Monthly Archives

July 2012

Facebook Promotional Guidelines: Are you breaking the rules?

By Social Media

In our business, if you care about your clients — really care about them– you don’t lead them down a primrose path. You don’t tell them it will be OK to do something even if “everyone else” is doing it. You don’t encourage them to break rules or laws; you don’t ask them to look the other way while you do so on their behalf. Facebook has very specific guidelines about promotions and contests. They are explicit. They do not want the liability of being in the middle of a contest, promotion or other rewards system. If you’re confused about what Facebook promotions are, read this page thoroughly: https://www.facebook.com/page_guidelines.php

Let me quote:

iv.    You must not use Facebook features or functionality as a promotion’s registration or entry mechanism. For example, the act of liking a Page or checking in to a Place cannot automatically register or enter a promotion participant.

Over and over again we see violations of this guideline.

What does Facebook say?

We reserve the right to reject or remove Pages for any reason. These terms are subject to change at any time.

That’s right. They can reject or remove Pages at any time, for any reason. Do you really want to be the consultant whose client pages are taken down due to an infraction?

 

Facebook Likes Are Back On My )@(#*$ List

By Social Media

After a blissful, serene quiet period, I have somehow started getting more and more “opportunities” to “like” one or another business on Facebook, usually in exchange for a CHANCE at some future benefit. Sometimes these opportunities are delivered in bulk, like a case of Pepsi (I’m a Coke man, myself) or doses of bad tasting cough syrup. What gives? Haven’t we already decided this is a bad idea over the long term? It feels a little smarmy, selling out the goodwill of your brand for a short little burst of happy. For we all know that these likes are fleeting, don’t we?

There are many articles on this. Here is one from ZDNet. Here is another from Fresh Networks, and yet a third from Social Media Today. They all say basically the same thing: once someone comes to your page and hits “like,” they rarely, IF EVER, come back. There is typically no reason to in their minds. 47% of potential  customers in a recent survey said that liking a page has no influence on a purchasing decision from that brand, and that 67% only liked the page to get better deals.

Facebook is a great platform for sharing the human side of a business and giving customers a glimpse of the people behind the operation. Sharing content, thoughts, and ideas with your customers in turn builds trust, which can enhance sales over the long term because we all feel better buying from trusted sources. But in order to earn and KEEP that trust, you have to be prepared to make the page a source of value EVERY DAY. If you promise one thing and deliver less, you will undo all your efforts.

So why would you undermine that trust by baiting “likes” with false or weak “deals” that will never be repeated? Moreover why would you PAY to do that?

Facebook’s Policy Protects Fan Pages for James Holmes, Colorado Shooter

By Social Media

TV3 Winchester Streaming Video –

Freedom of speech is one of the may valuable benefits of being an American. But when that speech or action is offensive or perceived as damaging, it’s difficult to stomach. After the tragedy in Aurora, Colorado, a small contingent decided to create Facebook pages for James Holmes as a “public figure.” Other Facebook users chose to “like” those pages. Thus far, Facebook has stood behind its policy and has not taken down the pages, despite dozens and perhaps even hundreds of people reporting the pages as offensive.

In the video above from TV3 Winchester, I provided my thoughts on the situation.

What do you think? Should Facebook disable these kinds of pages? Where should they draw the line?

Digital Citizenship: Best Practices for Navigating Social Media as a Student

By Social Media

At Jaggers Communications, we’re all pretty big fans of education. It doesn’t hurt that we’re all parents, a few of us with teenagers (and older — oh my!). We’re committed to excellent education for our kids and in our community. We support it in a variety of ways, through contributions to scholarship foundations and in our work. We’ve supported communications efforts for educational programs, tools and schools at all levels from preschools to graduate schools!

Today we launched a pilot program, courtesy of friend of the firm Coy Barefoot. Coy was teaching a class on leadership to area high school students and invited me to speak. I have been working on a program for students on digital citizenship and thought this would be the best place to roll it out with a good test audience.

The program doesn’t dwell on all the safety and guidance parents and schools have offered to kids using social media (although some of that is reiterated as a reminder). Rather, this program helps by providing guidance to students as they begin to transition from solely personal use of social media, to professional use as college students, graduates and employees.

We spent a lot of time talking about managing your personal online reputation and what that means for people getting ready to go off to college, applying to schools or for jobs. General awareness of the tools that exist (besides Facebook; teenagers know a lot about Facebook) and how they could and should be using them, is important.

You’d have to attend a Digital Citizen workshop to get the full gist of what was taught and the conversation that takes place in class, but the students were interested in access to the full presentation, and I thought the rest of you might be curious, as well.

 

Communications Done Right

By Communications, Marketing

With all the negative news in the press lately–from the travesty that is U.S. politics to the tragedy that is Aurora, CO and the subsequent NRA dustup, sometimes it’s nice to see communications used in a classy, nice but effective way.

Such is the case of Patrick Wensink, who commissioned a cover for his book, Broken Piano For President, that ended up looking a lot like a Jack Daniels label. As you might expect (although apparently Patrick didn’t), the brand police over at Jack Daniels got involved. And as you might also expect, typically these things can become, well, contentious and directive.

Not so this time. They sent him and extremely polite, understanding, and pleasant letter for once, which you can read about here. It’s the kind of cooperative tone that makes us proud to be in the communications business, rather than being embarrassed by the likes of Ryan Holiday, the lying jerk and “media manipulator.” The letter is non-threatening, helpful, understanding, and amazingly effective. Someone was channeling Dale Carnegie, a practice well worth resurrecting, don’t you think?