Blogging can be a powerful marketing tool for businesses with interesting stories to tell. I believe this is especially true in businesses where building a personal relationship with propsects or showcasing one’s expertise has the potential to translate into sales.
A few industries where this has proven to be particularly effective include:
1. Real estate - builds personal relationships between agents and prospects. Rain City Guide and St. Paul Real Estate Blog are two examples.
2. Software - Microsoft has been able to build closer relationships between Microsoft’s software developers and the developers who user Microsoft products to build applications. I’ve seen less success with Microsoft using blogging to communicate with consumer end-users of products like operating systems and Office software.
3. Authors - Blogging has proven to be a great way to build an audience for a book, keep the conversation going with readers, and drive pre-sales of future books. Speaking engagements come out of this as well. Seth Godin and the guys behind Freakonomics stand out here.
I haven’t seen much success with direct to consumer companies that aren’t known for personal relationships. For example, while Wal-Mart interacts with millions and millions of people a day in their stores and on their website, it’s a rather impersonal relationship. People shop their stores based on price and the convenience of finding everything from Kleenex to tropical fish and guns under one roof.
Of course, this doesn’t stop companies like Wal-Mart from testing the waters with things like blogging or Facebook sponsorships. For the cost of trying things like this, they’d be stupid not to.
Jeremiah Owyang from PodTech.net has taken a look at this subject in recent posts on his blog including one where he compares his blog’s Facebook group audience with Wal-Mart’s:
I’m checking up on the group, and have noticed that the group size is very low, in fact only 934 members. The Web Strategy Group that I promote is at 1500 members in just a few weeks longer, and it’s certainly a much smaller ‘brand’ than Wal-Mart.
Personally, I don’t think Wal-Mart’s marketing success can be measured by its Facebook group membership. Neither can the web success of other large consumer serving companies like Mobil or Xcel Energy. These are companies that easily ignore Facebook’s existance.
Adding someone as a friend or joining a group on Facebook is an act close to an endorsement of that person or business. Wal-Mart, and companies like it are basically utilities in the eyes of typical Facebook users. You use them because you need them, not because you love them.
What Wal-Mart will probably learn from their Facebook experiment is that they’re not cool; just like friending your parents isn’t cool. However, it’s not bad to be not cool as long as you’re respected and deliver on promises. In the case of Wal-Mart, the promise they should be pushing is, “we have cheap crap for your dorm room, from school supplies to aquariums.”
On the blogging front, Wal-Mart should NOT open up to the world. Can you imagine purchasing people from Wal-Mart blogging?
“Hi, I’m the guy who demanded such low prices on [insert product here] that your town’s main company packed up and moved production to China. Now you know why your dad can’t help pay for college.”
Bad idea.
As we’ve seen, Wal-Mart’s PR firm has struggled with this in the past by going as far as creating fake blogs supposedly written by customers about how much they love parking their RVs in Wal-Mart’s lots. Just face the facts: if you have to fake it, it’s probably not a good fit.
In summary: Understanding your customer’s relationship with you - rather than your relationship with your customers - is key to successful marketing.
Blogging can be a powerful marketing tool for businesses with interesting stories to tell. I believe this is especially true in businesses where building a personal relationship with propsects or showcasing one’s expertise has the potential to translate into sales.
A few industries where this has proven to be particularly effective include:
1. Real estate - builds personal relationships between agents and prospects. Rain City Guide and St. Paul Real Estate Blog are two examples.
2. Software - Microsoft has been able to build closer relationships between Microsoft’s software developers and the developers who user Microsoft products to build applications. I’ve seen less success with Microsoft using blogging to communicate with consumer end-users of products like operating systems and Office software.
3. Authors - Blogging has proven to be a great way to build an audience for a book, keep the conversation going with readers, and drive pre-sales of future books. Speaking engagements come out of this as well. Seth Godin and the guys behind Freakonomics stand out here.
I haven’t seen much success with direct to consumer companies that aren’t known for personal relationships. For example, while Wal-Mart interacts with millions and millions of people a day in their stores and on their website, it’s a rather impersonal relationship. People shop their stores based on price and the convenience of finding everything from Kleenex to tropical fish and guns under one roof.
Of course, this doesn’t stop companies like Wal-Mart from testing the waters with things like blogging or Facebook sponsorships. For the cost of trying things like this, they’d be stupid not to.
