7 Jul 2011

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Love buckets and feature creep

by Mark P.

When we’re working on projects for clients there’s always new ideas being thought up throughout the project. Ideas are great as an indication of a positive development.

The other side to this positivity coin though is the impending doom of “feature creep”. Sometimes its inevitable. It’s just the way it is. Get used to it! Over the years we’ve created a system that has evolved into something that seems to work for the client and for us. It’s even spurred us to build an application to manage the process.

We call this process the “bucket of love”. It’s a virtual bucket that all ideas go into. The term is fluffy and golden enough to take the edge off of a client feeling like they’re being ignored. They’re not of course, it’s just a sound way to remove feature creep until the end of a sprint. When we reach the end of the sprint, if it’s still a good idea we can discuss implementing it. Voila, everybody is happy.

This brought us to actually creating a system to do this and thus Rusic.com was born. A user logs in with their social account (Twitter or Facebook) and they then create “idea buckets”. Each idea bucket holds the basic premise of a question, “how can we improve sprint X?”. Everybody can contribute their ideas, “like” and comment on other peoples ideas. It’s a great way to see what is interesting (and what isn’t).

Interest doesn’t necessarily mean “like” either. I can make a negative comment but it still shows that I’m interested in an idea, just like in a real conversation.

There’s also a lot of social goodness going so that each idea bucket gains some momentum. Momentum is necessary for the generation of ideas. Ideas breed ideas…

5 Jul 2011

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Five to follow (it’s not Friday though)

by Julia

Fellow lovers of Twitter? Then here’s a list of the top to follow recommended by our very own team. From tech and social media whizzes to people who we just think deserve a shout out.

Darren Rowse [@problogger]

Well known for giving advice and tips to not only aspiring but expert bloggers, a lot of useful tricks that wouldn’t hurt to be learnt.

Alex Hunter [@cubedweller]

Genuinely nice guy with great digital marketing experience and broad knowledge.

Indian Ocean Race [@OceanRowingRace]

Ben Stenning (part of our director Les’ extended family) and James Adair are currently rowing 3,100 miles of open water from Australia to Mauritius for charity.

Follow these great guys on their progress on the Indian Ocean Rowing Race on twitter.

Shaun Collins [@bugsy2301]

Music lover? This is the guy to follow.

An aspiring journalist and someone who clearly knows their music, adding a twist to his writing with humour, wittiness and obvious passion. Make sure you check out his posts.

Zee M Kane [@Zee]

Finally Editor-in-Chief of The Next Web so expect all the latest technology posts, as they say.. if it’s worthing hearing: you’ll hear it from them first.

14 Mar 2011

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Facebook changes – what you need to know

by Sarah Bale

Facebook has made a number of changes to their pages recently and as a small business it is important that you know what these are; what you now need to do differently, and how you can make the most out of them! One of the best sources for Facebook changes, and where we found out about a lot of the below, is Inside Facebook and I would recommend having a look there every now and again if you are not sure about a Facebook change or want to be kept updated.

1. Bye bye FBML hello iFrame apps

We talk a lot about custom tabs and how you can make the most of these. Facebook have recently changed the way developers can create new apps, so whilst previously they were created using static FBML, now developers will need to use iFrame apps. This is not a big deal from a creation perspective, developers will still be able to create custom apps for your Facebook page in iFrame, but what it does mean is that if you have custom pages in Facebook already, then it may be worth your developer transferring them to iFrame at some point. Facebook are still supporting FBML and therefore your apps will not break immediately, but currently it is unknown how long they will support this for. Luckily Facebook appear to have made this easy to do! Also, as of last week, in the interest of privacy, apps must now use POST for Canvas. Again, this is nothing to worry about immediately, but it is definitely worth speaking to your developer about. For more information click here. Luckily, this is stuff that we know all about so if you are struggling to transfer information or are interested in creating tabs you can always contact us.

