Should Your Company Have a Facebook Page?

The answer is YES if:

• Your customers are an active community unto themselves
• You’re not scared of publicly stating that you have few fans
• You have heaps of fans
• People take lots of photos and videos of themselves using your product
• People are already telling their friends about you because you’re awesome
• You’re cool
• People care about you
• You are a band

Case in point: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Scarborough-Australia/Big-Cat-Reality/16608007646

The answer is NO if:

• Your customers don’t have any reason to interact with each other
• You’re doing it because you think you should
• You have less fans than you thought you did
• You’re scared of the world finding out that no-one really cares about your product

Case in point: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Southport-Australia/1029-Hot-Tomato/10956839700

We’re putting together a marketing plan and digital strategies outline for a children’s television series which is in development for an Australian network. It has been sold around the world and the producers are pretty excited about the social networking opportunities. Forums, blogs, ‘Second Life’ Islands and behind-the-scenes access areas are nothing new, but this series comes at a time when 90% of nine-year-olds have used the Internet and 34% of twelve year-olds have a profile on a social networking site. Never before have young teenagers engaged so enthusiastically with online content or been more inclined to join online communities.

I can’t reveal too much about the series, given that it’s in production and all a bit hush-hush, but it’s along the same lines as something like The Saddle Club or Bluewater High — a bunch of kids who are elite proponents of a particularly popular activity who are growing up together and attending the same school. The websites for those shows are pretty good, I particularly like Bluewater High’s, but the strategy we’re putting together is going to be on a whole new level.

The online strategy for the show is divided into four basic parts:

• A website which invites fans into a virtual world, allowing them to interact with the characters and their unique environment and chat with other fans.
• A behind-the-scenes website which acts like an online (extended) version of the special features on a DVD that shows interviews, allows fans to ask questions and even allows people to audition for the show.
• An online store which sells related merchandise.
• Discussion forums where fans can post messages and respond to related topics about the show and the popular activity the show deals with.

Here’s some of the cool things we’re doing on the social networking side:

A ‘Virtual World’ Website with Characters Integrating with Facebook and MySpace

Using Flash™ technology a detailed virtual world will be created where fans can walk through the sets and see where the characters have been. Bandwidth issues in Australia prevent video-intensive features like real-time character interaction (like you might find in a video game), but it’s certainly possible to create a static virtual world. Powderfinger’s Hotel Existence website is along the lines of what we’re talking about.

Fans will be able to sneak into character’s bedrooms and read their diaries, see what they’re listening to on their iPODs, see what they ate for lunch and gather clues from the virtual set to use in online games and competitions.

The coolest feature of this virtual world though, is how the character’s profiles will integrate with actual Facebook and MySpace profiles. The producers were keen to create a new stand-alone social networking platform especially for the show, using something like Ning, but we explained to them that if we used existing platforms, fans will already be familiar with the user-interface, they won’t have to sign-up for anything new and most importantly, every single aspect of their interaction with the show’s characters will be automatically broadcast to all their other friends who share the same social networking platform. The average Facebook user has more than 150 friends, so by allowing fans to interact with characters on Facebook you are increasing the show’s marketing reach by a factor of 150 for every single fan.

The social networking profiles will be updated weekly by production staff, in sync with the onscreen events. So, for example, when two characters start dating, their Facebook profiles will change to show that they are ‘In a Relationship’. When they break up, their profile will be updated accordingly. These changes will obvioiusly also appear in their real-life ‘friends’ news feeds as if the events were happening to real people. When characters post on other characters’ walls, fans will be able to track the conversations between them.

The characters will also post event invitations. For example, in the lead-up to an episode where one character throws herself a sixteenth birthday party, all her real Facebook friends will be invited to attend. Candid photographs of the party will later appear and fans will be able to comment on the photographs.

YouTube Integration

Several instructional videos will be created by real-life, professional proponents of the activity the show centres around (imagine if Kelly Slater had put together a series of instructional surfing videos for Bluewater High and then they were posted all over YouTube). A section of the website will be devoted to showcasing these videos and via step-by-step tutorials, fans will be able to learn what the characters are doing. Fans will then be able to film themselves and their friends and upload them to the site and to YouTube. This will ensure the website gains significant exposure in YouTube (and Google) when people from around the world are searching for videos of this activity – increasing the reach of the online campaign far beyond the core Australian audience.

Montages of popular television shows created by fans who put their favourite scenes together in a YouTube re-mix are another recent video Phenomenon (one fan film clip from Australian children’s series H20: Just Add Water has had more than 650,000 YouTube views). It’s a labour of love that can take countless hours, but tools like Flektor are making it easier to do and by providing fans with a library of useful clips, helpfully sorted under appropriate categories, we’ll make the process super-easy and encourage fans to plaster as many clips as they like on YouTube.

