The Social Path

What I learned from my social media hiatus. | Guest post by Javacia Harris Bowser

Today, we're excited to be joined by Javacia Harris Bowser, a blogger and founder of the Birmingham, Ala., women's writing group See Jane Write. Javacia shares the lessons she learned from taking a three-week break from social media.

Each January my pastor encourages all his parishioners to fast something for 21 days in an effort to grow closer to God. Many church leaders totally abstain from food for three weeks, while some members fast certain types of food (such as sugary treats) or give up something like television. I decided to give up social media.

I wrote and scheduled “See You Later” posts for my two blogs and alerted Facebook friends and Twitter followers that I was taking a social media sabbatical. I also gave up Foursquare (at the risk of losing all my hard-earned mayorships) and Pinterest. This fast also meant I wasn’t allowed to read any of my favorite blogs either, as that is honestly how I spend much of my free time.

When I started the fast a part of me wondered if I would reach the end of the 21 days and realize that I no longer wanted social media in my life. I admit that when I announced my hiatus I felt this strange sense of relief. For three weeks I wouldn’t have to worry about updating my blogs or feel compelled to check Twitter every hour to make sure I wasn’t missing a link to some life-changing article.

But that feeling quickly dissipated. Social media makes everyday life better. Seriously. Foursquare turns a dreaded visit to the grocery store into an exciting game as I battle local residents to be crowned as mayor of the places I frequent around town. I’m an English teacher and, therefore, spend hours grading very bad essays, but those moments aren’t as torturous when I can take occasional breaks to browse my favorite blogs. And while some people “veg out” after a long day at work by flipping through channels, I’m not much of a TV person and I would much rather relax by clicking through beautiful photographs on Pinterest.

Coincidentally, despite my hiatus I found myself talking about social media more than ever during my fast. While teaching Fahrenheit 451 to my students we spent most days discussing the pervasiveness of technology and the role social networking sites play in their lives. When the electricity went out in my apartment one evening my husband and I found ourselves having a conversation by candlelight about Twitter. (How romantic!) And speaking of Twitter, when storms hit the Birmingham area before dawn one Monday morning I felt lost without being able to track tornadoes through my favorite meteorologist’s tweets. The thought never crossed my mind to just turn on the television. (I told you I’m not a TV person.)

I did realize, however, that I need to make some changes regarding my social media behavior. First, I need to rekindle my love for blogging. That sense of relief I felt at the beginning of my fast was triggered because somewhere along the way blogging has stopped being fun. I need to fix that. I don’t want blogging to feel like a job, especially since I’m not getting paid to do it.

Second, I need to stop letting social media make me a bad friend. When I wrote about my return to social media on my blogs I decided to craft the post as a love letter because I realized that I’m just like the girl who ditches her friends for the new man in her life. I’m always so busy trying to update my blogs and read all the interesting articles being posted on Twitter that I don’t make time to have real conversations with my friends. And I use Facebook as a crutch. I figure, "I know that this friend is pregnant and that friend got a new job because I checked their status updates. No need to call them; I’m all caught up, right?" Wrong.

And finally, I have to make time for myself, to read books that have nothing to do with becoming a better blogger and, yes, perhaps even watch television. There has to be some reason so many people are into that thing.

Javacia Harris Bowser is founding editor of GeorgiaMae.com and she also blogs for The Writeous Babe Project. She can be reached via email or follow @writeousbabe on Twitter.

Photo credit: Leo Reynolds on Flickr

Three ways Facebook can lighten the load on admins.

Facebook has improved business pages and the administrator experience by leaps and bounds in the past year. We can now tag fans when replying in the comment section, have a separate notification application for each page, and easily access our pages from the newsfeed. Not to mention the improvements in analytics data and graphics which is another post altogether (that we covered here). 

But there are still some glaring and simple changes that Facebook could make to improve the administrator experience. 

Geo-Targeting Regions

When geo-targeting a Facebook ad, you set the ad to appear to an audience within a radius of a certain city or state - or multiples of both. When setting up a geo-targeted Facebook update, you have to individually add each city that falls in your chosen footprint. That can be a lot of work, especially if you'd like to target a region that spreads across multiple states (like the Gulf Coast, for example). I can't imagine a situation in which it wouldn't be helpful to target a post by a radius rather than selecting each possible city individually.

Custom Art and Descriptions for Linking to Tabs

At Luckie & Company, our Designers and Interactive Department work hard to build some seriously amazing Facebook applications. However, when linking to any tab within Facebook, the only art option is the page's profile picture and the page's description. At least when linking to websites off of Facebook you can edit the title and text and, at the very least, remove images from the link. But these are static when linking to a Facebook tab. It's strange that Facebook wouldn't provide this option seeing as they prefer to keep users on the site. 

