Author Archive

Mar 12
1

In Defense of Excellence

Posted by Ed Gazarian
Published in Industry Commentary, Social Media

Mediocrity should be a hard pill for your brand to swallow. You should not be OK with doing a job that can be considered “good enough”. This isn’t a rally-time bar hookup, and just doing a thing isn’t the same as mastering its craft. Are we all guilty of falling prey to this sort of cantankerous folly? Hells yeah. Do we know better? For sure. Does realizing either of those things make us in any way, shape or form immune? Nope. But when it comes to a well-designed, and well-executed social media strategy for your brand, simply put: mediocre won’t cut it.

You’re not the only brand out there that does what you do. You don’t have the smartest team, most clever copy, or most compelling visual material. You know why? Because you’re in the 99.9999999999% of people who are not the best. And guess what? None of this matters. The best aren’t thought of as such because of any of these things. The best are the best because of everything else they are surrounded by. If we hold them up against the ocean of mediocrity that characterizes most brands in social media, sure – they look shiny, and clever, and innovative, and fun. But if we take them for what they really are – people who see a need (or in some cases create that need), and find a way to communicate with their target consumers in a meaningful way – then we have unlocked the secret to excellence: good, old fashioned, critical thinking.

Social media has, among other things, made it possible for small players to compete with the Coca-Colas of the world in a tangible way. If social media were running for office this November, it would do well to talk about how it’s empowered Main Street, and made it possible for Mom & Pop to take on The Good Old Boys – and kick their collective asses. But it only works when brands realize that it’s people – not promotions, programs, ad buys, commercials, radio spots, and blah blah blah ad nauseam – that connect today’s consumers. It’s people that spread your message; it isn’t you, as a brand. If you don’t have strong critical thought at the core of your social media strategy, you are all but doomed to absolute, colossal, and tumultuous failure. You will have your mediocrity revealed in a way that – back in the days when printed ads were king – wasn’t going to cause much of a stir. You will only make the people that are better thinkers than you, look better. As for them – the more thoughtful of your comrades – their consumers will never know what hit them. All those consumers will experience is a message – be it visual, auditory, or in spectacular smell-o-rama – that contains exactly what’s relevant to them. Social media is a marvelous tool for the brands that understand these things. As for the rest of you – thanks are in order:

Thanks for syncing your Twitter feed to Facebook.

Thanks for forgetting that when people check-in on Foursquare, they are already at the place they’re checking into.

Thanks for posting 3 paragraph-long status updates to Facebook with no photo.

Thanks for thinking that Google+ is “the next big thing”.

Thanks for forgetting to optimize content for the feed.

Thanks for your rabid, and incoherent adoption of Pinterest.

But most of all, thanks for making it so easy for us to show our clients who gets it, and who’s going to help us make them look really, really good.

1 Comment

Oct 11
25

Stand Apart on Facebook – Don’t Pander

Posted by Ed Gazarian
Published in Advice and Tips, Brain Food, Industry Commentary, Online Reputation Management, Social Media, Social Media Marketing

There’s a growing trend in online communications, and I – for one – am not too thrilled. With increased aggression and startling frequency, quotients of the brands on Facebook are lowering their standards of communication. You know the type. They use words like ginormous and irregardless, both of which have become so pervasive in the American lexicon that they’ve been entered into the ranks of reverence on Dictionary.com (somewhere, another Wordsmith of some repute is rolling over in his grave, but doing it with a wink and a smile). These are the same folks that start every sentence with “Actually”, or “I feel like…” and in the spoken word utter every statement with a sickly sweet sense of mild, bland surprise, and a frequently falling intonation (“Oh, really? No kidding.) They have seemingly no regard for the fact that an exclamation point is meant to do just that – exclaim. If you can’t express the sentiment with language, then using !!!!! as a crutch is not an acceptable workaround.

These grammatical slights are not creative. They are examples of lazy, uncreative people expressing themselves in lazy, uncreative ways. Like telling an old joke over and over again to the same person, what once was impactful for its uniqueness has become ineffectual by way of ubiquity.

1 Comment

Aug 11
18

Food For Thought: No One Goes To Your Facebook Page

Posted by Ed Gazarian
Published in Brain Food

image by katerha

So you know that Facebook Page you’ve got for your brand? Remember the hours you spent thinking about what sort of custom tabs you want to put there? Remember the design comps you poured over, and the slick little graphics you threw together? Guess what – they don’t matter. Because no one goes to your Facebook Page.

Read it again and make certain it sinks in: no one goes to your Facebook Page.