Fans will also be able to download songs from the website soundtrack and edit them into the clips, resulting in huge exposure for the artists (a bargaining chip when licensing the songs). The website will then run competitions and the fans can vote on their favourite montages, bringing new filmmakers to the fore and increasing exposure on YouTube to a worldwide audience.

Fan Fiction

Creative, dedicated fans love writing fictional stories about their characters. Sites like Fan Fiction.net have millions of stories uploaded about virtually every popular television series ever created. Buffy the Vampire Slayer alone has more than 30,000 stories uploaded by fans.

A section of the website will actively encourage fan fiction competitions where people write stories about the characters and upload them for others to read. Producers will actively use this as a research tool to figure out what fans want to happen in the next series.

Those are just some of the strategies I can talk about publicly. We’re pretty excited about it all and I’d love to hear any feedback you had on what we’re doing. If anyone has any brilliant ideas of their own I’m all ears…

I’ve blogged about Facebook a little bit, but if you’re looking for a neat overview of the social networking platform from a marketing perspective check out this new e-Book from American analyst Matt Dickman.

It covers the following topics and it’s pretty easy to digest:

• What does the global population look like on Facebook?
• What is the age/gender breakdown of the Facebook population?
• How many members are over the age of 25/30/40?
• What options can I use to reach my audience?
• How much is it going to cost to reach them?

The last couple of topics are particularly relevant if you want to understand how the Facebook advertising system works. The first few go into detail about Australia as well - we’re one of the biggest Facebook users in the world.

If you’re keen to get a bit more involved and want to start creating Facebook applications (although it seems people are pretty much over them, myself included), check out this post by Jonathan which gives a run-down of the basics. Anyone considering Facebook should also read David Gillespie’s post: Facebook: Advertising Heaven or Hell?

Olive Riley loved the Internet and had hundreds of friends all over the world, but she didn’t have a Facebook account. She didn’t have a MySpace either. In fact, it was impossible for Olive Riley to have a Facebook account because she was born in 1899 and Facebook’s sign-up process only accepts people born after the year 1900, MySpace won’t let anyone over 100 join. Olive did, however, have a blog, and a YouTube account. Her tragic death over the weekend will probably lower the average age of social media users, but not by as much as you think.

A recent survey by Deloitte & Touche found that 43% of Internet users over 61 spent time sharing photographs with people. 36% watched and read personal content created by others. The average blogger is a white, 37-year-old male. 38% of Facebook users are over 35. More than 67% of MySpace users are 26 or over.

Don’t let anyone tell you social media is a youth phenomenon. Everyone is paying attention.

I don’t want to be one of those ‘I saw an article today’ bloggers, but, I saw an article today. It was at news.com.au and it was talking about how employers have “backflipped” on Facebook and want employees to use it. It was in the business section under ‘innovation’ — I had to chuckle.

“EMPLOYERS have backflipped in the way they view social networking sites at work. More than one in four managers now embrace the use of MySpace and Facebook as “untapped” business opportunities, research revealed today,” the article read.

What a crock of shit.

Here’s what happened: Journalist, Rebecca Beisler (I’m sure she’s lovely, but today wasn’t her day), received a press release from a corporation who did a ’survey’. It sounded interesting. Rebecca cut and pasted three paragraphs from the press release and then figured she’d better call some other people to get their opinion.

Internet Industry Association CEO Peter Coroneos said this:

“The internet is set to have an even more profound impact on business. The digital revolution is only beginning to be felt.”

Well fuck me.

RMIT ‘digital expert’ Mark Gregory said this:

“People like to use these sites and tell people what they’re doing. It gets them some happiness and more morale for employees.”

As a university representative you’d think Mark could get some more happiness into his grammar.

What this article really says is that 75% of managers surveyed don’t think social networking has a place at work and 25% of them think there’s probably some sort of untapped opportunity there but they don’t understand enough about it to know what it is, so maybe if they let Gen Y kids play on Facebook on their lunchbreak they’ll figure something out, or at the very least, not quit and go work somewhere else where they can play on Facebook on their lunch break.

If you want to make social media like Facebook and MySpace work for you (as opposed to business networking tools like LinkedIn), you need to figure out how to make it impossible for Cam Hill not to say good things about your brand to his friends (even, gasp, his ones from real life) and you need to understand that employees playing on Facebook at lunch are just like teenagers at the mall.

Don’t believe the hype.