-plus members, growing rapidly week-in and week-out. Facebook is becoming the standard for the social economy. As it strengthens its hold, more and more of your customers and their customers are going to be doing business – buying and selling – in this environment.
Four51 FanTools for Facebook is an excellent fit if you’re a brand, agency or seller wanting to nurture your community online. With it, you can configure your own, and/or your customers’ Facebook fan pages quickly, making offers to targeted prospects based on gender, geography, age, and lifestyle. Further, now you have excellent ways to create reports showing those accessing offers, accepting them, rating and sharing them.
Central to Four51 FanTools is the DealStream, a configurable, dynamic portal platform consisting of four distinct yet integrated programs:
- The Offer Portal, supporting unlimited offers via coupons, gift cards, mobile SMS messaging
- The Dealer & Location Portal, allowing fans to quickly find nearby locations
- The Brand Central Portal, an online source of branded video communications
- The Brand Store Portal, featuring immediate “buy-now” e-commerce integration via Four51 ecommerce technology
There are a number of benefits. For example, Four51 FanTools for Facebook lets you:
- Implement a social commerce strategy with minimal investment risk
- Manage the presentation of more dynamic brand content as a Facebook “Application”
- Control your social interactions
- Measure your campaign and communications effectiveness
Best of all, you now can seamlessly coordinate the emerging social media environment with traditional offline activities, ensuring that messaging and materials in both environments are in synch and delivering ROI.
As you know, we’re in an age where people and communities are exerting more and more influence over the brands they prefer. I learned this from my four kids who are in their teens and early 20s. Maybe you have too.
Say “so-long” to the brand manager, the agency, the distributor, the manufacturer mired in long planning cycles, extended production runs, dead-on-arrival messaging and repetitive static campaigns. That approach is so 24 hours ago! Today’s the day to plan how you need to message and market and sell tomorrow, based on what the world is tweeting or posting about you right now. And tomorrow’s the day to start planning for the day after.
Welcome to the 24-hour marketing cycle. Welcome to Four51 FanTools for Facebook.
Drop me a line if you want to learn more and see a demo.
Thanks
–tim
tmorin@four51.com
PS Look for Four51 FanTools updates on Four51’s Facebook Fan Page.
Popularity: 6%
Marketing: Is the latest always the greatest?
When looking for the most up-to-date and fresh marketing techniques, I like to think we all have a go-to source for information.
I usually consult my RSS reader which keeps the list I have built containing the sites and blogs I think supply me with me with the most valuable and accurate information on a regular basis. If I heard about a new trend somewhere and wanted to learn more about it, odds are I will type it into my Google Reader and see what it returns so that I can read some off-the-cuff evaluations from what I consider to be trusted opinions.
Recently though, I was thinking that the most cutting-edge marketing techniques are probably being employed in the race for the president. Our presidential candidates, John McCain and Barack Obama, have full-time teams devoted solely to the task of getting their names and messages out into the masses. Isn’t this in essence what every marketer is trying to do for her own business? So what are some of the elements of the marketing mix that our candidates for president are employing in their campaigns?
The traditional: the campaign slogan. It bring us back to the building blocks of defining the message we will bring to our target audience. It begs the question: How can I consolidate my entire offering into a five to seven word sentence that people will remember and associate with my product; or, in the case of the election, with my ability to lead the country. Salon.com provides an interesting rubric that personifies the brand equal of each of the candidates.
The trends: social media. Anyone who is part of a social networking community has invariably noticed the presence of a presidential candidate on their site of choice. Most notably for me has been the blatant endorsements on sites such as Facebook, where Barack Obama’s page boasts over a million supporters and John McCain’s page has just under 200,000. Now, these numbers could be an indicator of many factors: the candidate’s ability to leverage the social networking site, the demographics of the users on the site, the amount of time spent pursuing social networking as a viable tool for getting the candidates message out, and so on. Either way, it is just another method in the marketing mix that our presidential candidates are employing to win our votes. We are the judges of whether or not it is working.
In the battle of new vs. old marketing techniques, we will have to wait to see who wins this battle. One thing is for sure, there is no shortage of information on the refutation of old techniques and, conversely, the endorsement of new strategies. For more information on the subject, I strongly recommend the writings of David Meerman Scott, author of many marketing and PR thought leadership books and articles.
Mara
Popularity: 12%
Thoughts from Four51: Form meets function when learning is fun
Everyone is passionate about something–it’s human nature–and we will relentlessly choose to learn more and more about our interests. I’ve recently developed an interest in history. It’s a topic I have not spent much time on since…I don’t know when, but lately I can’t get enough of it. I buy books, I download podcasts on iTunes, I read blogs…yada, yada, yada. In short, I’ve become passionate about it.
