I find myself preaching the power of video more and more whenever I speak. Given that video is now so easy to create and distribute, that it can be such a powerful way to educate prospects and customers, and that YouTube is now the second largest search engine, leaving video out of your marketing mix could be a serious misstep. Recent data from the Pew Internet & American Life Project support that view. Pew reports that:

Seven in ten adult internet users (69%) have used the internet to watch or download video. That represents 52% of all adults in the United States.

I’m always on the look out for organizations that make strategic use of video and other tools, and one that I came across recently (thanks to a member of the Massachusetts Home Care Alliance) was the Visiting Nurse Services of New York. VNSNY is making very good use of social media in general, but I am betting a series of “how to” videos they have recently begun posting (see example above – click through if you don’t see it) are going to attract a lot of attention.

The videos are short, straight forward, and educational. I don’t know exactly how VNSNY shot them, but they are the type of thing that any organization could do well with a Flip camera, a tripod, and a well-lit room. The value is in the content, which goes straight to the heart of what so many prospective VNSNY customers care about: how to make good decision about home care for a relative.

VNSNY has set up a YouTube channel for the videos, which gives all the advantages of YouTube search engine “juice” as well as making it easy to share and comment on the videos. But the videos are also embedded in an education section of the organization’s site, providing a compelling reason for visitors to spend time on and return to the site. Naturally, many of the visitors will like become VNSNY customers at some point.

Bottom line: educational videos that speak directly to your customers’ needs in a concise way can be a powerful part of your marketing mix.

Jeff

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Many thanks to Deirdre Reid for noting in the comments to Want to transfer ownership of your Facebook page? Good luck! that Facebook has finally made it possible for an administrator to delete the original owner of a Page. (This news via All Facebook.) It seems like a small thing, but people leave organizations all the time, and if you happened to have an ex-employee or intern set up your Facebook page, chances are good that they “own” it.

Up until now, there has been no way to get the ownership back from them. People have been railing about this for more than a year, so it’s nice to see Facebook finally wake up and do something. To delete an admin, just go to “Edit Page” on the left side of the page and then scroll down to the “Admins” area on the right.

Of course, Facebook seems to have evolved to a point where it can’t seem to do anything quite right. As a number of people point out on the All Facebook post, the way Facebook has implemented the solution makes it possible for any administrator to delete the owner and take over ownership. Also not an ideal situation. So many other applications have the concept of a “super” administrator that helps to address just this sort of issue. Apparently Facebook has not tuned in to this idea.

Well, two steps forward, one step back.

Jeff

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I recently spoke with Michael Hess at the Packaging Machinery Manufacturers Institute about how his organization is using social media. Michael mentioned that they were introducing a series of videos on YouTube to support the PACK EXPO, their big annual event. I think they are doing a very nice job of it and creating an example that other organizations may want to emulate. (Businesses, too, can benefit from studying this approach as a possible tool for customer and prospect education.) The videos are short, entertaining, and highly useful – and, off course, they are also highly shareable.

The first video – What’s New for Exhibitors -  riffs off of the popular Commoncraft “Plain English” series. It’s very good, but I particularly like the a video PMMI has put together about how vendors at the conference might make use of Twitter and Facebook. I have embedded it below, but click through if you don’t see it. Enjoy – Jeff
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Facebook continues to offer significant opportunity along with significant frustration for businesses. Here are a couple of recent posts that illustrate the point.

The View from 20,000 Fans (I Refuse to Say Likers)

Maggie McGary over on Mizz Information offers some details on the experience of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) with its Facebook page. The ASHA Facebook page has organically (i.e., with no significant promotion) attracted more than 20,000 fans and the big ROI is that Facebook has become a “HUGE source of traffic” to the organization’s Web site.

Maggie doesn’t really dig into the reasons for Facebook being a great traffic source, but given that (a) ASHA focuses on issues that impact a large number of people, (b) that the issues are of the sort that attract people seeking information as well as others with similar issues, and (c) that ASHA itself may not yet be well known as a resource to a significant portion of those people it makes sense that presence in a broad social network could attract new eyes back to the organization. The fact that human interest stories and content relevant to students has tended to attract the most attention on the page would seem to support this view.

Before moving on to the next post, it is worth emphasizing Maggie’s final bullet about the success of the page:

The success of the page is totally dependent on daily tending. During the month-long period when I left to take another job and the page was pretty dormant, traffic to the page and to ASHA website from the page plummeted. Especially if your’e not relying on Facebook ads to direct people to your page, the only way people are going to be aware of it is if they see updates from your company in their News Feed. The only way to make that happen is frequent posts to the page.

