I’ve seen lots of FB ‘groups’ and ‘events’ set up which should be a ‘page’ or fan page. Groups and events have fairly obvious functions WITHIN FB but pages have the advantage of being taller – by which I mean that they stick their heads up ABOVE the garden wall so that Google  can see them. A Facebook page is where your business should be found, not on your own profile or just in a group (though groups and events are useful too) and updates from your page will be seen by all of your ‘friends’ and on the walls of their friends to (depending on their settings).

Don’t forget your final objective though, which is probably to get people onto your web site, preferably onto an appropriate landing page where they can easily see the call to action, whether that be to sign up or to buy something directly.

Your FB page is not just a link engine though – remember it’s a very real presence for you and you must set up alerts or check postings regularly. You’ll need time to ‘live there’ whilst still tempting people to click through to your site. The normal way is, of course, to make the ‘more…’  link into a route back to your place but don’t try and force them to register just to read more, that’s not very friendly!

Above all, see it form a visitors point of view and remember good and bad experiences you’ve had in following links from a blog or social media site. Remember – Christmas is coming – sooner than you think!

Ralph

Having rolled out a Google Groups set up for two non-commercial (sadly) clients recently, I’m embarrassed by the blank email syndrome that no one wants to fix and the clumsy way that members are added and displayed. Ah well, what do you expect from a free service? Well lots, actually because Gmail and other Google stuff is great but not Google Groups. OK, OK, I know it was intended as a news group front end but even so…

So I was about to transition to yahoo groups (haven’t tried it yet – any good?) when I discovered www.Airset.com and www.centraldesktop.com both in the same day – one from a friend and the other from Miko Coffey’s excellent blog post “Which on-line collaboration tool should I use?” I’ve always been a great fan of 37 Signals and I use Basecamp and Highrise, praising their elegant, simple implementation. Things move on though and while 37 Signals systems work just as well as they ever did, the freemium model used by Dropbox, Airset and others is a very seductive way to get people started with a new service.

Airset has a rather different proposition – you have ‘a cloud computer’ and you can create ‘a group cloud computer’ and share things. It’s a neat group ware concept, if you can get users to buy into it. The question is, how will they interface it with their existing world of competing on-line collaboration tools?

This all reminds me of the famous saying, “The great thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from”. Now – whom can I choose as an Airset guinea pig…

Just think about whom you ask before you buy something. There’s the person in your ‘social graph’ whom you trust, the ‘expert’ whom you read and the person who has to live with your decision and whom you’ll naturally consult. This ‘leading edge research’, I enjoyed informing a recent seminar audience, is from John French and Bertram Raven in 1959. There’s nothing new under the sun – except the media!

So using social media to communicate with influencers is a very important concept – think about communicating (after getting to know them well)  with journalists, editors and key bloggers. That’s an obvious start – with these people representing ‘Expert Influencers’ to many people. Don’t forget though that we all take advice from friends and colleagues in our ‘social graph’ and also from the people who’ll have to live with our decision. Just try buying something for the house without consulting your partner!

We all know that when writing for social media marketing, the correct ‘voice’ is important – you have to be a real, authentic, credible person with the aim of becoming known as a ‘trusted adviser’. It’s important to think of your reader, or the kind of reader you’re writing for. Well now you know that you should not only be writing for potential buyers but also to inform people who themselves want to be a knowledgeable ‘trusted adviser’ to their own friends and colleagues.

Just think of that bloke in the pub who knows something about everything or the taxi driver who like to talk. Wouldn’t it be good if he knew something about your message?

So now I shall keep a Blogger blog as well as this WordPress blog in order to get to know both of them.