Do you Like me? Facebook’s feature sleight-of-hand

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Marketing Musings, Social Media

Last week, Facebook made some changes. Depending on the slant, they either “seized control of the internet” or basically sewed buttons on everything in sight. A lot of the changes were under the hood, but I’d like to focus on the shift from the ‘Become a Fan’ to the ‘Like’ feature, along with the accompanying proliferation of Like buttons across the internet.

Do you like-like me, or do you just like me?

On users’ profiles, Pages are public: they’re broadcasted endorsements of brands, causes, ideas, and organizations. They are, like all the other pieces of profiles, one of the building blocks of a Facebook identity. On the old Facebook, ‘becoming a Fan’ of something meant consciously endorsing that thing as part of your digital identity.

That’s a high bar for engagement: it meant that Fans were clear advocates for the brand and interested in ongoing interaction (with the exception of Fan-building contests).

Meanwhile, we all got used to ‘liking’ our friends’ status updates, conversations, and links. ‘Liking’ something was the Facebook equivalent of smiling at it, nodding vigorously, or giving it a hug.

The Result? People ‘liked’ things more often than they became ‘Fans.’ So Facebook, cleverly, decided to parlay the habit of ‘liking’ into Pages. Now there’s no semantic difference between liking your friend’s graduate school acceptance update and liking the Coca-Cola Company. The only difference is the resulting engagement: one of those will be published publically as an endorsement and enable continuing communication, and the other remains a casual expression of congratulations. It’s like a flashback to 6th grade, when it was easy to spend entire bus rides explaining that you liked that guy, but it didn’t mean you like-liked him. Totally different, guys.

So what’s the difference, anyways?

For brands, this means that the barrier to Facebook engagement is much lower. Pages are likely to wind up with more Fans, but they will be less committed to the engagement. ‘Liking’ will be more common, but it will mean much less. This is good for companies for whom liking is enough—Coca-Cola, Sketchers, the Seattle Mariners—but less good for companies who count on deep engagement to build relationships and share content—the New York Times, consulting companies, financial organizations.

The “like” feature could become the next big marketing thing, or it could lose all meaning. For the marketers who rely on measurements like number of Fans, it’s going to require a reassessment of what that number means. For consumers, it could mean a backlash when they realize that ‘liking’ things grants access to news feeds.

Your turn!

Would you rather ‘like’ something or become a fan? Do you read ‘Pages’ as endorsements? How much engagement are you committing to when you like something? How much engagement do you hope others are committing to when they ‘like’ your Pages?

Speaking of which: do you like us?

Or do you like-like us?

Gartner’s BI Summit takeaways: Get business on board for BI

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Business Intelligence, Marketing Musings

Last week’s Gartner BI Summit in Las Vegas was a lot like the famous Vegas buffets—too much for one sitting. The topics ranged from establishing Enterprise BI and BI Delivery Frameworks to Master Data Management, Enterprise Architecture, Sourcing and Resourcing, and Measuring Business Value. Others were broader, addressing questions like how to engage the business in establishing meaningful metrics.

One of my favorite speakers was Keith Ferazzai, author of Who’s Got Your Back? and ex-CMO for Deloitte. He challenged us all to create an environment in our organizations and our projects that fosters truth telling. This starts with finding out what’s important to end users and taking an interest in their concerns, which helps to drive adoption and create reporting that’s more meaningful. Holding each other accountable and establishing a culture of intimacy fosters innovation.

Meaningful reporting comes down to measuring the right metrics, which was another common theme throughout the Summit. Often, companies invest in lots of tools and technology without stopping to really evaluate what they’re trying to measure. Business intelligence offers a real opportunity to make a difference by making sure you involve cross-functional areas of your business in the discussion of what should be measured. To take advantage of the full value of BI, recruit a senior executive to lead a metrics framework and create a BI strategy that connects planning, reporting, and analysis to inform business goals.

However, it often felt like those crucial business voices were scarce at the Summit itself. Here’s my recommendation to Gartner for next year’s BI Summit: offer a 50% discount for each business stakeholder from a specific company with a fully paid IT registration. This would help break the silos in which many companies now function by bringing attention and an open discussion to BI and IT projects. It would also create more holistic conversations so that all attendees could return home poised to build the collaborative frameworks that are vital to any successful BI project.

Take Something, Leave Something: Why online communities need a little love

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Customer Communities, Marketing Musings

Take Something, Leave Something The individual components of this antique typesetter's drawer contains nick-knacks; this and that's. If you see something you desire, please feel free to take something, and leave something in its place.

This past weekend, we decided to get out of the city and head to Mount Rainier for a few days of computer-free downtime. We stayed at a cabin whose décor ranged from modern (the flatscreen TV for movie-watching) to rustic (vintage skis). But the centerpiece of the living room, hanging just above the small dining table, was an antique typesetters’ box with a small sign above it.

It occurred to us that the typesetters’ box is a fitting analogy for online communities and the myth of user generated content. Ideally, each visitor would bring something interesting to the box—an oddly-shaped key, a silly figurine, a tiny picture—and take something equally interesting. But, looking at the box’s collection of odds and ends, it was clear that’s not how it played out. Instead, people had taken the things they found interesting and left whatever they had on hand. What did they have on hand? Mostly wine corks, bottle caps, and regular old trash. This knick-knack collection needed a curator—just as online communities need guidance from a manager or two.

