Facebook Accounts Versus Fanpages: Still Confused?

This is an area that has been creating a lot of confusion in business owners minds:
What I advise my clients to do is slightly different. It does not involve migrating their account into a page. This is how it goes.
1.Keep your personal account as a "family and friends only" account
2.Start a new account where you keep your posts, photos and contacts.. exclusively business related. One of the main advantages is that you can join and create groups from your account as a business person
3. Create your fan page administered from your account. As an admin you will be able to "switch" to "Use Facebook as Page" when you want to start "liking" other pages as part of your main lead generation strategy
4.Send a note or a message to all your business related friends (from your original personal account) and suggest them to become fans of your page or friends of your new business related profile

Firstly I find this a great way to keep your family and friends completely separate and in parallel, make yourself known as a business person, with Fan page attached to your account.
Secondly if you intend to use facebook as a tool for a proactive lead generation strategy, which you should, you still have access to groups, as well as "Liking" other pages from your Fan Page to get instant brand exposure.

Your thoughts are welcome!

Facebook Changes Make The Ink Flow... But How Much Does It REALLY Affect Your Business?

Just what everyone has been craving: a good old combat of the titans! Isn't it exciting to watch the heating race between Google+ and Facebook. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerber at the recent F8 Developers conference in San Francisco has revealed and explained the details of the latest changes in Facebook, among rumors and statistics flying around on how much dissent it has triggered and how much it's going to play right into the hands of Google+. I can see bookmakers rubbing their hands! ...
It's great get this kind of entertainment outside the sports arena, but let's get back down to earth for a while and look at it from a small to medium size business owners' perspective. If you have a busy enterprise to run you won't have time to wallow in watching the score between the 2 giants, but you will want to know if you can still effectively market through your fan page, right?...

So let's look at it a bit closer:

• As far as I can see, your updates will still reach your fans, except that their order of appearance might be tempered with somewhat. So far no damage
  
• You used to be able to send a direct message to your fans, a feature that very few marketers have been using for their business. This feature will disappear as of the 30th of September. That is regrettable as it was a more direct way to market your offers, by appearing in your fans' "messages"
• With the upcoming need for a SSL (Secure Socket Layer) certificate for your fan page you may need to put your Geek at work so your page is easily accessible after the 1st of October...that is inconvenient, except that it's making the use of Facebook more secure, which we all want right? Considering the short notice you would be forgiven to give Mark Zuckerberg some bad press, or a piece of your mind!
  
• If your Facebook page needs customizing this software will ensure a seamless transition for your fan page to be still easily accessible
  
• There are other "minor changes" in the wings, however except for some inconvenience and possible costs, the way you market through your fanpage could be almost unchanged
• If these changes were to create a huge backlash and associated exodus to Google +, then you could fear that the huge market that facebook represents may wither away. In that case you would want to focus your social media efforts on another, less volatile platform. But we are nowhere near that sort of tipping point!
  

So is it time to pack up your fan page and rush to brother Google+? I would say hold your horses, changes of this nature at short notice are sometimes hard to take, but it is probably wise to give it a few days and avoid panic. Let's reassess facebook as a marketing tool once the solutions emerge and see how they make up for the annoying rocker in the boat....
Meanwhile this is a great reminder for the big picture, and how to avoid the "eggs in same basket" syndrome. Use at least 2 social media platforms complementing each other, and always make sure you drive you followers and fans into an "opt-in" form so they become part of your email list. As social media platforms change, your email list remains yours as your best marketing tool.
Keep an eye on our blog for further updates on changes.

Twitter Can Predict the Stock Market

The emotional roller coaster captured on Twitter can predict the ups and downs of the stock market, a new study finds. Measuring how calm the Twitterverse is on a given day can foretell the direction of changes to the Dow Jones Industrial Average three days later with an accuracy of 86.7 percent.

“We were pretty astonished that this actually worked,” said computational social scientist Johan Bollen of Indiana University-Bloomington. The new results appear in a paper on the arXiv.org preprint server.

Bollen and grad student Huina Mao stumbled on this computational crystal ball almost by accident. Earlier studies had found that blogs can be used to gauge public mood, and that tweets about movies can predict box office sales. An open source mood-tracking tool called OpenFinder sorts tweets into positive and negative bins based on emotionally charged words.

