The More Things Change…
December 19, 2011 at 7:02 am
The more they stay the same!
Eye Tracking Facebook Pages
Eye Tracking Web Pages:
Facebook Accounts For 52% Of Sharing
December 14, 2011 at 12:48 pm
I love it when the round-ups of the year come out and this is the first I’ve seen for this year. Interesting points for me are:
- Facebook accounts for 52% of web sharing – they just make it so easy, and we’ve all learned how
- Mobile has exploded. Finally, after years of hype, it has happened.
- Chrome overtook Firefox in November. But lovers of Firefox, read this article about why it’s not doomed!
Tourism Ireland Facebook Fans Hit 500,000
September 21, 2011 at 10:48 am
Delighted to report that Tourism Ireland’s Facebook fans has hit half a million and it’s been picked up by the mainstream media. Am personally delighted about the mention of Ireland Town the St Patrick’s Day virtual game that consumed my life for a couple of weeks earlier this year!
Best headline: The Journal.ie - ‘they like us’
Facebook Landing Tabs – Yes or No?
August 15, 2011 at 8:01 am
I’m doing some testing at the moment as to whether having a landing or welcome tab on your Facebook Page increases the likelihood of a like, or whether it acts as a barrier (like an old school ‘skip intro’ page on websites). I don’t think there is a hard and fast answer; it depends on YOUR fans and their preferences. But I’ve carried out a little research into what some brands do, and collate below my thinking towards best practice on Facebook landing tabs. If you’re trying to decide whether to have one or not, I hope this helps.
Important Features of Facebook Landing Tabs
- Engage and get the max impact with the first 10-15 words
- Ask for the like and be human about it – I like this “We like you, do you like us?”
- Show the best of the Page’s content, and give people an idea of what they can expect as part of your community
- If you’re in hotels, or car hire, or ecommerce, it can be a good idea to offer some form of incentive to encourage visitors to become a fan – such as a money off coupon.
https://www.facebook.com/threadless
Design Led Landing Tabs
Here are some of my favourite examples of landing tabs that go straight in and ask for the ‘like’ but in a visually creative way:
http://www.facebook.com/VirginItalia
https://www.facebook.com/EnjoyEngland
http://www.facebook.com/TescoIreland
http://www.facebook.com/Microsoft
http://www.facebook.com/redbull
Getting The Tone Right
It’s really important to set the right tone. Don’t overwhelm people who are browsing, and don’t demand that they DO stuff straightaway – “upload all your pics and tell us why [our brand] is so great”. Kind of like what these guys do, but that could just be a cultural thing {smirks}.
Here are some of my favourites that get the tone right:
http://www.facebook.com/holdenaustralia
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Sweden/49607452291
http://www.facebook.com/sonyericsson
And finally, I have to give this one a mention – Ford.
I like the way they creatively use the profile pic and landing tab image, and very neatly show off their team. Ford gets a lot of kudos online about how great they are on social media, yet I have contacts on the inside who tell me that they are only now nutting down a strategy for Facebook and are in the process of rolling out monitoring software. I think the reason they get such good press is because they are doing better than most other car companies. If you are a car company and you want to earn yourself lots of online love, get started, invest a little and create a community.
Tags: facebook landing tabs, facebook welcome tab
But is your business really using social media?
July 27, 2011 at 8:51 am
There’s a lot of talk about how many businesses are using social media. There was an article in Sunday’s Business Post about it last week – claiming victory for Ireland over England and the US:
The research also reveals that there was a rise in Irish companies using social media to win new business, with 44 per cent of firms successfully winning new customers online.
Although this was below the global average of 47 per cent, Irish firms lead Britain (41 per cent) and the US (43 per cent) in their usage of social media for customer acquisition.
It goes on to list all the different types of social media tools being used by Irish businesses:
Websites such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter are the most popular forms of social media used by Irish businesses. Firms are also availing of blogs, microblogs and online forums to connect and engage with customers. Nevertheless, firms also emphasised the need for a balance of marketing media, made up of traditional and digital techniques.
I can imagine some business owner, faced with this survey from Regus, ticking the boxes of all the tools he’s ever heard of. Or ticking yes because they have a Twitter account (not touched since March 2010) and a Facebook Profile with lots of friends….
On the same weekend, over the course of being out and about, I met 3 small business owners – all very different to each other and in very different lines of work – but all were expressing worry about the same thing.
- “I know I need to use social media but I don’t know how.”
- “I have a Facebook Page because my mentor from the Enterprise Board said I should have one, but I don’t really do much with it… I don’t know how to get fans.”
- “Don’t talk to me about the other things apart from Facebook and Twitter, I haven’t even got them right.”
And now Facebook rows in with the announcement on Tuesday of its new online education centre aimed at helping small businesses use the social networking site. It’s interesting timing as it underlines Facebook’s support for businesses to be a part of the social network (provided you do it according to their rules!!) which is in contrast to Google’s controversial shut down of business accounts on Google Plus.
Tips for Small Business Owners in Using Social Media
- Don’t set up Pages, profiles, accounts unless you are willing and able to dedicate resource to manage them on a weekly basis
- How often? Try and commit to posting on your Facebook Page 3 times per week for starters. Use Tweetdeck to live on Twitter and it will become second nature and not something you have to count the tweets about!
