Joel Pinkham

But I think it’s bollocks, and these types of comments are fast becoming my pet peeve.

I’ve just read a blog post about the value of a Facebook user (the rest of this rant won’t make sense unless you read that).

I have a habit that always makes me want to argue anything that’s come from someone biased, so here’s why I think this “detailed” report was a waste of time:

• It takes 18 pages to make the point that a Facebook fan spends more & and engages with you more. Here I was thinking that if someone was my fan then they hated my company.
• It puts a value on the average Facebook fan and then throughout the report it constantly states the obvious by explaining that every company has a different value for a Facebook fan. To me this basically says “the value is $136, but not really”. It’s merely a number to catch headline and for the social media racquet to pull out and impress in pitches and presentations.
• The recommendations are written as general as a horoscope “Loyalty, Spend, Recommendation, Fan Acquisition Cost, Affinity, and Media Value are the key factors that impact fan value. Brands need to develop strategies that address these areas”. In other words, develop the perfect business and the value of your Facebook fan will be higher.

Of course a Facebook fan is valuable, they’re your fan and they’re wearing it on their virtual sleeve.

But don’t believe the hype. My problem is that reports and articles like this have caused a common mentality of “wow, I need to get a Facebook fan page!!” as if it’s the magic answer, but it can easily turn into a meatball sundae. A lot of companies would be better off using their time thinking about how to make something remarkable enough that people genuinely become fans of.

The real value of a Facebook fan – it’s the perfect medium for your true “fans” to spread the word for you. Your happy customers have been doing this for centuries, Facebook just makes it easier for them to do so and much more effective for you.

When search engine optimisation (SEO) is the main part of your business model, chances are you spend too much time trying to get traffic and not enough time improving your customer experience or building a brand.

I’ve heard plenty of people with “improving rankings” at the top of their list – SEO is one of those things people get caught up with when they don’t even have fundamentals right. It’s an easy trap for small businesses to fall into, but at the same time an easy trap for big businesses to dodge.

Let’s put SEO into perspective – imagine 3 restaurants

First restaurant ranks 1st for “restaurnts in internetville”

They’re going to get a lot of people discovering them this way and maybe even make a few $$$ along the way. Their food is average, nothing exciting and the service makes you yawn.

They’ll do OK but repeat visits and referral business will be lacking.

Second restaurant is invisible in search, but has a great reputation

This is the trendy place you heard about from your trendy friend. Always busy on a Friday night and serves a mean meal.

These guys will do pretty well…until the next trendy place comes along. Repeat visits and referrals will be what they rely on, fresh new business will be hard to come by without an established customer base to pass on the good word.

Third restaurant ranks 2nd for “restaurants in internetville” and has a good reputation

I think it’s pretty obvious where I’m going with my point. The 3rd restaurant of course wins the race.

Without good cusomer acquisition tactics (of course SEO is a big one) your business will peak and die as the trends do. With ONLY good acqusition tactics, you’re never going to grow organically.

So the point is: you do need both SEO & customer satisfaction to be significant. Thanks Captain Obvious.

There are a lot of Dotcoms who need SEO to survive as a business – to me they are the rats of the industry. The dodgy corner convenience stores of the web. Why would you want to be one of those?

With Facebook overtaking Google in terms of traffic, there’s an obvious increase to the importance of recommendations from friends over pure SEO. But Google is definitely not going away, you just need to be more accountable for your product/service.

Don’t get me wrong, SEO is a huge factor in any online business and something that can’t be ignored. While it presents a bunch of opportunities, by itself it’s not a sustainable strategy to run a company by.

These guys have been producing these videos for years now. It’s always amazing to see the latest stats, but apart from being cool and having a wow factor, it mystifies “social media” even further.

While I love these videos, they beat around the bush when it comes to business. Social media shouldn’t really make any change to “good” businesses, social media just makes it even more important to run a business well.

The main thing to take away is that you need to be very good at what you do and keep happy customers who are happy to endorse you. Of course this is nothing new, it’s just word of mouth…on crack.

Social media is simply the way the message about your product/service spreads quickly – positive or negative. These stats show just how quick the message can spread.

It's now a cliche

It’s everywhere. Everyone has “trendy” icons plastered all over email/web marketing materials lately. “Find us on Facebook”, “Follow us on Twitter” or a “View me on LinkedIn”. It’s at the stage where it’s become noise.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have an issue with people and companies “trying to connect with their audiences” but it’s pretty obvious a lot of it is done because they think they should or because someone else is doing it.

With so much media attention on Twitter lately, management types who likely don’t understand what’s happening will put the pressure on underlings to “setup a twooter” or perhaps make a “bookface fan page”. If everyone else is doing it, we HAVE to do it to stay competitive. Perhaps not a good philosophy.

The best example of it I’ve seen is with the ATO (Australian government tax organisation – same as the IRD or IRS). You can become a fan of completing a tax return using their e-tax software. Exciting stuff, people everywhere want to be a fan of tax returns.

Last time I saw it had 550 fans. In the scale of things, with 20+ million people in Australia and let’s say 10 million of those completing tax returns, it’s nothing. Why bother?

So what do I think you should do?

Evaluate if it’s going to really going to make a difference. Then make sure you’re going to follow through with it, so many people (including myself) might start something and not continue.

If you don’t understand what it is – try getting into something like Twitter on a personal level. Understand the dynamics of the twitter community so you can figure out how to leverage it for your company.

I haven’t followed through with Twitter myself, but notice I don’t promote my Twitter account?

Whenever Facebook comes up in conversations, I like to make a point about how I think it has reached a level where too many people are using it and we have too many friends. This of course leads to a clutted book of faces, all of a sudden it’s looking like a blue and white Where’s Wally image.

Sure it’s all coming from your “friends” – but I think everyone will have friends on Facebook that they don’t care about hearing from.

So with the new and much criticised Facebook layout (by the lowest common denominator, of course), you can now hide friends/apps/pages from your news feed. Excellent! I can now still be friends with someone but don’t have to put up with the bollocks they post on Facebook.

Facebook Hide Feature

I was starting to get annoyed with Facebook because the amount of crap coming through to me, so now I’m a much happier user. The featue hasn’t been executed too obviously though. This will probably lead to more people like me who haven’t noticed it because it’s hidden until you mouse over.

Anyway, why is this feature important?

F’Book has hit critical mass – too many people are now using it. If you allow people to keep it relevant and interesting, then we’ll keep using it.

I’ve just read an article on Ad Age about new legislation in the UK.

Essentially the new law makes it illegal to:

• Not disclose that you are being paid to write a blog post about a product
• Pretend to be a consumer

All in the name of consumer protection. I must applaud the law makers over in the UK, we might get a law like this in New Zealand in 2025.

It’s a nice time to be a consumer, where companies are needing to be transparent to be competitive.

In my experience with banks and insurance companies – transparency is not usually a term they know about. The financial services industry has the biggest challenge with ‘new marketing’ in my view. They have made screeds of money over time that they aren’t as likely to get away with now. Somehow they need to be transparent and add more value for consumers – great customer service isn’t going to be enough. Although they’re spending a bunch of money online – they’re not embracing new marketing and instead dishing out a meatball sundae.

NZ Marketing Magazine and DLB (NZ Marketing Association) seem to be constantly regurgitating messages about “embracing new marketing” at the moment, so I apologise for the cliche.