Are you going to “Like” the New Facebook “Send” Button

Just when you thought you had it all figured out, Facebook rolls our another major wrinkle to Facebook marketing. The “Send” button.

The Send button is a social plugin that, like the “Like” button, websites can use to let users broadcast information they’re consuming on the web to their friends on Facebook. The “Send” button is different from the “Like” button in that “Send” enables private sharing. Where a user hitting the “Like” button within a website publishes a feed post of this activity to his entire list of friends via his public news feed, hitting “Send” will enable that user to instead choose the exact people he’d like to share the content with. This linked content can be sent via Facebook message, email, or posted right into a specific Facebook Group’s wall. This addition to open graph sharing abilities will enable greater private sharing and more social sharing among groups of friends. Facebook is already calling it “the easiest way to privately share things with groups and individuals.”

Social media marketers will find the “Send” button a promising addition to the sharing functionalities of your brand website. Since visitors will now be able to target their sharing activity to specific people, instead of worrying about blasting their entire Facebook friends list each time they want to “Like” something on your site.

From Facebook:
The Send button is a social plugin that websites can use to let people send a link to a friend through Facebook Messages, post it to a Group, or email it to an individual. For example, if you see a Mother’s Day gift idea on 1-800-Flowers.com, you can now send a message or email to your family members to discuss. Or say you’re training for a marathon and you come across a great article about running shoes on The Huffington Post. Now you can share it with your entire running group in just one click.

The Send button to be used alongside the Like button. By including both on your website, people will have ability to broadcast the things they like and also send it to specific people

Facebook provides code that will enable you to add this feature to your site, however most of us will probably wait for the development of plugins with this feature before we install. If you would like the details on how to install, go to Facebook Developers.

With this new tool, Facebook is competing with other sharing tools such as Sharethis and Addthis. And because it is a Facebook app, I am sure there quickly will be widespread adoption because of the integration to your list of Facebook friends.

Advertising Salespeople Could Become Extinct

I read a post this morning by Daniel Ambrose, an editor for Online Pubishing Insider where he speculates that the success of Google’s and similar sites ability to create 90% of their revenue without salespeople. I have wondered about this also. I fundamentally agree with his premise, which is that even though the industry is changing, there will always be a need for salespeople. He states…

“Even more convincing should be the example of the financial services business.  Financial products are the ultimate commodity.  Mutual funds are merely bunches of stocks or other financial products that are priced daily, hourly or even by the second on exchanges around the world.  Stocks and mutual funds and other financial services, from the “boring” life insurance, to the notorious Collateralized Debt Obligations and the many other so-called-sophisticated financial instruments (still all made up of financial products that can be counted and measured), are sold by the highest-paid salespeople in the country.

What do media advertising and financial services have in common?  In both cases they have a clear and quantifiable history that can be viewed and analyzed for what worked. For both, past performance is no guarantee of future performance.  Yes, that is the problem.  The market keeps changing, customer behavior keeps changing, and advertisers are always trying to understand and anticipate that change.  So salespeople who bring a sophisticated understanding of their customer’s business and their customer’s needs, are valuable.  And they will be valuable as long as change keeps happening – likely to be true for a very long time.” Quoted from Are Ad Salespeople Doomed?

The problem is that so many salespeople don’t get it yet. They are not striving to become one of the elite that will survive. It is certainly a business of “Survival of the fittest”.

Building Brands Online – The Silent Click Has Value!

Recent studies show that consumers spend 40% of their media time online making online advertising an ideal place to deliver brand messages. However, in the past we have used only one metric to measure online advertising…clicks.  We were wrong!

