So the day we have all been waiting for has arrived rather suddenly and without much fanfare but Facebook have finally revealed the new brand pages.

First impressions are that they are somewhat similar to the new profiles and have a huge potential for brands to get creative with a large cover photo which can be used to showcase logos, products or just amazing design.

The pages don’t officially launch until March 30, but for now if you want to you can have a play around to preview the new look and review your page before the changes take effect. They have also released new ‘Learn about Pages’ guide to help you on your way.

According to Timeline product manager Sam Lessin, ‘Timeline for profiles was designed to make Facebook a better medium for individuals to tell the stories that create their identities, and the philosophy for brands is no different.’

There are a number of immediate changes that I am immediately aware of and feel will have a significant impact on how we manage Facebook campaigns. In a nut shell the main changes are:

-       Additional of a cover page

Cover pages are fantastic in that’s they allow far more space for brands to be creative but Facebook have already outlined strict guidelines for what you can and can’t do one them.

They must not contain:

  • Price or purchase information, such as “40% off” or “Download it at our website”
  • Contact information, such as web address, email, mailing address or other information intended for your Page’s About section
  • References to user interface elements, such as Like or Share, or any other Facebook site features
  • Calls to action, such as “Get it now” or “Tell your friends”

We’ll just have to wait and see how  far they will go in reinforcing them.

-       Tabs have moved

Tabs are no longer down the side of the page but displayed under the cover page. You can select the change the order they appear in and also the image that is displayed rather than the generic app logo.

-       No more default landing tabs

This is a bit of a nightmare as I am a big fan of having an optimised ‘like us’ branded welcome tab and frequently use this for clients. The other thing this will impact is the running of campaigns and competitions which will typically be the default landing page whilst they are running as a way of increasing fans.

However you can still link people to this by copying the URL and you can also ‘pin’ this to the top of your page.

-       The ability to ‘Pin’ posts you want to prioritise

Pinned posts are Page posts that admins have chosen to display prominently at the top of their Page. A pinned post will always appears in the top left of your  Page’s timeline and has a  flag in its top-right corner. Once you have pinned to the top of your Page it will remain there for 7 days. After that, it’ll return to the date it was posted on the Page’s timeline.

-       Highlight Posts

In addition to pinning posts, you can also highlight posts you want to feature more prominentl. This also extends to Milestones which are key moments you’ve decided to highlight on your Page. Milestones are automatically expanded to widescreen and are visible to everyone visiting your Page.

-       Timeline functionality

I think this is a fantastic addition to the new pages as it allows you to showcase the history of your company.  See what Manchester United have done with theirs. From anywhere on your Page’s timeline, scroll to a spot and click  to post a milestone or other type of story to a particular date.

Milestone photos display at 843 pixels wide and 403 pixels tall.

-       Updated Admin features

They have also improved the admin capabilities and you can now do the following from one pace;

  • View notifications
  • Respond to messages
  • View your Page insights
  • Access your activity log to curate content on your Page
  • Access the Edit menu to make changes to your Page’s settings

It will be really interesting to see how brands start using the pages and how it effects engagement and interaction on the page. Watch this space. in the meantime, check out this great guide put together by Mashable to see how brands are making use of the new pages.

One way to deal with reputation management

One way to deal with reputation management

Online reputation management is never black and white and every case if different. But whether someone is posting on your company Facebook page, commenting on your blog or posting their own negative content independently from your social platforms there are a few simple things to have in mind before you respond.

Getting your response wrong could have catastrophic results. Have a read of this blog post I wrote for Speed Communications a while back on crisis management for brands. It outlines some great examples of how not to go about dealing with negative press.

The list below outlines a few of the basics. With this in mind and with some good old common sense you should in most cases be able to deal effectively with negative comments.

1. Be transparent: Honesty is always the best policy – Don’t try and counter act negative posts with fake positive ones! State who you are and that you are a representative of the company in question.

2. Fix obvious customer service problems, just as you would if a customer called your customer service line. Be honest and courteous in your reply. Doing so shows the online community that you are committed to putting the customer first, and that you clean up your mistakes. If you solve the poster’s problem quickly, you may even earn a positive follow-up post.

3. Respond individually and personally when applicable. Acknowledge their complaint and offer a public apology explaining how you are dealing with the problem.

4. Be polite and take their argument on board- Never, ever, fight fire with fire. This is only going to make matters worse and is likely to attract more attention possibly angering the community around the post.

5. Respond directly to the comment – Don’t use “bad plastic surgery” to try and cover it up. This will be detrimental and will make people more fixated in the negative comments

6. Counteract negative posts with evidence – If the person in question is in the wrong then prove it but not in a confrontational manner as this could just make things worse!