This is a bitter pill to swallow, so here’s some supporting evidence to help wash it down:

Fact: 95% of Facebook users view only their “Top News” feed
Fact: Over 20 million people interact with Facebook from an iOS device, which doesn’t display custom tabs (and that was back in 2010)
Fact: Just 3% – 7.5% of fans see a brand page’s posts

Overwhelmingly & unequivocally, the lion’s share of interactions with your Facebook Page – upwards of 90% – are happening in the newsfeed, and most brands either don’t know, or don’t care. Interactions are not happening on your Page’s wall. Interactions are not happening on the custom tab you spent hours developing so that people can watch a talking, animated snake-oil salesman. Nope. Interactions are happening in the newsfeed, and they are happening with pieces of content that involve simple (but thoughtful) language, and rich media (e.g., pictures and video).

Now that you know this, what do you do? Post too often, and you risk the dreaded unsubscribe link being clicked. Don’t post often enough, and watch your active user base dwindle, and disappear. What you need is The Goldilocks Principle; you need a strategy that isn’t too hot or too cold – it’s just right.

Start by learning about your Page’s fan demographics. Track your impressions against your actual fan count. What percentage are you really getting your content in front of? Where are your fans – active and inactive – located? Figure out what days and what times are best to reach them. That is, don’t post once a day, at 9am, New York time, if most of your fans are in San Francisco, and won’t do their morning Facebook trolling until it’s ~1pm in New York. What time does your audience use Facebook? Is there another audience you want to reach, that operates under slightly different rules?

Sure, there’s more to it than that – but start there. You’ll be leagues ahead of most, and well on your way to a winning strategy on Facebook.

9 Comments

Jun 11
28

Transparency, Trepidation, and Ten-Year-Old Kool-Aid: “Experts” v. Expertise

Posted by Ed Gazarian
Published in Industry Commentary, Social Media, Social Media Marketing

Late last month, Peter Shankman posted a decidedly sour meditation on the perils of hiring a “Social Media Expert”, insisting that such a moniker is both apocryphal and a waste of dollars. Mr. Shankman wrote:

Being an expert in Social Media is like being an expert at taking the bread out of the refrigerator.You might be the best bread-taker-outer in the world, but you know what? The goal is to make an amazing sandwich, and you can’t do that if all you’ve done in your life is taken the bread out of the fridge.

Peter Shankman, 20 May 2011

Ouch, Sir. Very ouch. I have never described myself as a “Social Media Expert”. Rather, I subscribe to the philosophy of Bill S. Preston, ESQ., who famously quoted an Ancient Greek of some renown when he said “The only true wisdom, consists in knowing that you know nothing.” and as Mr. Preston’s esteemed colleague Ted Theodore Logan affirmed: “That’s us, dude!” As I see it, the title of “expert” is one that is better given, rather than taken. It is a far, far, better thing to be called an expert, rather than call yourself one. And so on the issue of self-titled “experts”, Mr. Shankman and I are in accord.

Where I take issue with Mr. Shankman’s diatribe is in the misstep of lumping so-called “Social Media Experts” into one big pot. Bearing in mind that true social media expertise is easily identified, but difficult to quantify, when endeavoring to define an “Expert”, it serves to separate the wheat from the chaff. Social media demands a specific set of faculties: command of the written word, an understanding of who you’re addressing, and a zero BS modus operandi. You’ll forgive me, Mr. Shankman, but it is in fact about engagement. It’s about talking with someone, instead of at them. That’s what the arrow of social media has added to the quiver of marketing: a direct, potentially meaningful and easily mismanaged, tool with which to engage consumers.

And so with this squarely in mind, on several points, I’ll agree that Mr. Shankman is correct. Social media is absolutely about transparency, relevance, and brevity. Like Mr. Shankman, those tiny hairs on the back of my neck stand staunchly on-end whenever I encounter grammatical woes in professional correspondence. Just last week a prospective job candidate wrote to me, stating that she was “fluent in both Mandarin and England”. Good grief. But I’m a firm believer that those sensitive to issues like these recognize others of the same ilk. With very little effort, it’s easy to see who is an effective communicator, and who isn’t.

So Mr. Shankman, rather than drinking “the same damn ten-year-old Kool-Aid” (which you say is synonymous with repeating the ills of the dotcom era), take a step back and recognize that like you, there are those of us out here that get it. We understand the value that social media adds to an overall sales and marketing plan, and like you, we find it abhorrently distasteful when the Kool-Aid goes bad. And as for making the whole sandwich – indeed, serve up a whole, amazing one (as long as you know not to serve a Double Down to the Judges of Top Chef).

2 Comments

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