Direct Messages from the Brand Rather Than Personal Account

In the last year Facebook added the option to "login" to Facebook as a business page, which is great. But this addition didn't come with the option to send message to users from the page. If I contact a fan privately, I have to reach out to them through my own personal account. I don't know about you, but with all the spam and viruses that get passed through Facebook, I'm hesitant to open any links or messages from unknown individuals. Not to mention, as an administrator, I prefer to represent the brand and not provide my personal profile or information to fans.

These are minor complaints compared to the changes and progress Facebook has made over the past year in improving the administrator experience. Still, I'd like to see these suggestions added to the list of improvements made in the next iteration of Facebook business pages.

What are some issues you face as a business page administrator or changes you'd like to see made?

Kammie Avant is a social media planner for Luckie & Company. You can contact her by e-mail or follow @KammieAvant on Twitter.

Photo credit: akunamatata on Flickr

Three ways to improve your customer service on Twitter.

We talk a lot about creating great content for our social media accounts, with the goal of engaging fans and encouraging conversation. But sometimes we forget that the best thing about social media is that our fans are already talking — to us and to each other. We can't wait for people to strike up conversations, but we can't get so caught up in pushing out our own content that we forget to join the discussions our fans initiate.

Here are a few tips to stay in tune with your fans.

Make the Most of Search Terms

Set up search terms or columns in a third-party application like TweetDeck or CoTweet. Be sure to include your brand name, products, etc., to capture as many mentions of your brand online as possible. Just because your brand Twitter account isn't tagged or directly tweeted, that doesn't make the conversation any less important. Some of the most productive conversations I've had with customers over Twitter have been with those flattered by the effort we put in to find and contact them, before they contacted us.

Be Sure to Use Push Notifications

Push notifications via Twitter smartphone apps are nice for your personal accounts but mandatory for your business accounts. It's important to know as soon as possible when a consumer is discussing your brand, good or bad. Social media is all about immediate results, and waiting even a few days to thank a consumer for a compliment (or react to a criticism) can tarnish your customer service image.

Avoid Canned Responses

Consumers are on Twitter to talk, so talk we shall! The best way to manage customer relations on Twitter is to use a personal voice. You're not asking consumers to press a number to classify their concerns, so don't give them a canned response. Social media allows us to give our brands and companies a personality. Loosening up seems to be one of the most difficult parts of social media management for some but the effort goes a long way. It bolsters customer loyalty and appreciation the same way it bolsters a friendship.

Sure, this all seems easy enough but with the sheer volume of conversation happening on Twitter at any given time, it's a lot to keep up with. For years brands have provided a 1-800 hotline for customers to call but social media has flipped the script - now it's time for us to find and reach out to our customers. People are out there talking about your brand, whether or not you chose to seek them out and respond is your choice. But given the choice to take control of your own image or let consumers run wild, which one would you chose?

How has your organization used Twitter for customer service? We'd love to hear about your experiences in the comments.

Photo courtesy robpurdie on Flickr.

Kammie Avant is a social media planner for Luckie & Company. You can contact her by e-mail or follow @KammieAvant on Twitter.

New Facebook insights provide more depth in understanding your audience.

As Facebook prepares to launch its new format for user profiles, and presumably new business page formats, the social network has taken the opportunity to streamline and improve its business platform, as well. These updates include an impressive new approach to analytics, with more data and more infographics built into Facebook Insights.

There are a lot of improved tools in the mix, but today we want to take a look at the new Facebook metrics and what they mean for marketers.

Top Line Analytics

(Click image for full-sized version)

Pictured above are the topline statistics provided in the new Facebook analytics home screen. We are used to seeing Total Likes, however the rest are new.

• Friends of Fans represents the total audience your page could theoretically reach if you successfully engaged each fan into sharing your content. It's a massive number, one you're almost guaranteed to never approach, but it's useful to know the maximum potential audience now that Facebook's new "ticker" provides constant updates on your friends' behavior, including Liking a brand page or commenting on a page's post.
• People Talking About This Page is a broad category that includes any "story" created by a fan. Liking the page, Liking or commenting a status, answering a question; tagging a photo, video, or status update with the page — each counts as an example of someone "talking about" your page. This metric is a nice and much-needed improvement over the older Facebook "engagement" number, which essentially only accounted for post Likes and comments.
• Weekly Total Reach is the last of the new key stats. It represents the number of individuals who viewed any content created by or about your page — including ads and sponsored stories — over the past week. The number includes friends of fans, meaning it could easily be larger than your total audience.