Jeremiah Owyang from PodTech.net has taken a look at this subject in recent posts on his blog including one where he compares his blog’s Facebook group audience with Wal-Mart’s:
I’m checking up on the group, and have noticed that the group size is very low, in fact only 934 members. The Web Strategy Group that I promote is at 1500 members in just a few weeks longer, and it’s certainly a much smaller ‘brand’ than Wal-Mart.
Personally, I don’t think Wal-Mart’s marketing success can be measured by its Facebook group membership. Neither can the web success of other large consumer serving companies like Mobil or Xcel Energy. These are companies that easily ignore Facebook’s existance.
Adding someone as a friend or joining a group on Facebook is an act close to an endorsement of that person or business. Wal-Mart, and companies like it are basically utilities in the eyes of typical Facebook users. You use them because you need them, not because you love them.
What Wal-Mart will probably learn from their Facebook experiment is that they’re not cool; just like friending your parents isn’t cool. However, it’s not bad to be not cool as long as you’re respected and deliver on promises. In the case of Wal-Mart, the promise they should be pushing is, “we have cheap crap for your dorm room, from school supplies to aquariums.”
On the blogging front, Wal-Mart should NOT open up to the world. Can you imagine purchasing people from Wal-Mart blogging?
“Hi, I’m the guy who demanded such low prices on [insert product here] that your town’s main company packed up and moved production to China. Now you know why your dad can’t help pay for college.”
Bad idea.
As we’ve seen, Wal-Mart’s PR firm has struggled with this in the past by going as far as creating fake blogs supposedly written by customers about how much they love parking their RVs in Wal-Mart’s lots. Just face the facts: if you have to fake it, it’s probably not a good fit.
In summary: Understanding your customer’s relationship with you - rather than your relationship with your customers - is key to successful marketing.
It’s great to hear that the Where I’ve Been application on Facebook has been acquired by TripAdvisor.com. UPDATE: they have not been acquired.
Biggest Facebook App Acquisition Yet: TripAdvisor Acquires Where I’ve Been for Reported $3 Million
Just two months after asking, “I Have 250,000 Users, Now What?”, Craig Ulliott has an answer.
In what is by far the largest Facebook application acquisition to date, travel company TripAdvisor has reportedly acquired Where I’ve Been from Craig Ulliott for $3 million.
This as one of the first Facebook applications that I found useful. It’s such an easy way to track places I’ve visited with a slick interface.
However, as Andy Beal from Marketing Pilgrim points out, it’s not something one visits every day to update, so how exactly will TripAdvisor get their money’s worth out of the application? Beal’s theory:
… it was certainly fun to try and recall all of the places that I have visited. But then what? I don‚Äôt ever really go back to it and I don‚Äôt think I‚Äôve ever closely reviewed the places my friends have been either.
Still, with 2.3 million users, TripAdvisor will no doubt slap its brand name on it and be happy to reach a new audience.
I think branding could play a role, but the much bigger opportunity here comes from doing something with the data users have contributed to their Where I’ve Been maps. Knowing where someone’s been, where they’ve lived, and where they’d like to visit has to provide marketing opportunities beyond slapping a logo on the application.
It’s great to hear that the Where I’ve Been application on Facebook has been acquired by TripAdvisor.com. UPDATE: they have not been acquired.
Biggest Facebook App Acquisition Yet: TripAdvisor Acquires Where I’ve Been for Reported $3 Million
Just two months after asking, “I Have 250,000 Users, Now What?”, Craig Ulliott has an answer.
In what is by far the largest Facebook application acquisition to date, travel company TripAdvisor has reportedly acquired Where I’ve Been from Craig Ulliott for $3 million.
This as one of the first Facebook applications that I found useful. It’s such an easy way to track places I’ve visited with a slick interface.
However, as Andy Beal from Marketing Pilgrim points out, it’s not something one visits every day to update, so how exactly will TripAdvisor get their money’s worth out of the application? Beal’s theory:
… it was certainly fun to try and recall all of the places that I have visited. But then what? I don’t ever really go back to it and I don’t think I’ve ever closely reviewed the places my friends have been either.
Still, with 2.3 million users, TripAdvisor will no doubt slap its brand name on it and be happy to reach a new audience.