The lesson I take away from her post is that Facebook may be a great traffic driver for your Web site if, like ASHA, you serve a broad audience of information seekers and you can leverage the network to create awareness, but like everything else in life and business, you don’t get something for nothing – you have to keep the content flowing. (See also my earlier thoughts on Facebook fan page success.)

Read Maggie’s Post: The View from 20,000 Fans (I Refuse to Say Likers)

An Open Letter to Facebook

Now for the darker side.  I posted a while back on the issue of not being able to transfer ownership of a Facebook page. Apparently I hit a nerve, as that post has attracted a lot of comments. Today, via @ConversationAge, I noticed that Tamar Weinberg has taken Facebook to task not just for this issue but for a whole range of other offenses that make the platform frustrating for business use. I won’t try to summarize here – just go and read Tamar’s full post if you are using or plan to use Facebook for your business. You need to know about these issues.

I’d like to say the lesson here is that there is an opportunity for someone or some company to knock Facebook off it’s throne when it comes to social networking for businesses, but Facebook has so much momentum now, it’s hard to imagine that happening. Still, no one thought that MySpace would fall so fast either. If Facebook doesn’t start addressing these issues soon, it would be surprising if Google – just to pick the most obvious choice – didn’t make some sort of play.

Read Tamar’s Post: An Open Letter to Facebook

Jeff

P.S. – It was great to see Maggie’s post about an association. I am still looking for case studies involving small business Facebook success, though. Please share ‘em if you’ve got ‘em!

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So, let’s assume you can live with the fact that Facebook does not currently enable you to transfer ownership of your Facebook fan page once you set it up. (A seemingly trivial issue that can have significant consequences.) What does it take to get actual business results out of setting up a fan page? You know, things like converting visitors into new customers, engaging and retaining current customers, and increasing net revenue.

I half-heartedly set up a Facebook page for my Mission to Learn blog a while back just to go ahead and stake my claim, but I haven’t really done anything to promote it or try to get value out of it. I’d like to change that over the coming months, but so far I am finding relatively few examples of success stories that amount to anything more than a lot of fans with little if any real business impact.

So, without a lot of great specific examples to reference, here are my thoughts on the general ways in which a small business or organization might get a return off of Facebook:

1. Offer Economic Incentives

I’ve already pointed out Sprinkles bakery as one of the success stories I have come across. Go to the Sprinkles Facebook page and get the phrase for today. Go to the Sprinkles bakery and get a free cupcake. It’s a straightforward proposition, and even if you don’t get the free cupcake, the opportunity cost of dropping by a Sprinkle’s is likely very low. Chance are good you will go ahead and spring for a cupcake or cup of coffee just to satisfy that little craving you have had since Monday or to spend some time catching up with a friend or colleague. It’s a logical fit for Facebook. And given the growing popularity of Facebook for mobile users – e.g., people who might find themselves in the vicinity of a Sprinkle’s store – it’s becoming an even better fit.

2. Entertain and/or Educate Them

Sprinkles manages to provide a potential economic benefit in an entertaining way. This combination, in my opinion, is one of the most powerful ways to use Facebook because it provides for a clear way to translate a game or other activity into into a business result. Entertainment on its own, however, seems like a somewhat dicier proposition. Do you gain anything simply by having people come to your page to play a game, take a quiz, or “interact” in some other way? Well, maybe. A recent study by Chadwick Martin Bailey and iModerate Research Technologies, for example, found that:

60% of Facebook fans and 79% of Twitter followers are more likely to recommend those brands since becoming a fan or follower. And an impressive 51% of Facebook fans and 67% of Twitter followers are more likely to buy the brands they follow or are a fan of.

Dangling prepositions aside, these numbers suggest that anything you can do that gets people to your page and turns them into fans could be in your favor. Games and other interactive applications are a great way to do this. (Check out http://www.facebook.com/apps/directory.php as a starting point.) Another way to do it is to make sure you are providing great content – and in my book, that almost always means being educational in some way, shape, or form.

Currently, I used Networked Blogs to pull blog content into the Mission to Learn Facebook page, and I have also pulled in the M2L Twitter feed using the Twitter Facebook application, but I’ll need to add in an app or two and begin posting some content original to Facebook if I really hope attract and engage more fans.

3. Serve a Community Need

I’ve put this one last, but I think it is very often an important contributor to the success of the first two – particularly if you don’t represent a huge brand that has massive numbers on its side. I borrow the term “Community Need” from Web strategist colleague David Gammel, who discusses it as frequent driver for nonprofit Web site strategy. The idea is that you may be in a position to serve particular needs that your audience has – for education, for networking, for collaboration, just to borrow a few of David’s examples – and your Web strategy thus becomes all about doing this effectively.