The Online Publishers Association, OPA, released a study today that assessed 80 of the largest consumer websites. over a month’s time analyzing consumer behaviors of those Internet users who were exposed to display advertising. “The Silent Click” measured three consumer actions:

1. Searches conducted related to the advertisers’ brands
2. Site visitation, the traffic driven to the advertisers’ site
3. Consumer spending, the e-commerce transactions related to the advertisers’ brands

For consumers exposed to brand display ad campaigns, the research found that:

• One in five conduct related searches and one in three visit the brands’ sites
• Users spent over 50% more time than the average visitor to these sites and consumed more pages
• Users spent about 10% more money online overall, and significantly more on product categories related to the advertised brands
• Higher income audiences visited the advertisers sites

“To date, measuring a brand campaign meant relying on the click, a metric more appropriate for direct response advertising. In order to understand the value of the audiences that display advertising attracts, the study helps marketers think about real behavioral measures designed to move the needle,” said Pam Horan, president of the Online Publishers Association. “The findings suggest that measuring consumers exposed to an advertiser message in terms of their search activities associated with that brand, their visitation to the advertisers’ site and finally their e-commerce and retail spending activities, is a smart formula for getting an important view into display ad effectiveness.”

To understand if the environment that the advertising appears in has an impact on its effectiveness and more importantly the characteristics of the audiences that the different environments attract, the study found that high quality sites delivered a better response and a higher consumer spend.  The results continue to reinforce why environment matters and how the brand halo effect is furthered among high quality trusted content sites.

“You must unlearn what you have learned.” –Yoda

I am reading through reports this morning from the Business Marketing Association’s annual meeting which had the theme “Unlearn”. It is about time! Regardless I give them credit for their efforts. Here are some of the more interesting points that were presented.

“Business marketing is rapidly changing, and business marketers need to learn about the full spectrum of change that is taking place in our field,” said Gary Slack, chairman-chief experience officer at Slack Barshinger, Chicago, and chairman of the BMA. Pffffft, what did I say earlier? “It is about time!”

““We have been too worried about shareholders and not focused enough on customers,” said Ralph Oliva, executive director of the Institute for the Study of Business Markets. “When did the shareholder become No. 1? We need to unlearn going along with this ride and begin constantly teaching people how business markets work. In the wonderful place between the supplier and customers, when we do our job well, we work together to create new value. This is what will drive the growth of our domestic product.” THAT was profound! I would totally agree that our customers look to us for guidance. They want us to be the expert and to help them to understand.

Some Tweets I followed from the conference.

Help people declare their love – Let people tell their friends about ur brand in any way possible. @sernovitz

Word of Mouth Topics (WOMT) – Portable, repeatable, memorable. @sernovitz

Skittles example – Home page is now Facebook cuz fans have more to say than company could. @sernovitz

#bma09 – HIGLY Recommended… got to www.skittles.com

NOW, THIS is a game changer, skittles.com. You have to take a look at these innovators. Their home page is taken from Wikipedia. Their friends page links to Facebook. Wow! This will certainly be a marketing study for future Marketing 101 classes.

Study Shows Print Advertising Drives Online Leads

Can print advertising drive online traffic? Yes, according to a study released by Telemetrics, a Toronto based company that focuses on call tracking and measurement solutions.

Tracking unique URL activity in addition to call measurement demonstrated a 78% increase in overall leads in the study that measured Yellow Page print advertising. Telmetrics found that site referrals from print represented 44% of leads on average.

“Evaluating the impact that print advertising has on Web activity is critical. Without tracking unique URL traffic, Yellow Pages advertisers would not know the total number of leads the print product is driving, as those touch points could be attributed to online ad channels,” said Bill Dinan, president,Telmetrics. “Our URL tracking data confirms that traditional media complements the digital media mix and echoes consumers’ use of multiple media and platforms in their purchasing decisions.”

The study states that during the timing evaluated, “the ads that used unique URLs (for example: florists2.com) were more often visited than client-specific domains with URL extensions (for example: publisher.com/florists).”

One of the critical elements in creating the report were the techniques used for tracking. Telmetrics created a URL tracking solution that provided integrated lead reporting allowing publishers to prove the value of the print medium. Telmetrics was able to record call and URL activity as each ad includes a unique phone number and URL only attributable to that advertisement.