7. Build up a profile within forums where possible: If you are getting flack within forums then make sure you yourself are active in these spaces. There is no point just popping up and responding to criticism as you will have absolutely no credibility and are unlikely to be taken seriously. However, if people are used to seeing and hearing from you anyway and you are providing them with good content and advice then what you say will carry more weight.

8. Try and take the conversation offline : Do this after you have made a public response so that your initial response is visible to others who will have seen the negative post. Ask for an email address or give them yours and try to move the conversation away from the public sphere.

9. Contribute to the conversation by leaving comments, writing guest posts, or setting up a blog for your company. As in any community, members of these online hubs are more trusting of people and companies they hear from—so give them a change to get to know you.

10. Offer additional resources. If the negative post refers to a common customer service issue, leave a comment pointing the post’s author to your company’s resources surrounding the issue. If the post poses a new problem, add that issue to your company’s online support desk. Doing so will help to prevent future frustration for your customers. There’s no better way to take a proactive, positive stance on a negative blog post than to provide additional resources.

11. Consider the tone of voice for the specific platform (If someone posts on Twitter respond using the same tone of voice for that channel i.e. informal and direct)

12. Don’t respond to everything at once- If you are unfortunate to have loads of negative comments about you especially on the same website/forum then a) Think about why this many people feel the need to publicly spurn you and b) don’t just fly in and try to deal with them all at once.

13. Prioritise which posts should be responded to – With the previous point in mind, don’t respond to everything as this will be perceived as spammy and bad practise. Think about which is the most damaging and respond to this one first.

14. Back up your response with factual information – It’s always better for everyone involved that the response be substantive and informed, not hastily put together before all the facts are known and interested parties consulted.

15. If comment is false or factually incorrect, contact the blogger or webmaster and politely notify him/her that the information is incorrect. On some occasions you may be able to remove the comment.

16. When relevant link to an ‘official’ page on the site that will back up the claim, however you must be very careful when posting links, this can be viewed as spammy if done too much or if it leads to information that doesn’t directly support the comment.

The advent of the digital age has made it much easier for customers to share their opinion of a brand. With an estimated 1.6 million new blog posts every day, consumers are constantly sharing their views, impressions and experiences, both positive and negative of every conceivable product or service. Whilst this is great for consumers as you can quickly and easily access unbiased product reviews, it’s having a detrimental effect on brands who are suddenly open to attack from unhappy customers whether there is truth in their claims or not. Online Reputation Management

“The actively disengaged customer is four times more likely to post to a blog or website about their poor customer service.” Ultimately, you want to avoid creating this sort of customer. Something has happened to change them from engaged, passionate customers to disengaged, irate customers.

The challenge with social media is that you have no control over what consumers say about your services, comments or accusations can be completely unfounded but get picked up and take momentum across the internet causing damage to the brand. As a result it is vital to have a strategy in place to effectively manage negative mentions.

This is known as Online Reputation Management and refers to the practice of monitoring the online reputation of a person, brand or business, with the goal of neutralising negative mentions entirely and therefore putting their reputation in better stead to change the slant and create a positive image, this is known as reactive reputation management.

Considering the vast amount of people who deal with brands online and offline it is not possible to ensure everyone has a positive experience, however if someone does voice a negative experience online it is possible to minimise the damage most of the time. This can only be achieved by responding in a manner that will address the problem, clarify the situation and put the company in a positive light without encouraging further criticism; Good crisis management requires responding with substance behind what you are saying.

The most important thing to understand and consider are the risks and do you have processes in place that you actually use, to manage with these risks should they occur.

Common ORM proactive techniques include online promotional activity through creating new content, promotion of existing positive content, as well as deeper involvement in the social web sphere through forums, blog and other high profile social networking forums such as Twitter and Facebook.

Read more about best practice for online reputation management here.

One of the biggest challenges I have faced whilst working in social media is how to maximise my outreach and measure success. Social media measurement is still a relatively grey area but as long as you are clear on what your goals are then there are a number of social media tools that can be utilised effectively to help you make the most of your campaigns.

Along the way I have come across a number of free tools that I have found hugely helpful. I have listed some of my favourites below and hope they help you too! Any additions are always welcome so if there are any others that you know of, then please feel free to comment below and I’ll add them to the list.

Finding Followers or influencers

One of the biggest challenges people face is finding people who share the same interests or are in the same area so they can start conversations and engage. For brands, this may be finding their target audience so they can better understand their needs or what they are talking about or it could be to find local people to promote an event or launch.

Twitter directories are a great way of finding relevant influencers to engage with, search for people who share the same interests or find followers in the same local area as you.

