Patrick Barbanes

Facebook’s new Offers is sneaky.

Facebook introduced another version of it’s own online coupon-deal thing. It’s first version was called Deals. The newest is called Offers. And it’s pretty sneaky. Here’s how it works.

An update will show up in your newsfeed. It will say something like “[Your Friend's name here] has claimed an offer”, and it will show your Friend’s picture with a small line item about the deal – say, $99 condo rental!” It won’t have much detail, see the screenshot here.

I don’t know about you, but MY first impression was that a) my friend “claiming” the offer really meant that my friend BOUGHT the offer, and b) that she wanted to share it out to let others know about it.

But neither of those was true. She neither bought it, nor explicitly said, “This deal is so good I want to share it with my friends, so let me click a Share button!”

No, what happened to her was what happened to me: she saw the same sort of message in her timeline – that one of her friends had “claimed” an offer. She clicked on the “claim offer” in order to learn more, and guess what happened? A message went out to HER friends that SHE had claimed the offer. I saw the message about her and I clicked to learn more about the offer. But instead of learning more, an update went out to MY friends that I had claimed the offer. When I’d really done no such thing, I just wanted to learn about the offer. And in fact, when you click, you don’t learn more. You get a pop-up box telling you that an email has been sent to you with details of the offer.

Sheesh!

This is like one of those viral scam video links where there’s really no video at all, but just by the link being clicked on by you, it sends out an update to all your friends that you watched a video. The social proof that you clicked the link is there, and some of your friends will click the link, too. And that all happens BEFORE you even learned what it was you were clicking on.

That’s about as under-handed as it gets.

Sure, somewhere in the depths of facebook’s settings, there’s a way to turn these Offers off – or even keep the Offers on, but turn off the sharing part (that you “claimed” an offer, when all you did was click to get more information about it). But here’s facebook again forcing users to go figure out a way to turn something off instead of just being upfront about what’s going to happen, and offering an opt-in. Something that would say, Yes, I want more information about this Offer, and yes, I want to share that with my friends.

It’s facebook’s world, and we live in it.

The Top 5 Biggest Wastes Of Time In Facebook Timeline for Pages

Social media can be a time-suck. But there are different kinds of time spent in social media: a good kind, and a bad kind.

One kind is the good kind: creating good content, and engaging with people. You know, being social. So among other things that includes spending time on Twitter actually initiating some conversations based on something you’ve seen in your tweet-stream, as well as creating good blog posts that will deepen an existing reader relationship or engender comments, and sharing stories on Facebook.

The other kind is, obviously, the bad kind. That includes obsessing over your twitter profile background (there was a time when providing custom twitter profile backgrounds was a huge business!) or mastering the use of a feature of these incredibly feature-rich social sites that you’re never really going to actually use anyway.

Facebook, of course, can be a huge time-suck. For good reasons (it’s fun!) and for bad (it keeps changing!). The change to the Timeline format is a great example of the bad, because it’s filled with features that professionals are urging you to spend time on in order to fully take advantage of this new “canvas” upon which you can “tell your brand story.”

So to save you some time, here’s my list of the five biggest wastes of time in Facebook’s Timeline. Yes, they can be advantageous. But no, depending on your business and your strategy, they might not be worth the time it takes to even learn about them.

1. The Cover Photo.
Frankly, this is definitely an area where I think the whole “Timeline thing” is overrated. I don’t recommend spending much time on designing or picking the absolute best cover photo, as I’ve read many guides to Facebook do. You’ve got more important things to do – like run a business! The stats are that only a small percent of people ever re-visit your Page at all after Liking it. That means that only a small percentage of your fans ever see your cover photo more than once. OK, first impressions count, sure, so it’s important to have an appropriate cover photo for when people do arrive there. But that’s like telling a man to keep his zipper up on his pants while he’s out in public – it’s pretty obvious. I wouldn’t tell him to spend hours designing a perfect zipper. Make sure it zips up, and he’s good to go. Same thing with the Cover photo. Don’t obsess over it, unless you think yours can create and maintain some amazing “buzz” about it that will drive flocks of new visitors to your Page.

