Do you think you will use Facebook Places? Our latest blog explores what it means for users and advertisers http://ow.ly/2s8Kq

Congratulations to @springfreetramp for cracking the 1000 facebook fans! Your campaign is rocking along http://ow.ly/CGli facebook

Facebook Ads Now Let You Target Friends of Your Fans http://ow.ly/BBFx via @mashable socialmedia facebook

Digital Futures - A great success

I had the privileged of presenting at the Digital Futures conference yesterday hosted by the Innovation Centre at the University of the Sunshine Coast.

My session was on driving and converting traffic. I've posted a more comprehensive debrief over at the Traffika More Quality Clicks blog, but below is my presentation from the day.

You can also see the Tweet stream here.

Digital Futures Presentation Sept 09

View more presentations from Matt Forman.

Facebook Fanomenon - 3 Tips for Building Your Brands Facebook Fan Base

Facebooks' relentless growth and roll-out of new products and features to create more value for users and brands seems to be gathering pace rapidly with a string on new API features and astonishing growth in new users.

According to Inside Facebook, the social networking giant is now growing by over 700,000 new users per day with a user base of around 250 million.


There is the plethora of new tools Facebook has opened up to brands like Facebook Connect, Open Stream and Live Stream that brings the viral power of social media to 3rd party websites outside of Facebook.

Then there is the Facebook Page for businesses - "a public profile that enables you to share your business and products with Facebook users". This is the starting point for building a brand presence on Facebook.

With the massive scale of Facebooks' user base and all these options available, it is understandable that businesses might feel lost when trying to understand how best to establish and build a brand presence for customers, or fans, to connect with them on Facebook.

While the tools from Facebook are free, like any marketing initiative it is important you have a strategy and plan in place before rushing out and jumping on the Facebook bandwagon. Many a brand has come unstuck by poorly executing their entry onto Facebook.

Once you have determined that Facebook is right for your business and established your plan you need to register your Facebook Page for you business. This will establish your brand presence and protect IP from imitators or cyber squatters.

Much like your corporate website, a Facebook Page isn't much value without visitors to your page. In the same way that you 'friend' your personal relationships on Facebook, customers and brand advocates 'fan' your business Facebook Page.

Building a fan base is critical to the success of your Facebook Page and here are 3 tips to get you on the way.

1. Value, Value, Value
If there 2 things that are going to destroy your reputation on Facebook quickly its spam and poor quality content. While Facebooks' user engagement time is impressive, if the quality of your page is poor and the value it provides low, visitors will leave your page, never to return again.

Your page must provide value - engagement, entertainment or education - pick 1, 2 or all 3, but provide genuinely valuable content.

There are so many content options available: 3rd party applications, news streams, videos, games, FAQs, blog feeds and the list goes on. Invest the time in creating valuable content.


2. Tagging
Everyone loves to see their own name up in lights, the viral power of Facebooks' news feeds help spread the word.

Uploading and tagging pictures and videos of company events that feature your customers, team members, partners, suppliers and even competitors will dramatically extend your reach by featuring in their personal newsfeeds.


3. Competitions & Sweepstakes
Facebook users love competitions, and lets face it, who doesn't want to win something for nothing? Many brands, both large and small, have successfully used competitions and sweepstakes to grow huge fan bases on Facebook.

Competitions that include a tagging element (like Dunkin Donuts recent Keep It Coolatta promotion) are a great way to get fans engaging with your brand and virally spread the good word on your business.

The are some great Facebook Apps available to help you quickly build and launch a Facebook competition, one we work with is WildfireApp. So no matter what size your business is there is no reason why you can't successfully run a your own competition on Facebook.

Like any new medium there is still so much for brands to learn to truly harness the full potential of Facebook.

If you have had experience and learned some lessons on using Facebook for business I'd love to hear your comments?

Social Media... Would You Like Service With That?

We've all seen the business & media headlines... Facebook and Twitter are taking over the world.

Digital agencies are rushing to help businesses and brands make sense of this new communication channel with new social media marketing and social media optimisation services springing up every day.

But if social media is about conversations and participation, just how do brands reach these huge audiences with their message, particularly when consumers don't want to be interrupted from their conversations?

While the media channels may have changed, basic business principles still apply. If you look after your customers and give great customer service they will be your biggest fans and the best source of referrals for new business.

By its conversational nature, social media is the perfect customer service tool... if it's used correctly.

I had a perfect example this week of customer service over social media gone wrong.

My company has recently started using a software-as-a-service accounting solution named saasu. The software is great and works well for a business of our size. Because we are new to using the software I needed some help in training and also integrating it with some of our other business systems.

I visited saasu's website looking for help and went to their Contact Us page. In addition to the standard email form and phone contact details there was a 'Social Media' contact option. "Post a tweet question using Twitter and get a chirpy answer!" it said.

Great I thought, I use twitter regularly and if they can answer my question publically on twitter maybe it will help other users of their software. So off to twitter I went and sent them the 'chirpy tweet' below.

"@saasu I need some help with consulting & training on sassu in Brisbane area. Can you recommend anyone or have someone contact me?"

2 days later I still had no reply.... hmmm.... maybe they didn't see it? So I retweeted.

Another 5 days pass and still no reply. By this time I had given up on getting a reply and took matters into my own hands, using Google to track down a consultant that could help with our training.

Then on the 6th day I received a phone call from someone at saasu. While I appreciated the personal contact I it was strange as I hadn't posted my phone number on twitter. Perhaps they looked up my customer record.

The saasu representative was very apologetic for taking so long to respond and suggested that the reason why it took so long was because I wasn't following them on twitter????? I don't get it???? "Post a tweet question using Twitter and get a chirpy answer!" was what their website said. It didn't say I had to follow them.

He offered to email me a list of consultants I could contact, but because I had already sorted it out on my own the opportunity had passed.

How could have this been handled better?

For starters, if you are going to embrace social media as a communication channel for your business then you had better have the tools in place to monitor it effectively and the resources in place to respond in a timely fashion.

Secondly, social media is about sharing and collaboration. If they had responded to my tweet with a link to a list of consultants or partners on their website, not only would it have answered my question but it could have helped existing or potential saasu customers looking for answers to the same question.

All's well that ends well, their software works well in my business and our training is happening on Monday. It is great they are embracing social media in a way and maybe my experience was just a few early adopter teething problems.

If you've had experiences of great, or not so great, customer service over social media, please let share it by commenting below.