The Point is the Conversation

Social media has been spreading like a disease, except it’s not a disease. It’s the overnight sensation that’s taken about 7 years to appear overnight. Everyone, but everyone’s had a look at Social Media and formed an opinion – waste of time, waste of money, don’t understand it, can’t see the point. Maybe they’ve become social media ‘experts’ with a view on what will and will not generate revenue and offer value and produce returns. Everyone’s full of crap of course because there are no experts, no one knows what’s going to work and the whole space is a complete land-grab.

I have tried Twitter recently and it’s like the Wild West out there. I started some conversations and they’re carrying on. I have used Linkedin and I was able to create a network of almost two-hundred sixty connections. I’ve got absolutely no idea what I’m going to do with my twitter streams or my Linkedin network – yet. But I do know that, so far, almost everyone – has missed the point of these technologies. The point is the conversation.

The conversation is, for the first time, being shaped and determined by the customer not the provider. That was always the intention of the Social Media model – it’s very ‘Web2’. There’s a good argument that says ‘conversation doesn’t pay the rent’, but inevitably, new things take a while to figure out and I have the impression that the moment’s arrived. Or it’s at least arriving. There’s plenty of tech geekery around the subject and there are a load of experts professing to know all the answers, but there’s also a growing conversation. A movement. It has nothing to do with the people who think they know the answer to ‘Social Media Revenue Generation Models’. It’s just about the people – having the conversations and working it out for themselves and with each other. And from those conversations comes the revenue. Just as it always has?

The End of “Old School” Relationship Prospecting

Sales is about people. Orders get signed by people and the appointments needed to get those signatures come when a level of trust is established. If there is one single factor that determines sales success, it is a relationship. 

In “Old School” relationship prospecting, salespeople would spend lots of time taking buyers to dinners, lunches, and on the golf course. During these events you would not only strengthen your existing relationship but you would also ask for new prospects. However ask any salesperson if these tactics work as well now as they did in the past and you will hear a resounding no! Today’s buyer is spending less time going to lunch or being social on the golf tee because they are under much more pressure to produce results with less and less resources. 

However there is hope. There are new ways to build new business relationships. In fact these new ways allow you to build relationships faster than you could before and more relationships than you could before.

The new method of finding prospects and building relationships with those prospects involve using a business network called LinkedIn. Using LinkedIn to start relationships with people in your target markets is much more efficient than  ”Old School” methods and you can do so without ever leaving your office. Using LinkedIn search functions can help you find the prospects by job title, company name, or even by business types and all within a local region. Once you find your prospects you can use the messaging capabilities to send an introductory letter.  Of course when you get a response you will want to deepen that relationship with a phone call and/or a face-to-face meeting. The human voice is and always will be the most desirable and pleasant way to communicate.

Additionally, LinkedIn tells me who the people I know in turn know. Its the equivalent of calling all the people I know to a meeting and telling them to bring their Rolodexes to the meeting then going through their Rolodexes to find the prospects that I am targeting. When you search for a company on LinkedIn, the results page will tell you who you know at that company. All other contacts listed that you to not know will display how many degrees of separation away from you they are. If you do not know the person you are targeting at that company, you can ask your known contacts to introduce you using the “Introduction Request” feature provided by “LinkedIn”.

I will discuss more ways to use Linkedin in the future, but if you are trying to build your business, I highly recommend that you take the time to become a member of LinkedIn.com.

Should Your Company be on Facebook? Absolutely!

Targeting Facebook users offers an opportunity to build brand loyalty while targeting your message in a very effective manner. Facebook Pages are free and offer the best way for your company to establish a presence on Facebook.

The main elements of a Facebook Page are

• Basic information such as location and hours of business, if relevant;
• A mini-feed of activity on the page
• The wall where people can post messages
• A discussion board where you can start and join conversations.
• Notes where you can post additional content to be linked from the Page.
• A list of fans featuring each person’s avatar
• Photos, and you can set controls so only you or you and your company’s fans can upload photos
• Videos, and you can also set controls for who can upload videos

When someone becomes a fan of your Page, a message shows up in their personal news feed so all of their Facebook friends see the action listed in their mini news feeds and have the option of clicking over to your Page to learn more or to become a fan as well.