Those listed below have been the most effective for me but I’m sure there are others out there as well.

http://www.wefollow.com

http://www.twellow.com

http://justtweetit.com/#

http://nearbytweets.com/- Useful tool for finding people in the same area.

My favourites

http://export.ly/ -

Exportly is my favourite tool of the moment! It allows you to export a CVS spreadsheet of all your followers. This allows you to have a proper look at who they are, where they are from and who are the most influential. You can do this by sorting the data by number of followers. Once you know who of your followers is the most influential you can target your engagement at them in the hope of increasing your reach.

Klout- http://klout.com/

Calculates the level of influence your Twitter account has taking into account reach, followers vs followees and level of engagement
Kurrently- www.kurrently.com

Useful tool for searching for keywords or competitors on Twitter and Facebook.

http://twoolr.com – Gives good stats with regards to tweet times, see followers and recent interactions. Find out what times retweeted the most.

http://twileshare.com/app/share – upload docs to twitter, pdfs, ebooks, images and gives back stats.

http://twtpoll.com/ – Twitter poll. Great different way to get customer feedback. Share poll with twitter followers and Facebook friends. Can later post this onto a blog or Facebook page to gain further followers and fans.

Measurement

http://twoolr.com – Gives good stats with regards to tweet times, see followers and recent interactions. Find out what times retweeted the most.

http://twiangulate.com (gives diagram + compares 3 profiles followers) Great way to compare twitter profile followers and friends. Finds who follows who, who your most influential followers are and compares.

http://apps.asterisq.com/mentionmap/# – great visual of followers/ connected conversations via hasthtags

http://www.foller.me – Shows tweetcloud of @mentions + world map of engagement

http://twileshare.com/app/share – upload docs to twitter, pdfs, ebooks, images and gives back stats.

http://manageflitter.com/ – manage followers

http://friendorfollow.com/ – manage followers

http://twitterfeed.com/- Feed your blog/ news into Twitter

So Facebook have yet again decided to make some changes. No surprises here then. What is interesting to note is that the most recent changes have some uncanny similarities with none other than Google+.
This week they have introduced the new subscribe button. By opening up Subscriptions on your personal Facebook profile, you enable anyone who chooses to subscribe to your profile to see any posts you share with “Public”.

Subscriptions also allow you to:

• Choose what you see from people in News Feed
• Hear from people, even if you’re not friends
• Let people hear from you, even if you’re not friends

New Facebook changes to Subscribe

Facebook Subscribe

The benefit of which means you can essentially start to pick and chose what appears in your news feed meaning you can potentially remove the incessant daily updates from someone you went to school with who wants everyone to know exactly what she has eaten on an hourly basis. It also means you can follow the posts of a journalist or celebrity who as you are not friend would not appear in your news feed with Facebook’s previous algorithm.

The changes also allow you to decide what types of updates you see. For example, you could see just photos from one friend, no stories about games from another, and nothing at all from someone else.

To make the changes click on ‘subscriptions’ which is a new option below your profile picture. You can chose to subscribe to a person if they have allowed the subscription option. Simply click subscribe by their name.

Get Your Own Subscribers

If you’d like to share your public updates with more than just friends, you can get a Subscribe button on your profile, too. People who subscribe to you will get posts you set as “Public” in their News Feeds. This is an entirely optional feature – you need to opt in.

In March this year I gave a talk at Brighton SEO on the The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) new extended remit that now covers all advertisers’ own marketing communications on their own websites and in other non-paid-for space online under their control. The ASA’s digital remit will now cover marketing messages on all websites, blogs and social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

The Advertising standards agency new extended remit

The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) are the UK’s independent watchdog committed to maintaining high standards in advertising. They are self regulated and funded by the advertising industry who are required to contribute 0.1% of their media spend to regulating the advertising industry. The ASA’s authority is recognised by the Government, the courts, other regulators such as the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) and Office of Communications (Ofcom) as the established means of consumer protection from misleading advertising.

The Committee of Advertising Practice (CAP) are the body responsible for writing the CAP Code which is governed by the ASA. Their purpose is to ensure the industry remained honest, truthful and within legal guidelines. Basically, to ensure that what you see is what you get.

Unbelievably, until March the 1st the digital remit only covered paid for advertising such as E-mail marketing , banner and pop-up advertisements, PPC, commercial classified advertisements and  paid-for listings on price comparison sites so out side of these paid for adverts online marketing was entirely unregulated and advertisies could get away with saying what they liked.  The new rules will effect all businesses no matter what the size or nature.

What are the benefits?