I think branding could play a role, but the much bigger opportunity here comes from doing something with the data users have contributed to their Where I’ve Been maps. Knowing where someone’s been, where they’ve lived, and where they’d like to visit has to provide marketing opportunities beyond slapping a logo on the application.
It’s great to hear that the Where I’ve Been application on Facebook has been acquired by TripAdvisor.com. UPDATE: they have not been acquired.
Biggest Facebook App Acquisition Yet: TripAdvisor Acquires Where I’ve Been for Reported $3 Million
Just two months after asking, “I Have 250,000 Users, Now What?”, Craig Ulliott has an answer.
In what is by far the largest Facebook application acquisition to date, travel company TripAdvisor has reportedly acquired Where I’ve Been from Craig Ulliott for $3 million.
This as one of the first Facebook applications that I found useful. It’s such an easy way to track places I’ve visited with a slick interface.
However, as Andy Beal from Marketing Pilgrim points out, it’s not something one visits every day to update, so how exactly will TripAdvisor get their money’s worth out of the application? Beal’s theory:
… it was certainly fun to try and recall all of the places that I have visited. But then what? I don’t ever really go back to it and I don’t think I’ve ever closely reviewed the places my friends have been either.
Still, with 2.3 million users, TripAdvisor will no doubt slap its brand name on it and be happy to reach a new audience.
I think branding could play a role, but the much bigger opportunity here comes from doing something with the data users have contributed to their Where I’ve Been maps. Knowing where someone’s been, where they’ve lived, and where they’d like to visit has to provide marketing opportunities beyond slapping a logo on the application.
VentureBeat has an interesting story explaining that some companies are seeing a spike in traffic to their sites due to their integration of their applications with the Facebook platform. For example, HotOrNot.com offers a Facebook interface for their site:
Surprise: Facebook apps may help grow home sites
The finding, reported by Quantcast, a service that tracks traffic trends for Web sites, suggests that sites failing to embrace Facebook may be missing out on potential growth.
For some, this is also encouraging evidence that Facebook’s platform, launched in May, isn’t necessarily weening users entirely off their own Web sites. While Facebook allows third-party sites to advertise on their applications on Facebook, many sites prefer to maintain control over their users’ experience, and are hesitant to trust Facebook’s promise that it will remain hands-off. Despite the pledge by Facebook’s executives that sites are free to make money on their apps within Facebook, its terms of service says Facebook can change its policy at any time.
To me, it seems like companies who can enable Facebook interfaces for their applications aren’t hurting themselves. They’re simply providing access to a larger audience who happens to prefer accessing applications through Facebook rather than on the open web.
In the ideal situation, data gathered through any interface such as Facebook will be treated the same by the application host, and improve the value of the application overall regardless of the interface used to get the data into the system.
This may not apply to all applications, but it seems like it should hold true for web applications that become more valuable as more people participate and contribute information such as HotOrNot, other dating sites, auction sites, wikis, etc.
I think we’ll see more businesses trying to decide whether they’ve better off launching as a Facebook application first, on on the web first with a quick follow-on Facebook interface.
Jules at floobergeist raises an interesting question about whether Facebook could lead to the end of class reunions.
If you’re continually in touch with your old classmates and up to date on their lives, what’s to be gained from a formal reunion?
Facebook: The End of Class Reunions?
Could the advancement of Facebook also result in the demise of the high school reunion? Is there a need to see your high school facebook friends in one place after 20 years? Will high school reunions simply become a dreary coffee date for the people of your graduation class who *aren’t* on facebook?
I’ve addressed this before from the perspective of his this will effect Classmates.com’s business, which has largely been built on the concept of enabling reunions.
Personally, I don’t think Facebook or sites like it will kill reunions. In fact, it could do just the opposite since they’ll be easier to organize and people will have more to talk about since they know more about each other through Facebook profiles than they may have known about each other when they shared classrooms.
To me, this is similar to local blogger meet-ups. People who’ve been tracking each other’s lives through their blogs generally have a lot to talk about since they know what their fellow bloggers have in common with them before them get together.
*Photo by Velo Steve under CC.
I’m starting to see a two cases of Facebook spam that Facebook will need to
address. This seems critical to me, since a very similar issue is one of the things
that’s led me grow to hate MySpace over time.