These numbers are just the tip of the iceberg in the new Facebook Insights, but they're a good starting point for marketers to see how the new metrics measure the full, three-dimensional impact of your content on Facebook and not just direct interactions with your fans.

On one hand, these new numbers can help show that you're not engaging your audience enough. On the other, it can show that you're actually having a larger marketing impact than you might have imagined.

Between these numbers and the more detailed metrics provided elsewhere in the analytics, page managers now have better tools than ever to gauge the effect of their content and fine-tune their audience communication for maximum effectiveness. 

As if these analytics weren't enough to motivate you to produce great, engaging content, Facebook now displays the "People Talking About This Page" metric publicly. It's listed under your total number of Likes, meaning that Facebook users can now see how interesting your page truly is before committing to a relationship.

Understanding Reach

Diving deeper into "Total Reach," Facebook provides a chart breaking out how each user was reached. Organic refers to individuals who saw your content through their newsfeed, ticker, or on your actual page, so that mostly includes fans. Paid is obviously the number of individuals who viewed an ad or sponsored story for your page. And finally, Viral represents the number of times a story about your page was viewed by a friend of a fan. Keep in mind, these numbers can be skewed because someone could be a fan, and view stories about your page in all three ways and each would count separately.

However, a chart is provided that shows how many times users were exposed to any content from your Facebook page over a given time period. You'll see in the above chart that around 400,000 people were exposed to 1 piece of content from this page over a 1 week time period and only 200,000 were exposed to 2 pieces of content, and so on.

Daily breakdown

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In addition to the top-line metrics, using the chart above you can see how each of these numbers changed on any given day, as a result of the content published on that day. The purple dots grow, shrink, or disappear based on the total number of posts by the page on a given day. We've had some of this information provided before but the new chart gives a much clearer view of daily activity and how your fans react to posts.

New Likes Traffic

While Facebook has provided internal and external traffic reports with analytics for years, it has been clunky to say the least. They've now provided a sleek infographic to show how new fans were driven to page. You can dig deeper into these statistics by downloading the insights.

Talking About This

(Side note: For the amount of effort Facebook obviously put in to improving their analytics, I cannot be the only one disappointed in the lack of effort put into naming these products. OK, back to the show...)

"How People Are Talking About Your Page" represents the total number of stories created by individual users. You can see the total number of stories created over the time period by selecting one of the options from the drop-down menu. That way you can dive into more detail on what each "story" concerns.

Breaking down the new products really only scratches the surface of the mountains of data Facebook provides in their updated insights. However, I think these updates will change the way we utilize our pages and connect with our fans. I can already see opportunities to target updates that were better received by different age groups, or tweak how we chose to share images through the pages. 

Take a look around the new analytics yourself. How do you think it will improve your communication and strategy, if at all?

Kammie Avant is a social media planner for Luckie & Company. You can contact her by e-mail or follow @KammieAvant on Twitter.

Little Debbie earns praise as one of the most social brands on the shelf.

We don't spend a lot of time on this blog talking about our extensive client work, instead preferring to focus on topics that can help anyone make better use of social media. But we didn't want to miss this opportunity to recognize a client brand that's gotten some much-deserved attention lately for their social media partnership with Luckie & Company.

Recently, the Little Debbie brand was recognized by social media mega-blog Mashable for the brand's success integrating product launches into Facebook. Mashable also gave kudos for the continued efforts that have helped the page reach more than 1 million "Likes" in under two years.

A few days later, Little Debbie's Twitter account was recognized for outstanding content in a blog post by social media thought leader Chris Brogan, which sparked even more coverage by David Strom of ReadWriteWeb. In a comparison of similar grocery shelf products, they found Little Debbie to be a shining beacon in a field of expired and underused accounts.

For more than 50 years, Little Debbie parent company McKee Foods has been a family-owned company that prides itself on customer service, a quality product, and upholding the image and commitment of the brand that bears their name. So it's no surprise that in the process of developing a social media strategy through a partnership with Luckie, McKee Foods' leadership looked past the initial excitement of launching the page and planned for the future. For marketers and brand storytellers like us, that makes our daily jobs infinitely easier.

I've always compared running a professional social media presence to running my own life. I want to be welcoming, engaging, to give back to those who give to me, and to maintain valued friendships. This is the perspective Luckie brings to the table with our social media accounts, and we're thankful to have longtime clients who see it the same way. (Little Debbie has been partnering with Luckie for more than 30 years!)

A big thank you to those who have recognized the hard work and focus of the Little Debbie social accounts, and a special thanks to McKee Foods, whose commitment makes our job so much fun.