As the administrator of the page, you have the ability to edit any portion of the page and turn features on and off. You can also assign admin privileges to other Facebook members who are fans of the Page. Administrators can also send a message to all fans which is a handy broadcast feature but one that should not be overused. I’ve personally removed myself as a fan from several company pages because they sent messages to my Facebook inbox too frequently.

Creating a Social Ad on Facebook

Having a Facebook Page should only be one part of an overall social media strategy. Facebook offers a potentially wide audience but you can also target a more niche audience. To drive traffic to your Facebook Page, you can opt to pay for a Facebook social ad. I love this feature because you can really hone in on your target audience. Just click on the “Promote Your Page with an Ad” link and begin narrowing down your search of Facebook members who you would like to see your ad. These ads appear on the home pages and profile pages of each member as they are viewing their Facebook account.

Facebook had fantastic targeting capabilities and offers a tool that will calculate the number of people you will reach based on your campaign criteria. You do have to pay for a Facebook ad but can set a limit on the amount you want to pay — based on clickthrough — and the duration of your ad.

While you can create a Facebook ad to drive traffic to your Facebook Page, you can also have the ad go to any website. Personally, I think that if you are advertising on Facebook to people using Facebook, you should first capture them as fans on your Facebook Page and then drive them over to your website or blog. Having fans on your Facebook Page is a powerful marketing asset.

Understanding Behavioral Targeting

Behavioral targeting is an advertising delivery technique used by online publishers and advertisers to increase the effectiveness of their campaigns. Behavioral marketing can be used on its own or in conjunction with other forms of targeting based on factors like geography, demographics or the surrounding content.

Behavioral Targeting is based upon information collected regarding an individual’s web-browsing behavior, such as the pages they have visited or the searches they have made, to select which advertisements to display to that individual. This behavioral history is then used to deliver their online advertisements to the users who are most likely to be influenced by them.

Most add delivery platforms identify visitors by assigning a unique id cookie to each and every visitor to the site thereby allowing them to be tracked throughout their web journey, the platform then make a rules-based decision about what content to serve.

B2B sites have traditionally used a simplified version of Behavioral Targeting by aggregating content into channels and then allowing advertisers to target those channels. Behavioral Targeting systems go beyond content targeting by monitoring visitor response to site content and learn what is most likely to generate a desired conversion event. The downside of Behavioral Targeting for B2B publishers is that onsite Behavioral Targeting requires a relatively high level of traffic before statistical confidence levels can be reached regarding the probability of a particular offer generating a conversion from a user.

B2B publishers interested in behavioral targeting should consider Advertising Networks as an alternative since advertising networks offer both the technology needed for Behavioral Targeting and the larger user base that individual B2B websites lack.  Additionally, Advertising Networks use Behavioral Targeting in a different way than individual sites since they serve many adverts across many different sites, they are able to build up a picture of the likely demographic makeup of internet users allowing Advertising Networks to sell audiences rather than sites.

Does Journalism Have a Collaborative Future?

The future of journalism is probably a pretty deep subject for a non-journalist like me to tackle but humor me for a few moments if you will.

Here is my premise. Could a feature article be written from a flow of  “Tweets” submitted by a collection of writers? Could you envision a series of entries from multiple writers all attending the same political event feeding into one online page creating a time line of ”Tweets” that provide insight and detail of that event? Could this collection of writers work for different companies yet share their collaboration on their own individual web sites?

Forget walled gardens — this is the spirit of journalism’s future.

I must give credit where credit is due, I didn’t dream up this concept myself. I am writing about  a concept called “link journalism“ or the “Washington Link Project” detailed in a Publishing 2.0 article.

In some ways this networked linking process is an extension of how newsrooms collaborate with traditional wire services, but I think this concept is more than that. Papers using a traditional wire service aren’t really collaborating. They’re primarily trying to a) extend the reach of their stories, and b) get access to material they can’t afford to produce on their own.

Innovation that’s easy, popular, and cheap

The Washington link projects should serve as models for the entire news industry. They show that collaborative linking draws readers, is easy, and costs nothing more than time (and not even much of that).