While we are free to pursue personal learning on our own time, self-directed learning in the workplace is often a struggle for employees. Most of us don’t get to pick what we learn about at work, and if we do, the time allowed for self-directed learning is often very limited.
An online training magazine I recently read cited a survey that showed that 80% of survey participants didn’t remember the last time they purchased any self-directed learning offerings. To add further evidence, I’ve observed that nearly 100% of Four51 customers that attend our training courses come because they were asked to by someone else at their company, typically their boss.
It makes sense, right? Companies make calculated investments in their employees and ought to get a return for their money.
Here’s an obvious but interesting fact: Most of us learn the bulk of our knowledge and skill on the job, through ad hoc interactions with our peers. We collaborate with each other on the fly, and learn a wealth of information while doing so. It’s a powerful dynamic, probably more powerful than any classroom or web-based instructor-led training!
That being said, my impetus for this post is a learning website called learnhub.com. It’s a new tool that allows educators and students to teach and learn in a collaborative online community. Basically, it’s Facebook meets eLearning.
But the coolest thing is that you don’t need to be a licensed, certified educator to teach courses. In their words, “Because LearnHub’s communities can be created by both teachers and learners, the system purposefully blurs the line between teacher and student to increase collaboration between learners and educators. By eliminating the divide between students and teachers and combining education with the benefit of social networking, LearnHub has created a niche in education that is unprecedented in the world of online education.”
Pretty cool stuff. These people truly understand how most of us learn: peer-to-peer, collaboratively, in social networks. And, as an added bonus, learnhub.com is a lot of fun. Learners and educators have the ability to create personal profiles, develop communities around any topic, get RSS updates about what other users are doing, and much more.
Why not make learning fun? Shouldn’t Four51 do this? I’m not making any announcements in this post, but I will say that Four51 is currently taking a hard look at ways to enhance our training offerings. In a few weeks, Four51 will be distributing a survey to all our customers asking for input about how we can enhance your Four51 learning. When you receive the survey, I ask you to take it seriously and really let us know what your training needs and wants are.
To me, learnhub.com is a clear indication that there is technology available to support a wide-variety of learning styles and needs. That’s what I want Four51 to do but the question remains, do you?
Owen
Popularity: 11%
Social Media: Twittering to myself
I have some friends who run a PR/marketing/social media consulting company. They’re really into the latest and greatest social media trends and push me to try new things in their realm with moderate success.
One of these things is Twitter, a simple yet powerful little application that allows you to ‘tweet’ about what you’re up to–in 140 characters or less. For those of us in the instant messaging generation, it’s like a one-sided AIM conversation. For those of us in the Facebook generation, it’s like constantly updating your Facebook status.
I signed up for Twitter about six months ago, started ‘following’ a few people, and, shockingly, a few more started ‘following’ me, meaning they had my status updates filtering into their account. Oddly enough, they wanted to know what I was doing.
I never fully got on the Twitter wagon, and maybe that means I didn’t give it a fair chance. But I have to say, I don’t really get it. Even though I came of age during social media’s burst onto the scene, I still can’t really get into Twitter. I don’t understand who cares about what I’m doing and I can’t say that I’m very interested in what others are doing, either.
I don’t think I’m alone in not knowing how to use Twitter. Yesterday I saw this article on the Marketing Profs blog that observed that many Twitterers (especially from big corporations) are using the platform to broadcast marketing messages–that their status updates are no longer interactions with their Twitter community, but rather a billboard for letting their “audience” know they posted a blog article or put out a press release. The author says (in a comment reply) that while he realizes Twitter is available for any use by anyone, he finds it odd that people who ‘clearly understand social media would backtrack and use a social site such as Twitter as a one-way communication channel.’
While I certainly understand and agree with his point (from the perspective that those who know and understand social media should be the last to mis-use it), I have to wonder how many people are out there who are like me–who know, use and understand social media yet can’t quite figure out how to get value out of some of the newer iterations of it. I diligently updated Twitter for about a week but because I didn’t feel like I got anything back (unlike Facebook where I know my updates are read by my friends (“You liked Juno, too?!”) and where I certainly stalk, er, follow my friends’ and acquaintances’ updates) I pretty much gave up on it.
Perhaps I’ve missed Twittermania. Or perhaps it’s just the next great thing that will be replaced in a matter of months but the next great thing. For now, I’m sticking with Facebook.