Kammie Avant is a social media planner for Luckie & Company. You can contact her by e-mail or follow @KammieAvant on Twitter.

Is this the future of Facebook business pages?

Recently, Facebook debuted a new "Timeline" approach to user profiles, which many early adopters have already started using for fun and experimentation. But here's the real question: If the timeline format kicks in for all users, will business pages be far behind?

If the past is any indication, Facebook is fond of uniformity. New formatting changes typically apply to users first, then gradually roll out to businesses. We're even seeing that this week, as Facebook quietly enabled larger photos and galleries on business pages, about two weeks after giving them to users.

Here's an example of the photo change, which our client pages just received this morning:

With such features already being activated for business, it's clearly worth discussing the biggest user change in the works: Timeline.

The new user profile format, currently in beta, uses the full width of your screen to display your updates, photos and conversations in chronological order, with a timeline running down the middle and a related navigation by year off to the far right.

The goal is to turn your profile into a sort of real-time autobiography. You can even go back and add events or comments to the past. Here's a nice video overview from Facebook:

It's like public journaling. Or better yet, it's more like public scrapbooking, with pictures, video, links and coversation. It seems like a lot to deal with, especially when I think about filling in the gaps from years 1986 to 2005. But then again, I once swore I would never upload an photo album to Facebook. Well, 23 albums later, you can label me a liar.

So is Timeline coming to a business page near you? Our colleague Will Flowers mocked up the Luckie timeline you see at the top of this post, and we'd say it looks about right. But there are still several waypoints between here and there.

First Timeline will obviously have to come out of beta, which it is almost certain to do. This beta period was essentially just created for developers to play around with the new format and see how their apps will or won't work within the new environment.

But then there's the question of whether Timeline is the right format for a business. Does a company need a scrapbook? An autobiography? Most consumers, who just want coupons, exclusives and freebies, would probably say no.

But Timeline does show a dramatic shift in how a Facebook page can be formatted. It's modular. And modular means it can be customized. A modular layout for pages could mean an end to tab applications, or at least a complete overhaul of how tabs are used.

For now, we'll keep experimenting and watching as new features continue to evolve. We're curious to hear your predictions, so please be sure to share them in the comments.

Kammie Avant is a social media planner for Luckie & Company. You can contact her by e-mail or follow @KammieAvant on Twitter.

How Facebook has made it easier for critics to bash you, and why that might not be such a bad thing.

If you work at a business that has its share of critics, I hope you’re sitting down, because I’ve got some bad news. (The good news being, not many people read this blog standing up in the first place.)

Just as a recent survey found negative comments about products are becoming more powerful online, Facebook has decided to allow anyone to comment on your business's Page without becoming a fan. What a fantastic combination.

As you probably know, commenting on Facebook pages has traditionally been limited to those who first “Like” the page. Some businesses have felt that this creates a mental barrier for critics who don’t want to be seen “Liking” the evil corporate oppressor.

Admittedly, it’s a short hurdle for activists to leap over, but I was still a bit disappointed to see that Facebook recently (and quietly) removed it. Now anyone can comment on a page regardless of whether they’ve Liked it first.

And criticism appears to be more potent than ever. As you can see in the eMarketer chart below, negative information about products is affecting purchase decisions quite a bit more in 2011 than it did in 2010.

So should we all panic? Yes. Yes we should.

No, I’m just kidding. Of course the news isn’t all bad. In fact, you don’t have to try too hard to put a silver lining on this thunderhead.

Two reasons to remain optimistic:

1. Positive comments continue to outweigh the negative when it comes to affecting purchase decisions. You can see it right there in the same chart. People put a lot of stock in customer praise, perhaps because it’s in such short supply these days.

2. Facebook’s change actually opens you up to more positive comments, too. Not everyone on Facebook is a “joiner,” and many people have an understandable amount of Like fatigue when it comes to brand pages. We take it for granted that Twitter has long allowed businesses and consumers to chat back and forth without any sort of subscription being required.

Now businesses on Facebook have a chance to hear from casual customers who are neither superfans nor megacritics, but still have something important to say. And as with anywhere else on the social Web, if you take the time to respond, you might pull off the greatest trick of all: turning a one-time visitor into a customer for life.

David Griner is the Director of Digital Content for Luckie and Company and contributing editor for Adweek’s blog, AdFreak.com. You can reach him by e-mail or on Twitter.

Sweet success: Join us for a panel discussion on social media achievements.

For all the talk of how social media is revolutionizing the business world, it can still be surprisingly hard to find good case studies of success.

