Time. Time. Facebook Timeline is On My Side

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Marketing Musings

If you’re involved with the world of social media, you’ve probably seen the surge of complaints that erupts whenever Facebook makes a change to its site. It’s like the Old Faithful of social media. I was actually surprised when there wasn’t much uproar over the new Facebook Timeline. (Sure, Timelines.com got a little upset).

The Timeline feature has been out for a while now, so you’ve probably already seen it. But if you haven’t, it is a new way to organize the timeline of your life according to what you share on Facebook—when you posted status updates, when and where photos were taken, even when you were born. It’s all there. With the updates and photos, Facebook has created a slick-looking new profile page. Poke around Facebook and check it out.

You: “Sounds great, Brian. How about you give me some examples and suggestions for how I can use this thing.”
Me: “Sure thing.”

Right now, the Timeline feature is limited to personal accounts, but I’m guessing that Facebook is working to roll out something similar for businesses. That said, you should be thinking about how to tell the story of your company’s history. Two paragraphs on an “About” webpage isn’t going to cut it. In 2012, people want interactivity.

Facebook’s Timeline provides a place to show off important events. Think about how you represent your company using social media? Is it just about the present and future? People like to know how something got to where it is. This means you might have to go way back into your company’s archives for images. Gasp! You might have to scan some pre-digital images! Or, you could consider tracking a new product’s development.

Even if Timeline isn’t for businesses yet, you can still create picture albums either by product or by year to share some of your history. If anything, those old company photos of people sporting brown corduroy suits and big hair are good to poke fun at. More than likely, something like Timeline will be coming and it would be smart to start thinking about how your company’s past should be represented.

Are you currently using Timeline for your personal page? How can you envision it being used for business pages? Comments are welcomed and appreciated. Or, continue the conversation with me on twitter.

Learning to Curate: How to Become a Modern-Day Trader in a Lost Art

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Content Strategy, Marketing Musings, Social Media

Remember back in your college days when one of your friends was always listening to the latest local bands or piecing together new and interesting outfits? Well, in their own way, they were curators. You may think of museums when you think of curation, but the truth is everybody curates in some way.

Creator vs. Curator
In our digital world, you’ll sometimes see people refer to themselves as a creator or a curator. Some people do both and some prefer to do one or the other. Creators are people who make videos, write blogs, take photos, write reports, comment on blogs, actively tweet their thoughts, etc. Curators spend time finding interesting content to share with others or to use as a reference for later. They are more concerned with sharing good content and being part of the action of developing stories in the social media world. Of those people online, nearly everybody does both, but a few tend toward one or the other.

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Twitter Comcast “Case Study”

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Marketing Musings

One of my colleagues, Greg, told me about this story. It’s an old story about turning around a disgruntled customer using new media–Twitter! (Note: Twitter is a micro-blogging tool that allows users to send short blog posts of 140 characters or less to other users that follow their micro-blog.)

One Twitter user who just happened to run his own marketing blog (C.C. Chapman, Managing the Gray) was “Tweeting” about the quality of his HD picture on Comcast during a Boston Celtics game. Shortly after his micro-rant, a Comcast service professional sent him a message on Twitter asking him how he could help fix his HD reception.

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Keeping it Real

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Marketing Musings

I am attending the New Media Expo in Las Vegas for 2 1/2 days of interesting presentations from a variety of speakers.  So far I’ve heard from Michael Geoghegan, who produces Disneyland’s podcast,  Gary Vaynerchuck, podcaster for Wine Library TV, and Scott Whitney, a professional podcaster.

One common theme through their presentations was to make sure that recordings are spontaneous, passionate, and emotional.  Vaynerchuck shoots his video for tv.winelibrary.com in 20 minutes in one take every day without editing.  Geoghegan admits that he doesn’t know much about Disneyland.  When he learns a new Disneyland fact in his podcast he’s genuinely excited and interested, and it shows up in the podcast.  Whitney coaches his clients not to read from a script when he interviews them, and will stop an interview to encourage interviewees to speak from the heart.

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The Math of Viral Marketing

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Marketing Musings

In catching up on my RSS feeds over the weekend, I found myself staring at a short New York Times article that suggested a long story left unwritten. How does anyone build a viral campaign that succeeds out of any force other than blind luck?

Believe it or not, there is an equation for just that purpose:

[Be Amazing] + [Act Amazing] = [Get Amazing]

Viral is really that simple – just be worth talking about and do something worth talking about. The only catch is you have to have both to succeed. Notice also that I’ve not mentioned timing anywhere. There is a reason for this: Great campaigns always make their own timing.

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Social Networking Inside Big Businesses

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Marketing Musings, Social Media

It doesn’t have to be said that blogs, wikis, podcasting, twittering, etc. will eventually be considered a natural part of the way we communicate as individuals and is fast becoming the way that enterprise companies reach their audiences (see Forrester research). But turns out now it will be a major way big companies reach their employees and facilitate conversations between their employees too.

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Seriously Amusing.

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Customer Evidence, Customer Reference, Marketing Musings, Social Media

Like auto hobbyists with a new set of tools, marketers can’t stop chatting about how traditional marketing and social digital media will intersect over the coming years, so I won’t bore you with more opinions on this exact matter. Plus the somewhat ironical humor of discussing social media, new media, or community marketing via a blog just cracks me up. Continue reading →