But Bollen wanted to build a more nuanced emotional barometer. He used a standard psychology tool called the Profile of Mood States, a quick questionnaire that is used frequently in pharmaceutical research or sports medicine.

The original questionnaire asks people to rate how closely their feelings match 72 different adjectives, including “friendly,” “peeved,” “active,” “on edge” and “panicky,” and uses the responses to measure mood along six dimensions: calmness, alertness, sureness, vitality, kindness and happiness.

Bollen and colleagues checked a huge Google database to see what other words are commonly used in conjunction with the original 72 adjectives, and added those words to their lexicon. Then the researchers took 9.8 million tweets from 2.7 million tweeters between February and December 2008, selected the tweets that indicated a confession of emotion (tweets that included the words “I feel” or “I’m feeling,” for instance), and ran the test on the entire data set.

“We’re using Twitter like a psychiatric patient,” Bollen said. “This allows us to measure the mood of the public over these six different mood states.”

As a sanity check, the researchers looked at the public mood on some easily-predictable days, like Election Day 2008 and Thanksgiving. The results were as expected: Twitter was anxious the day before the election, and much calmer, happier and kinder on Election Day itself, though all returned to normal by Nov. 5. On Thanksgiving, Twitter’s “Happy” score spiked.

Then, just to see what would happen, Mao compared the national mood to the Dow Jones Industrial Average. She found that one emotion, calmness, lined up surprisingly well with the rises and falls of the stock market — but three or four days in advance.

“I sank into my chair. That’s a pretty big result,” Bollen said. “It was one of those ‘Eureka!’ moments.”

But this surprising correlation said nothing about whether Twitter could be used to tell the future. To test that idea, the researchers trained a machine-learning algorithm to predict whether the stock market would go up or down, first using only the Dow Jones Industrial Average from the past three days, then including emotional data.

The algorithm did pretty well using stock market data alone, predicting the shape of the stock market with 73.3 percent accuracy. But it did even better when the emotional information was added, reaching up to 86.7 percent accuracy.

“Including this mood information leads to higher accuracy,” Bollen said. He stressed that their algorithm is highly simplified, and not the best stock market predictor anyone could come up with. But “we’re presuming on the basis of what we found, if you have some kind of super-duper algorithm and you add our time series, its accuracy will go up, as well.”

The fact that Twitter mood could predict the stock market’s movements even in the middle of 2008 is also significant, Bollen added.

“This was probably one of the most difficult periods to predict,” he said. “We had a presidential election, we had what looked to be financial Armageddon, we had the start of what has been the deepest and greatest recession since the 1930s… If our algorithm was able to predict Dow Jones Industrial Average in that period, we figured that may establish some kind of lower baseline. It could do a lot better in other periods of time.”

But why does it work? “The short answer is, we don’t know,” Bollen said. It’s reasonable to assume that people’s moods will have some effect on their investments, he says, but more research is needed to figure out exactly how.

“It’s a pretty interesting result,” commented computer scientist Sitaram Asur of HP Labs. But even though the correlation is there, Asur is reluctant to believe that the moods captured on Twitter can cause the stock market to change. Not everyone on Twitter plays the stock market, he notes, or even lives in the United States. And he would like to see the algorithm used on tweets from a wider span of time.

“If it is true, if we can actually find this correlation to be consistent, that will be a very important result,” he said. “But right now, I would be cautious about saying how important this is.”

Bollen agrees that the result has some shortcomings. “We need to expand this,” he said. The next step, he said, is to “put some of our money where our mouths are, and try to do this in real time.”

The One Essential Key to Developing Your Social Media Influence

On October 16, 1869 workers digging in a field in Cardiff, New York unearthed a startling specimen; the petrified remains of a 10ft tall giant man. The owner of the land, George Hull, set a tent over the remains and charged visitors .25 cents to view it. Droves of people flocked to this tiny farm field in New York - so many in fact, that in just 2 days Hull was able to raise the cost of admittance to .50 cents. Visitors gazed in thoughtful silence at the twisted and contorted remains, they were transported in their imaginings to an ancient world where giants walked the planet. It did not take long, however, before archaeologists presented evidence that the giant was no more than a stone carving created by Mr. Hull, and stained with acid to give the appearance of age. Yet, despite the evidence, many people defended the validity of the giant, unwilling to believe that this beautiful story was not real.