Firstly, the new rules should go at least someway to ensuring what we see online is what we get a reducing the amount of outright dishonesting in marketing messages. It will also be effective in making online marketing an more equal playing feild as currently ethical marketer could be losing out to competiors who sound amazing and lure in unsuspecting clients with far cheaper prices which are not anywahere near the truth! The good that about the guidlines is that if you are aware of a competitor doing this you can report them and they will have to be open and truthful about their prices and services.

Why has this only just come in to place?

The extended CAP code has come into play this year for a number of reasons. Firstly and probably most significantly as 2010 was the 1st time online advertising spending in the UK exceeded TV yet this was largely untracked. Unsuprisingly, the internet is now the second most complained about medium after TV.  In the last 2 years, Over 3500 complaints regarding websites  that fell outside of remit. For these reasons, even the Conservative Party pledged to ‘Tackle currently unregulated marketing on corporate websites targeted at children’ and ‘to shut this regulatory loophole and clamp down on irresponsible online marketing targeted at children’.

The ASA gave advertisiers a 6month grace period from September to get to grips with what the new rules mean to them and have been offering online site audits to marketers who are unsure (these do cost a hefty £8k so it is probably worth learning it yourself!) To fund the new remit, the industry has agreed to apply the standard 0.1% levy on paid-for advertisements appearing on internet search engines through media and search agencies. This has been spent on an advertising campiagn including TV ads (click to watch here )and posters around stations and on bill boards (I am still yet to see an actual Ad myself though??)

The Official line from CAP….

“Advertisements and other marketing communications by or from companies, organisations or sole traders on their own websites, or in other non-paid-for space online under their control, that are directly connected with the supply or transfer of goods, services, opportunities and gifts, or which consist of direct solicitations of donations as part of their own fund-raising activities.”

So what does all this actually mean and how will it affect me?

There are now a number of things that you will need to be careful of when considering your marketing activity:

1.  Watch out for claims you cant back up.
In theory everyone should have been doing this anyway! But you must now substantiate not just everything you say or write on your site, social media platform or blog, but also everything everyone else does too.

“3.18 … Quoted prices must include non-optional taxes, duties, etc.”

“3.7 … must hold evidence for any claims that consumers are likely to believe are objective“

“3.17 … price statements must not mislead by ommission and relate to product listed“

“3.9 … not stating significant limitations or qualifications”

2. Social media and User generate content

For the first time, Social media platforms fall uder the remit as “ Non Paid for Space under Advertisers control” something that will undoubtedly effect they way we think about our social media strategies.The biggest challenges for marketers regarding social is with regards to User generated content  (UGC) and distance marketing rules.

The first big consideration is using content from your Facebook page, Twitter account , blog or forum for your marketing materials. Previously, you could quite rightfully take positive comments or Tweets and use them for self promotion. This, along with using photos that have been posted by users on Facebook, even if you are tagged in them  is no longer allowed.

Another major factor is ensuring evreything you Tweet or post can be substanstanciated at the time you post it. This includes ReTweeting or even liking something a fan has written about you that at the time you engage with that comment is no longer true.

Top Shop for example recently go into trouble for ReTweeting a comment someone made about how great they were and how they had just bought a skirt in the sale. By the time Top Shop ReTweeted the skirt was no longer in the sale so the comment was unsubstansciated.

“Inaccurate or misleading facebook copy that contains a claim written by the advertiser themselves or by the customer and then reused by the advertiser”

3. Distance Selling Marketing

The inclusion of Distance selling marketing communications in the online remit essentially means all promotions, Tweets and comments about a product must include:

9.2.1 the main characteristics of the product

9.2.2 the price, including any VAT or other taxes payable (see “Prices” in Section 3: Misleading Advertising, and payment arrangements

9.2.3 the amount of any delivery charge

9.2.4 the estimated delivery or performance time (see rule 4.9.3) and arrangements

9.2.5 a statement that, unless inapplicable (see rule 9.6), consumers have the right to cancel orders for products. Marketers of services must explain how the right to cancel may be affected if the consumer agrees to services beginning less than 7 working days after the contract was concluded.

This is virtually impossible to do in 140 characters and so could essentaily change the way we use Twitter and Facebook for promotions. However it is still very unclear how strictly this will be enforced.

Enforcement

The ASA have stated the following will be the procedure for dealing with complaints of advertisers acting outside of the code:

Informal warning at first asked to withdraw Ad

Should an advertiser refuse to do so, there will be no immediate fines but a referral to office of fair trade.

There will be no active policing – Someone will have to make a complaint for them to look into.

 Like every set of new regulations, advertisers and agencies will have to wait for the first companies to be rapped on the knuckles.

My next blog post will look into whether or not the ASA have acted on their threats and whether anyone has been caught….