First, I’ve been getting repeated friend invitations from people who are overly
aggressive business networkers. The kind of people who think quantity is as
important as quality when it comes to networking.
Second, I’m getting repeated invitations to join groups. In some cases, they’re
groups where I’ve previously been a member but decided the group wasn’t right
for me. After leaving, I’m apparently considered a prospect for joining the
group again, so the invites start coming in.
It seems like the friend request confirmation process needs a 3rd option beyond
confirm or ignore that allows users to block future requests. That would give me
the control I’m looking for to manage my relationships properly.
The group invite problem could be addressed when leaving groups. A checkbox
saying, “Been there. Done that.” which creates a “not interested” status for a
specific group would clean this up nicely.
After finishing dinner tonight, I hopped on Facebook. I could have just as easily watched some TV shows - on my computer, since I don’t have one of those clunky wall units - but I found myself catching up with my friend’s updates, including relationship status changes, Twitters, groups joined, and party invites.
Once caught up, I turned to the web, where I read a blog post by Brad Feld, who raised an interesting point within a recent post about Facebook:
Last week, I started saying to people “Facebook is a substitute for television.” I don’t think I made this up (I’m sure someone else said it first), but for the last decade many people involved in the Internet have been searching for the pure substitute for TV – what will you spend your online time playing with instead of sitting and passively watching TV. Facebook finally seems to be the tipping point for this.
I absolutely agree with Feld’s point. Personally, Facebook has overtaken TV as my first choice for entertainment at home, since it’s much more interesting to login to Facebook and catch up with friends than it is to passively watch a show. Facebook’s News Feeds allow me to find truly interesting content with only a few clicks. Interesting things that I find myself talking about with my wife and friends later in the day, such as a change in relationship status of one my wife’s brothers today (good news).
At this point, I see college students refreshing Facebook on commercial breaks while watching TV. This puts their attention at around 3:1 in favor of TV. But if you forced them to choose between Facebook and TV I’m sure a large percentage of them would choose their friends (Facebook) over their shows.
As Facebook user’s networks grow, just keeping up with changes becomes a big time commitment. But it’s a commitment people are willing to make since it’s extraordinarily interesting content. Eventually, something has to give, and I think it will be time spent watching commercial TV.
David Dalka raised an interesting point about Facebook’s apparent policy change to open up public profiles for search engine indexing:
Facebook Spamming Your Identity To Drive Their Traffic
The other day I was highly surprised to learn that my Facebook profile was showing up in the top 10 for Google when you Google my name. In my opinion, turning on a feature like this without informing your users of the change to drive traffic using users’ identity to their social network via search engines is rather sleazy. After looking through their 89 zillion privacy options, I could not find a way to do it without excluding current community users which I did not want to do.
As Dalka explains above, he thinks Facebook should have been more clear about how public a public profile is, and give users explicit control over whether their profile can b e indexed by search engines.
Personally, I’m not bothered by this, but could see how some people may be. For example, people with relatively slim online histories are more likely to find their name’s search results to include their Facebook profile than someone who’s an active blogger and engaged in many online communities. Of course, a more active online personality is already more open about their personal lives due to the nature of their online behavior, so would probably not be bothered by one more search result about them popping up.
The biggest reason why I don’t have an issue with this is the content on Facebook is within the control of each user. Whether it’s indexed or not, the content contained within your own profile page is content you put their yourself. Put that together with the privacy settings you chose when setting up your account, and there really is no justification for shock here.
It looks like the profile indexing change is still relatively new since Facebook, as of this writing, has a mere 276,000 pages indexed in Google. Compare that to MySpace.com’s 19,600,000.
Leveraging the search rankings of individual user’s names is an incredibly powerful way to build the network. People Googling friends and happening upon Facebook are surely great candidates for joining the service in order to view full profiles, message other users, and build out their own profiles.
Mashable’s Peter Cashmore offers some insight in the comments on Dalka’s blog explaining profiles from Facebook are ending up in Google’s index:
Actually, it’s not all that bad - it’s been like this at least 6 months, and Google only indexes Facebook pages that are linked to from elsewhere (most commonly, when you post a Facebook badge somewhere like a blog). When not logged in to Facebook, nobody can view that page, and those that are logged in only see a photo and location.
My advice: If you post something to the web, do so under the assumption that search engines will find it, and that it will live forever.
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