Laura
Popularity: 10%
Marketing: What CMOs are thinking
Last month, Four51 had the chance to hang out for a couple of days with Chief Marketing Officers from all kinds of different organizations and businesses.
Below is a recap of what CMOs are thinking:
1. Four topics are top of mind: a) Search engine marketing and optimization, b) lead generation, c) social networking, d) digital and mobile messaging.
2. Printed communications did not get a mention. This isn’t to say printed/branded communications doesn’t have a place in the traditional marketing mix, but my sense of CMOs is that, to them, it’s a ‘known’ in terms of how and where it fits, and how to get it done. The big unknown today is where does print fit as CMOs come to better understand the ‘unknowns’ (that is, search engine marketing, social networking, etc…).
3. The keynote speaker, Kevin Joyce, CMO of Kodak Graphic Communications Group, emphasized that the role of marketing and its executive leadership in organizations should be on leading/driving the business model as much as the messaging. That is a terrific insight and, when you consider it from the point of view of new opportunities arising from things like social networking, search engine marketing and optimization, and mobile messaging that are intended to help business communicate and drive commerce, it seems that an unlimited opportunity for conversation with CMOs can emerge. The big question that goes along with this is: How are you thinking about new models for your business as well as for your customers?
4. This collection of executives is a new group, a community really, of CMOs formed for the purpose of helping CMOs and their organizations become better aware of and drive rapid adoption of best practices. It is called The CMO Club (www.thecmoclub.com).
5. If you are a CMO or have a senior marketing executive in your organization, you may want to learn more about this group, and perhaps join it. Keep in mind this is a learning community, not a place to hawk products and services. The guy to contact is Pete Krainik. His email is pete.krainik@thecmoclub.com. If you write him, tell him you heard about him and The CMO Club from this blog.
6. Finally, I do not know yet what to make of the social networking phenomenon. My four college and high-school aged kids tell me to ignore it. In fact, they refuse to allow me to create a Facebook page (one of my daughters accused me of being a creeper for even inquiring about getting a Facebook page, and when I told her that columnist Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times has a Facebook page, she put me further in my place – er, corner – by declaring that no one cares about a newspaper guy, which is probably fodder for another blog at another time).
7. Anyway, LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com) is a social networking site for professionals like you and me. Go get signed up and invite your professional relationships to join you at Linked In. You may be surprised how many of your customers, suppliers, competitors etc. are already profiled at LinkedIn.
Like I said, I do not know where this will lead, but you will be smarter for the journey. And maybe your kids even think you are cool.
-Tim
Popularity: 11%
Client Growth Corner: Attracting young talent
The Client Growth Corner is an ongoing column from our Client Growth Coordinator
Hi All,
It is getting increasingly harder to avoid. From the PrintCEO Blog to Graphic Arts Monthly, the topic is permeating the media: Young talent is not flocking to the print industry. Many attempts have been made to educate and attract youth towards this legacy industry. However, in this author’s opinion, these feeble attempts have been borderline offensive (if you’re uncertain what I mean, read Laura’s post from 3/12/07 and watch the video). As Patrick Henry states in his recent article on the PrintCEO Blog, “Print is not sexy. It is not the ‘next wave’ of anything. It’s like plumbing, you don’t notice it until it doesn’t work. It has a 500+ – year tradition of capturing some of humanities greatest achievements (books) and worst (junk mail).” With its lack of “flash” and “cool”, print is not high on the list of dream jobs for many youth. Does this trend worry you? What are you doing to attract young talent?
Here’s an idea: social networks. The buzz around social networks these days like Facebook, MySpace, or LinkedIn, is almost as great as the buzz around sustainability and “green”. As a longtime user of social networks and as an elusive youth working in the outskirts of the printing industry, I can personally vouch for their growing relevance in community building, commerce, and business. One such social network recently added a Marketplace, allowing users to break through the walls of anonymity of Craig’s List and Ebay, to transact with people they can “see” or perhaps validate through their other friendships. This is an extremely powerful thing. Social networks are no longer just for picture sharing or proclaiming your relationship status. They are powerful groups of people (MySpace has well over 100 million users, Facebook with 29 million).
My suggestion to you is this: check them out. Do you have employees currently who use social networks? Do these social networks allow for job listings (Facebook recently added this feature). As people increasingly flock to these social networks for everything from friendship maintenance to apartment searching, why not look for a career as well? If you make your company accessible through a medium they feel comfortable in, it gives you a bit of street cred, without insulting their intelligence (again, watch the video). You might just achieve a little bit of that “flash” and “cool”.
~Maren
Popularity: 6%