I hope you can join me next week as I discuss how social media, specifically Facebook, has been a gem for our client, McAlister's Deli. Our Tea Town USA promotion generated 60 million impressions, 68,000 Facebook fans, and, of course, endless gallons of delicious sweet tea.

The Alabama Social Media Association will present a Social Media Success Panel Thursday, Sept. 29 at the Hill Event Center at the Alabama Theatre. I'll be joined by Birmingham's brightest social media experts who have used those tools to achieve great results. Networking begins at 11:15 a.m., and the discussion begins at noon.

In the meantime, I'll be joining AlSocMe Executive Director Stephanie Hutcheson Tuesday, Sept. 27 on ABC 33/40's Talk of Alabama. We'll be chatting about social media with Maggie Poteau around 9 a.m.

Be sure to tune in on Monday, and join us Thursday for Social Media Success.

Edward Bowser is Community Manager at Luckie & Company. You can contact him by email or follow him on Twitter.

Facebook officially kills Deals after downgrading Places. Will geotargeted mobile ads fill the gap?

UPDATE: Since we posted this Friday, Reuters and other news outlets have clarified that it is Facebook's Daily Deals offering (a la Groupon) that is now being phased out, not the Check-in Deals (a la Foursquare). It remains a bit unclear how Check-in Deals will continue or evolve, but since much of the commentary below is still valid, I've decided to leave the original post up:

Well, Facebook's short-lived attempt to compete with Foursquare in the check-in space is officially over.

As you might have heard, Facebook dropped the "check-in" aspect of Facebook Places from the social network's mobile app this week. Now Reuters is reporting that Facebook will be shutting down its related Deals product "in the coming weeks."

It's easy for all this to sound like a public defeat for Facebook — and it is, in the sense that they tarnished their brand by launching a lackluster check-in tool to begin with. The site also lost some goodwill from socially savvy marketers who tried using Facebook's check-in Deals, which were riddled with glitches. (In a recent campaign run by my team featuring Deals at 300 locations, the check-in offer went unclaimed due to glitches a staggering 95% of the time.)

But Facebook isn't giving up on location-based marketing. In fact, the site's leadership deserves credit for admitting they had a flawed product, pulling it, and choosing to focus on the next iteration of how location can be folded into online activity.

Here's a nice summary of the change, via MediaPost:

"This is not a retreat in any way," said Michael Nicholas, chief strategy officer at Aegis Group's Isobar. Rather, the move is essentially an "embedded tag strategy that's about getting more people to put more location data into Facebook." Instead of a single mobile feature where users have to manually check-in, he added, "they're putting location into everything."

The real question, of course, is how Facebook will allow marketers to make the most of this location data. My hunch is that it will be tied directly to the one marketing tactic that has been noticeably missing: mobile versions of Facebook ads.

Given that more than 50% of smartphone owners are checking Facebook at least daily, you can bet that Facebook wants to make money off this massive audience. Using location data to serve up geotargeted ads could be the perfect solution.

David Griner is the Director of Digital Content for Luckie and Company and contributing editor for Adweek’s blog, AdFreak.com. You can reach him by e-mail or on Twitter.

Zuckerberg's warning from the past: Growth could hurt Facebook's customer service

With Facebook taking over the world and lowering your company's productivity levels, it's funny to think back to a time when "TheFacebook" wanted to do nothing more than reach every college campus in America. Such was the adorably simple ambition of the 21-year-old, beer-guzzling Mark Zuckerburg in a 2005 interview discovered by The Huffington Post and shown below.

While his ambition and bedside manner may have improved, Zuckerburg lost sight of one very important value he held at the time of the filming: customer service. The most interesting glimpse into the past comes toward the end of the interview, when he's asked how he sees Facebook expanding. Zuckerburg said:

"There doesn't necessarily have to be more. A lot of people are focused on taking over the world ... part of making a difference and doing something cool is focusing intensely. There was a level of service that we could provide when we were just at Harvard that we can't provide for all of the colleges. There is a level of service we can provide when we're a college network that we wouldn't be able to provide if we went to other types of things."

How right you are, Mr. Zuckerburg. Just imagine, if they were losing the ability to serve customers when they had reached just over 800 college campuses, how difficult is that task as the site approaches 800 million users?  Having been a member of Facebook since 2004, I've seen the evolution of customer service and priorities shift from one extreme to the other, as is evident in this interview.

Nonetheless, this glimpse into the meager beginnings of the website that changed the world is fun and almost refreshing. Check out the video below and share your thoughts on how Facebook has changed over the years, for better or worse.

Kammie Avant is a social media planner for Luckie & Company. You can contact her by e-mail or follow @KammieAvant on Twitter.