What would make it work and continue to have great content?

  • A little warning: let people know before they arrive that they should bring something worth sharing. For the first go, this is a little tricky, but online communities are likely to see repeat visitors. If they see great content being contributed by other users, they’ll want to come back with something to share in return. I’ve seen this most vividly on Tumblr and (in the old days…) LiveJournal, where the quality of your networks’ content is a challenge as well as a treat.
  • A little cleanup: drop by every so often to tidy things up. Clean out the trash, whether it’s irrelevant or spammy comments. Cull the repetitive stuff, whether that means ineffective re-hash or accidental double-posting. Of course, in communities, it’s often verboten to delete simply low-value content, but just cleaning up the mistakes and spam helps raise expectations so people are a little less inclined to leave their trash.
  • A little bit of love: if you care about the community, you’re going to need to help out occasionally by refilling it with the really good stuff, so that people have something to come back for. If it’s a knick-knack box, this might just mean bringing a few tiny figurines and a seashell. If it’s a community, this could mean engaging an expert blogger to write an article or logging in every day to thank the highest-value contributors. It could even mean making a video yourself or asking around to see if any of your partners are willing to share their best presentations with the community.

What does it all come down to? User-generated content isn’t magic. It’s not going to create itself, and it may not even curate itself particularly well—especially on a small scale. That doesn’t mean it’s not worth pursuing, it just means you’ll need to participate. And if you do, the reward is an interesting, constantly changing place, worth visiting again and again.

Need more help with the care and curating of customer communities? Let us know – we’d love to help.

Code, content, and cocktails

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Content Strategy, Marketing Musings

I am neither a web developer nor a designer, but somehow I had the good fortune to sign up for An Event Apart in Seattle, mostly because I have joined the church of Halvorson and couldn’t miss a chance to hear the content strategy gospel first-hand.

Here are just a few of the things I learned over the past few days, in no particular order:

  • There’s nothing to be gained and much to be lost by not taking up Twitter. (Follow me @Naumannclature.)
  • Embrace your audience. As a content strategist (still trying that on for size) I’ve always advocated for identifying who you want to reach before you start to even try communicating with them. But that’s not enough—you also have to know what device they prefer and what browser they default to in order to engage with them on their terms.
  • Interactivity isn’t new—it’s a return to the way things were before we started to let our eyes glaze over, zoned out in front of the TV.
  • The best way to “fire” your clients is to make them think it was their idea.
  • I just love bread pudding. (The catering staff may have been more responsible for this lesson than the conference presenters, but an important insight nonetheless…)
  • To clients, developers, designers: we word-loving people (editors, content strategists, web writers) come in peace. Messaging is a tool, not something to be tacked on like a piece of gum—and definitely not a weapon.
  • Embrace feedback. Or, as Jeffrey Veen quoted from codinghorror.com’s Jeff Atwood: “The velocity and responsiveness of your team to user feedback will set the tone for your software, far more than any single release ever could. That’s what you need to get good at.”
  • Yes, it is possible to give a great presentation while drinking a cocktail.
  • Seek inspiration in new places – in detective novels, architecture, chalkboards, the history of refrigeration, on the moon.
  • Design for the future. It will be here sooner than you think.

My recommendation—hop on over to An Event Apart and take a look.

How to engage online and do it right: lessons from An Event Apart

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Customer Engagement, Marketing Musings

I spent the first part of this week at An Event Apart, which is billed as “the design conference for people who make websites.” While I’m not a designer, I do make websites (like this one), and the speakers included a number of people I hugely admire, so I was thrilled to be able to go. After two days packed with presentations, great people, and good food, my head felt ready to burst with design, code, content, and interaction ideas. I came away feeling personally challenged to do better work—and with a few major takeaways for all of us who work to engage with customers online in one way or another:

  • R-E-S-P-E-C-T: find out what it means to…well, everyone. Respect your colleagues, your users, your readers, and your clients. The strength of the presentations themselves came from these presenters’ obvious respect for each other and for us as their audience. But they also preached respect: Jeffrey Zeldman talked about the importance of recognizing when clients are a good fit (and how to part ways gracefully if they’re not), while Luke Wroblewski and Kristina Halvorson discussed the need to respect users’ time and attention by keeping content to-the-point.
  • Engage on your customers’ terms. Luke Wroblewski pointed out that this increasingly means meeting them on their mobile phones, but Ethan Marcotte’s “Dao of Flexibility” presentation offered ways to get a great experience on the biggest screens as well as the smallest. MailChimp’s Aaron Walter talked about playful, humorous design, but also highlighted the need to make straightforward, serious communication available if that’s what customers need. And of course, nearly everyone talked about the need to be aware of what browsers and devices visitors are using and to make their experience positive.
  • Be nice—but first get out of your customers’ way. Playful brand identities and emotionally appealing interfaces are great (and important!), but websites and applications have to stand on a solid foundation of usability and clarity. Nicole Sullivan’s suggestions for faster websites and Jared Spool’s emphasis on truly user-centric design underscored how important it is to keep in mind that “engagement” should never mean “entanglement.” (See the difference between this concept of ‘engagement’ and this one, which was quite successful).

I left impressed and inspired. These people care about the internet and its users in a way that should inspire all of us to engage genuinely and humanely online. What’s more, they provided direct ways to start doing just that—my to-do list grew with every presentation. In fact, I’d better get to work on that!