- Allocate a little budget (doesn’t have to be much) to Facebook ads to reach your target audience. If they are on Facebook and it is an appropriate channel to engage with them, you should grow your fan base pretty easily.
- Once you’ve got fans you have got to engage with them. Write a Facebook editorial plan and stick to it. Try and mix it up in terms of chat, pushing product, and chat again. Images work well, so go and find beautiful images that will start conversations. Be creative.
- At the same time as you’re using Twitter to chat to your followers, start using the Advanced Search feature to find people talking about your service/product in realtime. Choose whether it’s appropriate to engage with them.
That’s what you need to do for starters. Next up is how to extend that activity beyond Facebook and Twitter. How to listen to what’s being said about you and your business across the social spaces and how to respond and engage. Consider how you can move the social activity away from just being something you or your marketing person look after, to something that is second nature to everyone in the organisation.
More on that in another post. Please leave a comment if you want to see this soon. That’ll incentivise me to write it before this season is out. 
Social Media Awards Finalist
May 25, 2011 at 3:57 pm
Tomorrow night it’s a dust down the oul’ gúna, invest in a blow dry and put on my best razzle dazzle smile, for it’s awards time again! And this time, me and my team are up for not 1, not 2, not 3… OK let’s try and be a little humble here… 6 awards at the inaugural Social Media Awards.
For the last 18 months or so, I’ve been working with the great team at Tourism Ireland in the role of Social Media Project Manager. It’s a great team to work with because of the vision for embedding social media firmly within the organisation’s every activity, the professionalism of everyone working there, the fun we have, and of course the great results achieved. I work closely with Maxmedia who develop content, Betapond who have developed quite a few apps, gem the contact centre and Radical on media buy. When I began at the end of 2009 Tourism Ireland had a handful of Facebook fans, Twitter wasn’t really happening, and there was no blog.
Now we communicate daily with over 365,000 fans, have several Twitter streams on the go, blogs in English, Spanish, Italian, and French – which are all great – go and read the English language blog. We develop plenty of apps to keep our fans happy and a very impressive social game called Ireland Town to mark St Patrick’s Day. Currently the UK team has a couple of bloggers in Ireland whose trip is being fuelled by Facebook fan’s directions. There are 3 promotions running that offer great prizes and facilitate data capture. And fresh off the block just today is the latest app that is focused on capturing user generated content – Ireland Holiday Stories app. If you have a great story to tell about a trip you took in Ireland, why not come on over and share it with us?
So, tomorrow night, we’re up for an award in pretty much every category we could enter! If we don’t pick up at least one piece of foam I’ll be very disappointed! If you’re going to the awards tomorrow night, come on over and say hi. I haven’t been out to one of those gigs in quite a long time, so it’ll be great to see some old faces again.
Facebook Page for a Non-Profit Organisation
Integrated Facebook Campaign (Page, App and Ads)
Best Twitter Account – Support, CRM
Integrated Facebook Campaign (Page, App and Ads)
Use of Social Media by State Body/Org
Customer Care using Social Media (Integrated)
Innovative Use of Social Media
How Electricity Companies Should Use Twitter
April 13, 2011 at 9:50 am
It’s quite simple really – there are only 3 competitors in the Irish market. Very easy to use Twitter effectively to listen out to people at their ‘point of need’. This could be negative….
Or, er, negative (I couldn’t find any positive tweets about Airtricity, Bord Gais, or ESB!)
Assuming that we’re ESB, the newly relaunched competitor.
How to find people who are itching to switch? And score some positive WOM while you’re at it
- Open up Advanced Twitter Search
- Do a search for “Airtricity”… you’ll find a lot of tweets coming up about the football league, and job ads, etc.
- Insert those words in the “none of these words’ box
4. Review your results. In the case of disgruntled customers, consider tweeting them with a special offer code. It’s very important to get your tone right. Be engaging, empathise. Whatever you do, don’t be too salesy. That will backfire.
5. For the example above about charging higher standing charges, I’d suggest tweeting “ESB standing charges X. Bord Gais X+2. Airtricity X+3 #we’renotsneaky“. Straightforward display of pricing, with a nod to the original tweeter’s use of the hash tag.
6. Wait for the person above to respond – because folks – this IS a conversation and that’s how conversation works. If they choose to engage with you (the brand), then you can come back with an offer code. See what they say, be polite, answer their question, and end with a call to action – preferably a trackable link – for making the switch.
7. I’d suggest creating a switching page on your website that is written to disgruntled Twitter people coming over. Everyone knows personalisation works, so why not write your body copy on this page to talk to directly to these people? All links to this page should be tracked so you can capture the number of leads you’re getting from Twitter.