2. Backdating.
When blogging, depending on your blogging platform, you could usually go in and change the date that you published a blog post. You could actually write and publish a blog post today, but change the date to make it look like you had published it yesterday, or even last year. Now you can do that with your facebook status updates, too. I’m going in search of a use for this, but a few come to mind quickly: instead of making people think that the picture of my amazing dessert at the restaurant represented the dinner I had TODAY, I can change the date to make it look like I had that awesome dessert last month. Or I can post a happy birthday update to someone, belatedly, but then backdate the post so it looks like I really said happy birthday on their actual birthday. I hate being late with that kind of stuff.

3. Milestones.
Somewhat similar to backdating, milestones are events (or actions or “stories”) that you can backdate into your Timeline, and which show up as huge banners across your Timeline. So a brand can fill in it’s company history – true, or in the case of Captain Morgan’s Rum’s Timeline, partly fictional. This allows ardent fans to scan through a Timeline and learn amazing facts about the brand, such as the introduction of it’s first solar water panel heating system for it’s corporate offices, or the demotion of one it’s vice presidents to branch manager. Milestones can be thought of as those pretty boring lists of corporate, well…milestones…that many corporations put in their annual reports. And we all know how people love to read annual reports. So unless you’ve got staff sitting around with nothing to do, I don’t really recommend spending much time going back in time to flesh out your brand history on Timeline.

(On a side note, this blog post was inspired by the now-ongoing (May, 2012) 30-day Really Simple Blog Challenge. Learn more about it by opening the really simple blog challenge facebook tab – it will open in a new window – right now, then coming back to finish reading this post!)

4. Pinning Posts.
The ability to “pin” a post to the top of your Timeline activity has gotten a lot of publicity, mostly favorable. The problem is, those few people who DO come to your Timeline (see #1), will look at your activity and see an old-dated post (it can stay pinned up top for as long as a week) and get the impression that you’re not really all that active. So whatever great impression you made with your incredibly amazing cover photo (see #1 again) could get ruined by a pinned post. Be honest, MOST people are not going to notice that little “pin” icon on the post or understand that it means there could be more recent activity beneath that post. Sure, there can be advantages to pinning certain posts, but for the most part, a waste of time.

5. Ability to message with fans.
Previously, the only interaction a brand page could have with someone who Liked the page (a fan) was by posting an update and hoping the fans saw it, liked it, commented on it, shared it, or otherwise engaged with it. But along with the mostly-visual changes of Timeline came an operational one: now a brand page can actually go one-on-one with fans. The fan has to initiate the interaction, but this is a dramatic change. But how can you encourage private messages between a Fan and you/your Brand? (What if you just ASKED for messages?) Now, it’s not just you posting and your fans reading, commenting or liking – which is one kind of relationship. It’s actual one-to-one dialogue, which is a whole deeper level of relationship. Imagine the possibilities! Some of the suggestions I’ve read have been to ask fans who are leaving negative messages on your Timeline – let’s say they’ve had a bad customer service experience with you – to please message you privately so you can deal with their problem more intimately and make them feel more important. That could work, but now your customer service reps who are busy fielding angry tweets are also having to read and respond to angry facebook messages, which are harder to ignore than angry facebook posts. Because, really, if I post a complaint on your wall and never see a response, I’ll just shake my head and sigh at your lack of engagement. But if I leave you a private message and I get no response, now you’ve really pissed me off even more.

So there you have it.

Again, there are and will be positive uses for these things, but currently I see way too much attention being paid to them. My advice? Stay away from them, and continue to focus on posting engaging content that will reach into your fan’s newsfeeds and be shared by them with their friends to get you new fans; reach out and engage on OTHER pages, to be seen as one of the people who doesn’t just broadcast but also goes out and responds (kind of like commenting on other people’s blogs); and create useful custom tabs that you can drive visitors to through direct linking and advertising.

So those are my Top 5 most important changes in Facebook Timeline for Pages. What do YOU think? Do you see other changes that would fit in that list?