Even if your audience has particular needs that you can clearly serve, however, you have to be sure to ask yourself whether Facebook is really the place to do it. I have to admit, I am leery of cultivating deep engagement – to which serving a need tends to lead – on a platform I don’t control. But if that’s where a significant portion of your audience is, you may have little choice. I think this is a reality that may ultimately trip up a lot of businesses and organizations: they will try to serve community needs on their own Web site, perhaps within private communities, while the real action with their audience moves to Facebook.

The bottom line with all three of these approaches is that you have to know your audience and be aware of whether, how, and in what volume members of it are using Facebook. I’ll do a follow up post on how to figure this out, but in the meantime, I’m still eager to find more bona fide examples of small business success on Facebook, whether using the approaches above or otherwise. If you’ve got any, please comment and share.

Jeff

P.S. – If you enjoy what you read here on Hedgehog & Fox, I’d be grateful if you would subscribe to the feed or use the form at the upper right corner to subscribe by e-mail.

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I sent out a new edition of my Hedgehog & Fox monthly newsletter yesterday and have already received some very nice feedback on it. Among other topics covered in it, I discuss how the concept of “blue ocean strategy” might be applied to social media. Subscribe and you will receive this latest edition automatically.

With the latest issue out, I have also finally started doing what I meant to do a long time ago: archive the past editions. I’ve only got a couple posted so far, but I hope to fill in all of 2009 and 2008 during the next few days. So, check out the archives when you have a chance – there’s some good stuff in the newsletters.

Jeff

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As I noted in an earlier post that has attracted a lot of traffic, it is currently impossible for an individual or business to transfer ownership of a fan page on Facebook. This is just one of the ways in which I find Facebook frustrating for businesses. There are enough others to turn me off of the platform entirely.

And yet, there’s that number: 350 million.

More than 350 million people globally are active on Facebook. And that number shows no signs of shrinking. Just based on that alone, I feel like Facebook cannot be ignored, and I have to assume that it will become friendlier for business usage over time

So, with that optimistic mind set, I went looking for actual case studies that suggest how small businesses may already be using Facebook successfully.

As might be expected, there are no shortage of results when you search on terms like “Small business case studies Facebook,” but the great majority of these results simply lay out the usual ways in which a small business can use Facebook. You know: set up a page, don’t hard sell, it takes time, etc.  Great stuff, but no real meat.

What I want to know about is businesses that are actually getting business results from Facebook. You know, things like making money and … er … making money. (I know – all you “can’t we just be social” folks want to slap me, but I have rent, and phone, and Internet bills to pay, and so do my clients.)

So, I am looking for great examples of small business success with Facebook. If you have got them, please comment and share them.

To kick things off, one I came across via the New York Times (score one for old media) was Sprinkles Cupcakes. Every day Sprinkles posts a word or phrase that a specified number of customers can use to get a free cupcake. As I am writing this post, for example, the wall on Sprinkle’s Facebook page reads:

Variety is the spice of life… try a new flavor! The first 50 people to whisper “variety” at each Sprinkles receive a free cupcake of your choice!

Now, this strategy would not work for every business, but for a cupcake company based in Beverly Hills, it is a slam dunk. Giving away a cupcake costs next to nothing, and you can be sure that these little teasers bring lots of people into the stores. And let’s face, how many people are going to walk into a cupcake bakery and not buy something? Chances are they will buy something even if they happened to win a free cupcake.

This strategy has been so successful that Sprinkles is now approaching 100,000 fans, and guess what? – they are now running a special promotion focused on hitting that number.  When the page reaches 100,000 fans, Sprinkles is going to randomly choose a winner in its “BFF” (Best friends forever contest. This lucky winner gets an all expense-paid two-night visit to Beverly Hills during which many cupcakes will be eaten.

And you can bet that trip will feature prominently on the Facebook page.

So, that’s my initial offering. What have you got? Please comment and share. (And consider giving this a retweet so that we can attract as many case studies as possible.)

Jeff

P.S. – If you enjoy what you read here on Hedgehog & Fox, I’d be grateful if you would subscribe to the feed or use the form at the upper right corner to subscribe by e-mail.

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SocialFish has recently released its much-anticipated white paper Six Online Community Vendors for Associations: An Analysis. I’m in the midst of a very busy couple of weeks, so have not had the chance to fully digest it yet, but it looks like the usual great work from Maddie Grant and Lindy Dreyer. In it, Maddie and Lindy take a look at “six fabulous vendors who are committed to the association community–Higher Logic, NFi Studios, The Port, The Social Collective, Socious, and SusQtech.”

Even if you are not necessarily an association, you will find much of this report helpful. You can download it, scroll through it, and generally find out more at: http://www.socialfish.org/whitepaper.

