Facebook has become an important part of most brand’s marketing efforts. As it is now the most visited site on the Internet (more visits than Google even), businesses can’t afford to ignore it. More and more people are logging on to Facebook first thing and checking in all day on their laptops, phones and iPads. So all our clients have strong, robust Facebook pages with good followings.

Facebook is awesome because it’s permission marketing at its most pure. Your customers “like” your page, which gives you permission to push updates to them. So when they log in to see what their friends are up to, they also see what YOU’RE up to. You can push specials, promotions, contests, random trivia, brand messages, timely updates – whatever. There are guidelines and formulas we create for each of our clients (don’t “sell” too much, for instance, and don’t update too often or people will de-friend you). The idea with marketing on Facebook is that it’s a social medium, so we encourage our clients to engage with their customers. Have a conversation. Ask a question (Facebook allows you to use polls). Comment on topical items that might be interesting to your customer.

To date, Facebook had a feature that allowed you to add tabs to your page. These appeared in the left hand column. I’m not going to bother showing you a screen shot because they’re going away. One of the great features was that you could force new fans to a landing page (one of the tabs). Brands used this as a welcome screen (we call them “fan gates” in the biz). So a new customer is forced to your fan gate and asked to “like” your page. Not forced to like your page, but right there, in their face, a request. Sometimes, we tie that request to an offer, like a coupon. . . “Like us for a free coupon.”

SAMPLE FAN GATE FOR OUR CLIENT, UNCLE MADDIOS:

And this is where the new Timeline for Facebook SUCKS. No more tabs. No more forcing new fans to a landing page/fan gate. All new fans will go to your “wall” – now called “timeline.” <sigh> No more check-in deals, either, but there will be a “deals” app.

You can still have apps that people can click on for further info . . . store locations, for instance, or contests, or to “like” you for a coupon. But we can no longer force people to that page. The apps will  live beneath a large cover photo and honestly, it’s going to be tricky to get people to find them until they’re trained to look there.

So that’s the problem. We’re working on solutions for our clients and will post some ideas here. Stay tuned. There are some great new features with Timeline, too. We’ll cover it all!

More and more, it looks like social media is here to stay. In fact, more than 50% of all adults use some form of social networking DAILY (and 65% of all Internet users). Twitter’s usage alone grew from 8% of Internet users to 13% from November 2010 to May 2011. It’s not just teenagers using social media, and hasn’t been for a while: fully 83% of Facebook users are between the ages of 18-54 (and increasingly more women than men, which isn’t a huge surprise given that women tend to be slightly more social in real life, too).

I love Scrabble. My husband loves Scrabble. We own five or six Scrabble games: one deluxe edition, the Cubs edition, a travel version, a plain old regular version, etc. A few years ago, people were playing a Scrabble-ish  game, “Scrabulous,” like mad on Facebook. Problem was, that app was not developed by Scrabble, so Hasbro sued for copyright infringement and the app was removed. No worries; other Scrabble lookalikes have popped up in its wake.

People still play word games on Facebook but the “in” thing right now is to play on your phone. The most popular app is called “Words with Friends” and it allows you to play with other friends who are online, or to play with random folks if your friends are all too scared to play with you (yeah, I’m talking to you, Wendy!). Take that! Triple Word Score with an “X” on a double letter tile! (Words with Friends for iPhone/iPad here, and just released for Android phones here.)

Hasbro has been criticized for not digitizing their game fast enough or providing it in all the various digital formats their customers want. Their response?

“Hasbro innovates, but we innovate when we know there’s a real market,” according to Mark Blecher, senior vice president for digital media and gaming for Hasbro. Mark, Mark, Mark. I realize “innovate” is only an 11-point word and hardly worth your time, but to innovate is to lead, to come up with something new. You just admitted that you follow the market. WTH?

Do you think housewives were screaming for a microwave when it was created? Think they were just sitting around waiting for someone to come up with a way to nuke their food into dry, hot, rubbery messes? Do you think the folks who created the Internet were going where there was already an established market? Cuz really, there were so many people sitting around with broadband connections just wondering what to do with them 50 years ago.

If you wait until there is already a “real” market, you run the very real risk of becoming the market loser. Just ask Borders.

p.s. Read more of this story at the New York Times. I’ve been very pleased with their tech and social media coverage lately.

Good grief. Who is in charge of their PR over there? Never mind that their reputation went from 60 to 0 in nothing flat because of their vehicles’ sudden acceleration problem. Now someone at Toyota has decided that the best way to combat the negative PR is to pay a bunch of mommy bloggers to write positive things. Now, to be fair, they aren’t asking them to lie. And there is a push among bloggers to reveal if they’re writing a paid review or not. (It’s called Blog with Integrity, and yes, I’ve signed the pledge.)

But the better way to combat negative publicity is to do something positive as a company. Do lots of positive things and give people a chance to write about that.

This is all part of a growing field of marketing science called “Online Reputation Management,” or “OTR” if you’re collecting marketing acronyms. It’s one of the most important, and most overlooked, tactics a business can employ. And many of the companies who are trying to do it (like Toyota, I assume), are making a mess of it. Stay tuned to our blog. We’re working on some OTR how to’s for you.

In the meantime, read the whole story of Toyota’s botched mommy blogger outreach here. The blogger who wrote this is not a marketer by trade, but she sure writes like she is one. I couldn’t have said it better myself.

UPDATE: The company that contacted the blogger with the offer says they are not affiliated with Toyota, nor did Toyota ask them to do this. They are trying to build a company where stay at home moms can be paid for simple blog posts and I guess they put up their own money and selected Toyota as a test case to build their proof-of-concept. <sigh> OK, so I could write a whole other post on why this was a bad idea, starting with the fact that Toyota might not like it very much. And that there are some other, well-established companies already doing this, such as BlogHer. Not to say you can’t create a competitive venture, just that if you’re going up against a well-funded competitor, you’d better have a strong differentiating proposition, which this company does not seem to have. Also, you might not want to mess up right out the gate with your intended target audience!

Social media isn’t for every business. But as more and more people log on to Facebook, tweet out every little thing, and broadcast their location with Foursquare, social media is increasingly becoming an important part of the marketing mix for businesses, large and small.

Here, then, are the latest traffic numbers for the most dominant player, Facebook. We always joke with our clients that Facebook and Twitter might not be for everybody, but with numbers like this, we would be committing “marketing malpractice” if we didn’t at least tell you about it! It’s worth noting that Facebook now has more visits than any other site on the web, including Google.

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