My Biggest Blogging Challenge

My biggest blogging challenge is just like my biggest challenge in life: getting things done without pushing them to the very last minute or second! Even when I have plenty of lead-time to do a project, I either put off the serious work of …getting it done until the last possible minute, or I tweak and tweak and tweak – or in the case of blogging, edit and edit and edit – right up to the deadline. It’s like I want to feel the pressure, as if I think I work best under pressure, and the pressure is usually one of time, but it’s usually self-created. And the truth is, I do like the feeling. But I also don’t like it. I wish I could finish a project – or a blog post – far in advance of it’s due date. Maybe I could live without the pressure!

Start Annoying Yourself

As a child, you probably annoyed your parents when you began to test the boundaries of what was allowed, how far you could go, what you could get away with. Adults do the same thing. The Occupy movements are testing boundaries. While the movements have various goals, I see a great deal of protesting for the sake of protesting, to test the rules of free speech and free assembly – even if there’s nothing particularly specific behind the assembly or the speech. They’ll form a crowd and cause a ruckus in a train station where you just might be trying to catch the 5:45 to get home, or they’ll make it difficult for you to get into your office building in the morning to do your job. It’s pretty annoying. A videographer that I know sees one of his foremost roles as that of boundary tester: he’ll begin videotaping in a situation you might not really expect, like in the security line at an airport. It’s legal, and he knows it, even though the authorities often don’t know it themselves. The photographer is creating a crisis and often a confrontation – Hey, you can’t videotape here! I’ve seen footage, and you can hear the annoyance of people in line behind him who are perhaps late for their flight. Needless to say, it’s more than annoying to the authorities. But in each case, whether it’s a child testing the limits of parental authority, a group of citizens testing their country’s constitution, or a videographer testing the right to take pictures, there are two significant effects. First, they put the legality of the rules to the test: do the authorities know the limits, and how do they enforce them? Second, they show other people that the limits they may have expected – you can’t videotape here! you can’t assemble here! – were not limits at all. As a child, the limits to how far you could go naturally seemed narrow. Until you tested them and realized that in many cases, the limits weren’t there at all – they were in your childish mind. You annoyed your parents, but were discovering yourself. There’s great value in being annoying. Unless you’re testing your own boundaries, you’ll never know where your limits are – and chances are, they don’t even exist.

Uncertainty Is Liberating

When I’m doing social media training sessions, I often get asked things like, What will the next big thing be? Will Google+ take over Facebook? Will Bing take over Google? Questions like that. Now, I recently got into the stock market, and part of my education is to read stock sites and blogs and watch CNBC. And for any given stock or industry, there are usually three expert opinions. One expert says BUY that stock…NOW!!! Another expert says SELL that dog…now!!! And the third expert says the stock market is rigged, what are you doing trying to invest in the market, anyway! I thought the experts would help me. And they did. They reminded me that nobody really knows what’s going to happen tomorrow. The stock market, the roll of the dice at a craps table, heads or tails, should you take this job or that job, social media’s next big thing….Nobody knows. That’s actually very liberating. With some fundamental knowledge under your belt, you realize that you’re as smart as the experts. You can’t let what might or might not happen paralyze you. Let the uncertainty liberate you. Take an educated guess and move forward. You have to get in the game.

B2B? Data Shows Why You Should Be In LinkedIn Groups

A brand-spanking-new survey by Leadformix of 289 B2B companies with some kind of presence on LinkedIn has some great data.

It’s quite an indepth analysis. (You can read the full report from Leadformix here.)

Here’s one of the key take-aways for me:

Of visitors who clicked to a B2B website from LinkedIn, 24% – almost 1/4 – were enterprise visitors – meaning they were visiting from a corporate IP address. What that means is that almost 1/4th of people who clicked from LinkedIn to a B2B site were on their corporate network at the time.