Jeff

P.S. – I also send out links to great resources like this over Twitter – Follow me!

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It’s the $64,000 question these days (for those who remember media back in the days before it got social): How do you know that all those bucks you plow into blogs, and Twitter, and Facebook are doing anything for you? And for that matter, how clear are you about how much you are actually spending on these things? (You do know that “free” is hardly ever truly free, right?)

Olivier Blanchard of BrandBuilder has posted a very solid – and entertaining – presentation on the Basics of Social Media ROI. It’s worth viewing just for the photos and captioning in the slides, but it does also deliver on explaining the basics of social media return on investment. The core argument, I’m sure some will complain, is nothing new – i.e., you have to connect media measurements like “eyeballs” and subscribers to actual financial data like increases in sales if ROI, in its true ALL CAPS corporate sense is really what you are talking about – but I suspect the deep need for repeating this argument will not disappear anytime soon.

(Note: Blanchard doesn’t address ROI in situations where some of the most important metrics might be other than financial – i.e., for mission-driven organization -  but the same logic applies: You have to know what those metrics are, and you have to be able to establish a clear connection between social media tactics and any movement of those metrics if you expect to make a convincing argument about ROI.)

I’ve posted the slide presentation above for your convenience, but I encourage you to view it on Slideshare to see the comments – to which Olivier, to his credit, seems to be responding promptly.

Thanks to the Marketing Over Coffee guys for pointing this one out.

Jeff

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Facebook page frustration is on the rise!

Like many people (based on quite a bit of searching), I am becoming increasingly frustrated with Facebook. For the past few days, what has really gotten to me is the way that Facebook pages work.

Here’s the rundown:

It is possible to create a “fan” page in Facebook that enables you to promote an individual or organizational brand – kind of like a Web site for a specific purpose within Facebook. To do this you either:

• Add a page onto your individual account
• Create a business account specifically for the purpose of managing pages and advertising

Sounds simple enough, but as many of us are finding out, nothing is really ever simple in Facebook if you scratch below the surface. A couple of the major issues – and these are just the major ones – that arise as you start to dive into pages are:

• There is no way right now to transfer ownership of a page from one individual to another. So if Bob in marketing has set up the fan page for your organization, guess what? Bob continues to “own” that page even after he leaves your organization. Or if you want to sell your small company and transfer the fan page to a new owner…good luck!
• Well, but of course the simple solution would be just to set up a business account instead of an individual account (it’s an option in the page set-up process). Not so fast, though. If you already have an indvidual account, Facebook’s policy is that you are not allowed to set up a business account. So, you have to find the one person in your organization who is not yet on Facebook and does not ever want to have an individual account to set up your business account. Then you have to deal with all the headaches of your business account stepchild not really working as well as the better-loved individual account in Facebook.

You have to wonder why more people aren’t screaming about this one. My theory is that they will be soon – Facebook for business is still a new enough concept that relatively few people have run into the need to transfer ownership of a page. And many people still aren’t even aware that the business account option even exists.

The natives are getting restless, though. In the Facebook Help discussion forums, there is a thread titled “Transferring a page to new ownership?” that was posted at the beginning of April. Since then, a total of 146 people have chimed in. As far as I can tell, all of them are looking for an answer and nobody has one.

Where are you Facebook staff?! (Is there a Facebook staff?)

I’m sure the issue will be addressed eventually. Maybe it has been already and some kind reader will chime in to tell me where the secret answer is hidden. (Please!) In the meantime, though, this seems to be yet another instance of Facebook simply not being in tune with the needs of users – and apparently not caring.

All in all, I agree with Douglas Karr’s view that Facebook is a lot like AOL 10.0 and that it will ultimately “fail unless it can correct one universal weakness.” Namely, the majority of time spent in Facebook – at least for business users – is “spent managing Facebook… not using it.”

One final note: If you have set up your business as an individual account, woe be unto you – Facebook could choose to shut you down at any moment given that this approach is a clear violation of their current policies.

Here’s hoping that Facebook sorts through these issues soon.

Jeff

P.S. – If you found this posting of interest, you will also want to visit the more recent postings by Tamar Weinberg (on Facebook) and Valeria Maltoni (covering LinkedIn and Twitter as well as Facebook):

• An Open Letter to Facebook

• Do Social Networks See Organizations as Customers?

P.S.S. – I am looking for examples of small business success stories on Facebook (particularly given the issue above!) If you have one or know of one, please visit the Facebook success stories post and comment.

And yet another P.S. – For anyone debating Facebook vs. LinkedIn, note that there is a clear process for transferring group ownership on LinkedIn.

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