We love stories.

Actors, movie studios, publishers, video game creators, and, yes, social media connections, are some of the most prevalent influencers in our lives because of their ability to move us. Those who tell stories well are rewarded commensurately. Those who can't tell an engaging narrative burn out quickly.

The greatest predictor of social media success is also the most challenging to master; it is the ability to tell a story well in very few words. A narrative must be intentionally developed and every post must become a building block that deepens and widens the story.

Those who succeed in social media, those who have the ability to influence the behavior of others, are master storytellers. They have learned how to graft powerful words together that pique emotion, stimulate a need, elicit a vision, and produce engagement.

Some of the best stories are being told on social media. And so are some of the worst. If your story is disjointed, perhaps you have not yet developed your narrative.

Consider in advance how every post fits into your story, and whether it is consistent with the narrative that you're intentional cultivating. Pique. Stimulate. Elicit. Engage.

We can outline effective social media strategy all day. However, even the most accomplished music theorists will fail if they try to sing without first having exercised their voice.

We must find our story and tell it well.

Online Video Retail Success Stories

Increase your conversion rates overnight!

Really?

That’s amazing. How can I get a piece of that pie?

Call it what you will -- V-Tail, vCommerce, or just plain online video -- we are seeing some pretty bold claims around the use of video in eCommerce. Claims from platform vendors, press, and even some case studies and success stories from large retailers who are seeing some significant successes when they integrate video content into the online shopping experience.

But there’s the key. Integrate. Of course it isn’t as simple as sticking a few videos on your existing dot-com site and hey presto, conversion rates skyrocket. Video needs to support the sales process in a way that makes sense to your customers, that supports your brand values, and that enhances the shopping experience.

There are a growing number of ways to source video content, and an increasing number of players in the market who will all tell you that they have the answer. From user-generated content to automatically generated video. From content delivery networks to social media. There are a bewildering number of options out there.

Video absolutely can deliver firm benefits :

• It can increase page views by driving traffic to your site.
• It can enhance the time people spend lingering on your site, giving you more opportunity to market to them.
• It can help to increase conversion.
• It can reduce your returns.

I’ve been looking at a wide range of vendors, agencies, and retailers who are seeing some of these benefits and, along with my colleague Sabine, have published both a strategy guide and a specific Case Study on one particular success story. I’d love to hear about more examples as this unfolds, because from what I’ve seen, video in retail is only just at the start of a long and interesting journey.

3 Successful Small Businesses on Social Media

This post is part of the series – Successful Small Businesses on Social Media.

So we have heard of big names like Starbucks, Dell and Whole Foods making their names even bigger on social media. We have also shown you 5 great social media campaigns and social media best practices from the giants and there are a lot that we can learn from their strategies.

But are you truly convinced that social media could actually help small businesses?

No? I thought so too. To help you see how social media can work no matter how big or small your business, I’ve found some great case studies of small businesses that get it and are seeing results!

1. Caminito Argentinean Steakhouse

Caminito is a traditional steakhouse in Northampton, MA run by Justin Levy and Joseph Gionfriddo. Tapping on Justin’s business and social media expertise, this steakhouse has seen great results online and boosted sales offline.

Social Media Engagement

PrimeCutsBlog – Through the blog, the restaurant provides tips on cooking, grilling, kitchen gadgets, restaurants and recipes. It has no lack of pictures and videos to engage readers. The blog is also linked to other social media sites that Justin is active in.

Prime Cuts TV – Caminito reaches out to the YouTube audience with their very own channel, providing value with videos for foodies, which are also posted on its blog.

MySpace Page – A MySpace page was first set up to reach college students. Updates are sent via its profile but otherwise, the page has not been very active.

Google news, blog alerts and analytics – Simply engaging in social media is not enough. This steakhouse makes sure its web analytics is studied weekly to measure the success of social media campaigns and promotions.

Google news and blog alerts are used to observe not only what people are saying about the restaurant, but also what other steakhouses and restaurants are up to.

This results in innovations (menus, designs and more) and new ideas to promote the business.

Justin is also active on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, FriendFeed, Flickr and Delicious, giving Caminito the exposure it needs.

Social Media Results

Justin was interviewed in 2008 about his social media success. I can’t imagine how well he is doing now!