Why is that significant? It means they weren’t home, personally surfing the web. They were at work, or at least on their work computer and network, visiting LinkedIn and then bouncing out by clicking a link in LinkedIn to a B2B site. So far so good? OK…

Of those “enterprise visitors,” as illustrated in the chart below, more than one-half of them arrived at websites from individual profile pages (35.7%) or company profile pages (16.3%). Only 16.4% arrive via “groups” and 3.6% via LinkedIn ads.

BUT… those people who went to a site from a LinkedIn “Group” were the most likely to complete a fill-in form on the site they visited. In other words, they were most likely to “convert” from a Lead to a Prospect. As Leadformix notes, “In the B2B space, all enterprise visitors to a website are referred to as leads.” When a Lead (the visitor) fills in a form on a B2B site, they are handing over their information in exchange for a whitepaper, some other offer or simply on a contact form, and thereby becoming a “Prospect”.

Those are the people you want visiting your site…the ones who will convert.

So based on this report (and as I’ve been saying all along without all the data and the graphs) Groups within LinkedIn are the best place to interact with them.

Why? Because it makes sense, and this is good data to support that.

Groups narrow down and bring commonality to an area of interest. Someone in a Group that you are in is already interested in that thing that you are interested in.

So someone who sees and/or engages in a Discussion in a Group that you’re taking part in, for example, and who then takes the next step of clicking out to your site would naturally be more likely to take the NEXT step and complete a form on your site (if that was one of your calls to action there) than someone who came across your profile and clicked to your website from there, or who happened upon your site among a News item and clicked to it from there.

Groups engage people. Engaged people become Leads. Leads become Prospects. Prospects become Clients. (If you, you know, know what you’re doing.)

So get engaged in Groups on LinkedIn! You’ll find more people clicking over to your site, and becoming Prospects. And isn’t that what all businesses want?

Social Media for Advocacy

Holy crap, this is good! Check out this presentation from Chelsea Duran, who writes at Copy and Social Strategy. Chelsea put the presentation together for a panel discussion with high school students about using social media for advocacy. High school students! Her messages hit all the right notes. It’s heart-warming to know that young students are getting this perspective on social media early in their lives! (Read Chelsea’s post about it here.)

How To Use LinkedIn’s “Signal” Feature

One of LinkedIn’s newest features is called Signal, and it lets you tap into, search through and filter almost everything your LinkedIn connections are thinking and doing and even tweeting (yes, tweeting!). This is powerful. Here’s just one example of how to use this “secret” LinkedIn feature:

You’ll learn things like this in more detail in my all-online course, Really Simple Bootcamp, which is on special pricing right now through Sunday only in the Really Simple Bundle. Go check it out now, because only 20 are available at the bundle price!

Be A Revolutionary

I came across this old post of mine from July, 2008. I like it enough to repost it again now, without asking you to click again to go find it. So here it is:

Be A Revolutionary

As I write this, the date is July 4th, 2008. My wife and daughter are still asleep as I type, but they’ll be up soon for the barbecue and the fireworks later tonight. Because here in the United States, July 4th is Independence Day. American independence was declared after the Revolutionary War. Here’s what I think: YOU should be a revolutionary and declare YOUR independence (if you haven’t already).

In a world of much mediocrity and “same-ness”, you must dare to stand out. Declare who you are.

If you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything.

Just by doing so, you’ll be declaring your particular, personal “brand.” Even if you don’t do it online or use any of my strategies or those of other personal branding strategists, you must do it.

Brand YOU. Not your company. Not your boss. YOU.

Yes, just by actually taking a position, taking a stand, stating your opinion – even when it’s contrary to most of the opinions around you…in fact especially when it’s contrary to most of the opinions around you, you’ll be a revolutionary. And that’s a good thing.

Easier said than done? Let me know.

Job-Seeker’s Workshop Preview

I’m so excited about the upcoming Get Back To WORKshop! With special thanks to the good folks at MedTrain (http://www.mymedtrain.com/), who have donated the training space, here’s a brief video we put together about it:

We’ll be teaching some really simple social media strategies, as well interview skills and resume tips and guidance from CrescoMedia, plus some motivation from Denise Jacobs!

Read more about it and sign up for this free job-seekers workshop here.