As regards the positive WOM stuff… I use an example in training about how impressed I was when @VodafoneIreland responded to a tweet I made about Vodafone network being down, Twitter being all I’ve got. Vodafone tweeted me back a few hours later to say “we’re back on now”. That simple tweet was very effective. It turned a negative (the network being down) into a warm and fuzzy feeling (“oh they listen to me… they care…”). Whenever I share this story (telling people = positive WOM), course participants are always quick to jump in with similar tales of positive actions such as this. So apart from hoovering up leads by using Twitter in this way, you’re also generating lots of instances of positive WOM. I still believe that, despite what one of my more cynical buddies on Twitter had to say on the matter yesterday! What do you think?
I do hope you can understand my equation stuff above, I did go to seek out the electricity standing charges in Ireland to use real numbers, but it’s a bit of a minefield and I couldn’t get my head around it in the time I have now. I’ll come back to it.
Note the use of the hash tag. I will write about hashtags shortly. They are, simultaneously, the most abused, and the most well used device on Twitter. Hashtags were invented (by Chris Messina) specifically for use on Twitter. Sadly, they’ve been hijacked by overzealous marketers.
Finally, while you can create searches in Twitter applications such as Tweetdeck to deliver tweets to your app on specific search terms, the big failing here is that you can’t use negative keywords, and you cannot geotarget, so while you can set them up, you may be at risk of getting a whole load of noise. But if that’s what you want, that’s OK. I like the “since this date” feature in Advanced Twitter Search because you can task your team to perform this activity every couple of days (hoovering up sales leads!) – so all they have to do is insert their keywords since the last date they performed this search, and away they go
What about your business?
Are you using Twitter in this way, which incidentally is Number 3 on Mashable’s List of 9 Digital Marketing Lessons. Do you need a little help?
Do you pee?
April 6, 2011 at 12:31 pm
I came across this on Twitter lately; I think it sums up social media pretty well:
“I am pee-ing” on Twitter
“I just pee-d” on Facebook
“I am peeing here” on Foursquare
“I can pee, hire me!” on LinkedIn
Do you pee? 
Great Pickup
March 17, 2011 at 5:16 pm
When you read stuff like this after a long hard week that isn’t over yet, it makes it all worthwhile..
Tags: Ireland Town
Ireland Town Social Game
March 15, 2011 at 9:14 pm
If you’re looking for something fun, interesting, and challenging to get you in the mood for Paddy’s Day, then you might want to check out Ireland Town! It’s a social game on Facebook that I’ve been working on over the past 6 weeks in my role as Social Media Project Manager for Tourism Ireland.
Like all good things, it began on the back of a napkin in Bewleys when Brian conveyed to me his vision for a social game involving key destinations in Ireland. I took that napkin home, wrote it up into the shortest brief ever known to mankind, and shipped it out to a couple of trusty developers. Internally wincing at the turnaround time I was asking for proposals back, and the number of words in the brief, things happened, ideas got created and work began on Ireland Town in early February.
Betapond, who I’ve worked with on a couple of projects before, were the winning development team and they have pulled an amazing rabbit with fluffyness, brains and that can speak 5 languages – out of their hats!
Now we’re at the end of an exciting 6 weeks. You will be able to play Ireland Town yourself from Thursday (St Patricks Day) – but if you’re a fan of one of Tourism Ireland’s Facebook Pages, you will get an early start today.
My Role (as Social Media Project Manager on behalf of the client)
- During the specification process, working on behalf of the client to ensure their best interests are being specc’ed out in the documentation and formal agreements for the project
- Communicating timelines to all parties involved in the project internally
- Sourcing content… while designers design, developers code, and the money people negotiate, someone has to come up with content ideas, and run around sourcing, signing off, and delivering. For this project we have 31 destinations with 9 tasks at each one = a lot of content to come up with. Luckily we also have our copywriters on hand to jazz up the language.
- Wearing my design hat, feeding back client’s views to the developers.
- While development takes place, I turn my attention to preparing all the ancillary content such as creating the Facebook presence, with custom designed tabs, a schedule of content for the first 6 weeks, Twitter skins, etc. Working with our trusty video editor on promo videos for Youtube.
- Communicating progress throughout to the stakeholders within the organisation. Ensuring their questions are answered, ideas are fed through into the development process, and requirements from them are clear.
- Did I mention there are 5 non-English languages?
I Love My Job.
I love the start of projects where it’s all about ideas and ‘What Can Be’. I love the middle of projects where everyone’s working together towards the same thing. I even love the crazy end of projects where days are long, and work is a heady balance of calls to mobiles and landlines, 3, 5, and often 7 way skype chats, emails flying, last minute things being dropped in…
Thank You’s
- To the makers of Basecamp, Dropbox, Skype, and Conceptshare – you are my saviours… Where would we be without you?
- To Aileen, David, & Lisa – thanks for poring over the spreadsheets and injecting fun into them! If you’re going to the Blog Awards this weekend, give them a big cheer – they’re shortlisted for the Best Sports & Recreation Blog.
- And of course, last but definitely not least, to Heidi who always ‘gets it’ and manages to do cutesy but cool at the same time – A Massive Thank You Indeed. If you want beautiful design from someone who knows what you want more than you do – talk to CookieWeb.
Go on – play Ireland Town the newest social game on Facebook. Enjoy. And happy St Patrick’s Day!
Tags: facebook.com/irelandtown, Ireland Town social game, St Patricks Day, St Patricks Day 2011