As far as our ROI on social media efforts, of course it’s always hard to determine that. But, what I do know is that since we turned our focus to social media, attracting inbound links, more internet marketing/less print advertising, etc., we have seen an approximate 30 percent boost in sales (year to date) in a time where a lot of restaurants are down 10-20 percent. Not all of that can be attributed to our online presence but I’m sure a good portion of it can. The blog and social media outposts help us reach and interact with our community as well as show our expertise in our space. I have done some research and can’t find anyone in our area (or in general) that’s doing what we’re doing as a restaurant.”

2. Wiggly Wigglers

Wiggly Wigglers is a small gardening business in Herefordshire with a mission to change the world, one rural home at a time. Its Wiggly community is built on several social media tools, which are mainly maintained by Heather, the farmer’s wife!

Social Media Engagement

Blog – Used to share gardening tips, events, interesting content and offers, this rural store is very active on its blog.

Podcasts – Stay tuned to the Wiggly team every Monday on the Wiggly podcast! It’s hilarious!

“With thousands of listeners from all around the world, and over fifty 5-star reviews on iTunes, it seems that our audience enjoys listening to the shows as much as we enjoy making them. Join us every Monday as we cover the environment, wildlife, gardening, farming, biodiversity and the things we can all do to make a difference.”

Facebook Group – The Wiggly Facebook group now has over 2000 members. That’s really impressive results for a small gardening business. What’s worth commending is how active it is on Facebook!

Twitter – I should correct myself, Wiggly is active everywhere! Heather tweets really often on Twitter about latest offers, free stuff and tips.

The Wiggly Cinema – By now, you should be really convinced how social media savvy the wigglers are. The Wiggly Cinema is filled with high quality videos about everything gardening! You can find some of their videos on their YouTube channel as well!

Social Media Results

In 2008, Dell and its global partners awarded Wiggly Wigglers the Global Small Business Excellence Award. It went on to win Dell’s Inaugural Global award.
Its podcast reaches thousands every week and along with over 2000 Facebook members, Wiggly Wigglers is able to reach customers worldwide while cutting back on its advertising costs.

Here are the other Wiggly achievements mentioned on Dell’s website:

• Interviewed on new webTV channel Small Business Advice.TV where the theme was ‘Using social networking for small businesses’
• Special winning feature in The Daily Express
• Two videos on Dell’s YouTube site – Video 1 , Video 2
• Coverage in leading SME online publication BusinessZone.co.uk – UK firm worms its way to the top in global business awards
• Two articles in leading IT magazine IT Pro – Web helps Wiggly Wigglers win big and In-depth feature on Wiggly Wigglers
• Hereford Times (local press coverage) – Blakemere’s Wiggly Wigglers win Dell’s Excellence Award in New York
• Heather was also invited to be a panel member for a special Small Business Media Roundtable in London in December 2008

3. Moonfruit

Moonfruit is a free website builder with no ads and no catches! Building your own website DIY style is made easy and fast. Over 2 million sites have been built using its website.

Social Media Engagement

The Moonfruit Blog and Forum – Moonfruit site updates, website building tips and other announcements can be found on the blog. The forum was also set up to answer enquiries, gain feedback and allow members to share their new sites, experiences, tips and frustrations. Pretty comprehensive site!

Twitter – Moonfruit is very active on Twitter with most tweets involved in some form of interaction with its followers.

Twitter Campaign and Results

To celebrate its 10th birthday, Moonfruit decided to hold a Twitter campaign: users that include “#moonfruit” in their tweets are entered into a daily draw to win 10 Apple Macbook Pros, one to be won each day for 10 days.

The results were surprising and overwhelming! The buzz caught on so fast that “#moonfruit” topped Twitter’s trending topics, with “Michael Jackson”, “#iranelection”, “iphone” and “Wimbledon” below it. This is pretty awesome for a small business.

What’s more, the campaign brought Moonfruit 600 percent uplift in web traffic, and number of sign ups for trial services doubled.

These small businesses have shown us how big they can be on social media. We don’t need to be huge companies with a huge capital to benefit on Facebook or Twitter. Anyone can set up a profile and a blog free of charge, no excuses.

Small Businesses Are The New Big

It might be true that we don’t have the benefit of vast brand recognition, but from what we can see from Wiggly Wigglers, recognition knocks on your door when you have done social media right. In fact, most big businesses have a lot to learn from the small people.