2. Increase your ‘likes’ – but strategically

Quite often I see emails or messages on Twitter where businesses are offering something in return for a ‘like’ on Facebook. One example was a 10% discount on your first order, another was entry into a prize draw. Both of these were being managed by the company themselves. Now however, you can get someone else to do the work for you! Insto.re is a site that enables you to reward your customers for ‘liking’ your page in a way to suit your business.

Business owners are able to visit the Insto.re site and enter in all the information they like – the reward details, the Facebook page, the name of the store etc. You choose how you would like to structure your rewards and hay presto you are away! If you are a coffee shop for example you may wish to offer a free muffin with every purchase for a ‘like’. This can be a great way to increase awareness and get your ‘like’ figures up! The only thing I would say is, remember what you are trying to achieve by doing this… Do you want to create a loyal community on Facebook who will engage regularly and be loyal to your brand? And will giving away free stuff aid this or just get you loads of fans who just want something for free and do not really care about you? Can you give away something with your brand name on it that people will want to keep but will not cost the earth? Make the most of this but do not jump straight in, think about your strategy.

3. Hooray for useful analytics!

Analytics over the past month has become a LOT more useful on Facebook. As we start to base a large number of online decisions on metrics and data, it was important that Facebook kept up with the trend and gave businesses useful information, and they seem to have done just that. For businesses there is nothing more important than metrics in terms of seeing whether your time on Facebook is really worth it, seeing what further developments could better improve your ROI, and seeing what you desperately need to change. From your insights page (login, click Adverts and pages on the left, then click insights) you can now see real time data about the performance of your Like button and Comments Box, what your most popular websites are, a lot more about the demographics of visitors etc – great news! For more on this click here.

Daily places activities

If yours is a business that people “check-in” to and/or “claim deals” then this might be enough to make you do a little dance. Page insights will now show you a daily places activity so you can see the number of people who checked in or claimed your deal.

4. Photos

Is your photo blurry?

Everyone’s profile photo has now been resized to 180 x 540 so if your image is looking a little blurry it might be worth you re-sizing it accordingly.

Photo Strip

You will probably have noticed that you now have a photo strip across the top of your Facebook page with your most recent photos. Some companies have done some very cool things with their photostrip

For more on how to create a similar photo strip go here. The important thing to remember is that this is one of the first things people look at when they come to your page. Have some photos in there, if it is blank it will not look good. But also make sure they are great photos that tell people a bit about your business and give off the right, engaging, messages. If there are some not so great photos in there, hide them by clicking in the top right of the image, and pull through the ones you want.

5. Tabs

If you have spent time and money on custom made tabs, do not worry. They are still there, just a lot less visible. This just means you need to rethink titles, landing pages and how you can get people to look at them! I.e. posting messages throughout the week to get people looking there. You can reorder your tabs/list as well by pressing more – edit and clicking and dragging. To give you an example, you can see from the below that Coca-Cola have a special ‘Home” page which is also their landing page. The tabs so to speak, are listed are the left hand side. You can see they have ‘House Rules” listed in the top, clearly this is a priority they have moved up the list.

When you click on ‘more’ at the bottom of the list, a large list of other pages comes up (this is just a small section of them!). Each of these taking you somewhere different.

I would strongly recommend looking up some big brands on Facebook and seeing how they do it to learn from. Maybe look at you competitors? Or industry leaders? You will often be able to tell from their engagement levels and comment numbers on their walls compared to yours if they have something worth learning from!

6. Authority to the page!

As a page you can now ‘like’ another page and therefore not just favourite.

You can also post outside your page as your business. For example, if you want to comment on other pages or profiles as your company, you now can – this enables you to take your business on Facebook outside your page which becomes very interesting…

These are just six of some of the bigger changes from Facebook over the last couple of months. Please feel free to add others in using the comments and let us know what you think about the changes! What are you happy/unhappy about? What do you think needs to come next? I know better searching facilities is number one on my list…

Special thanks to scroobl.com for the use of their image

11 Feb 2011

2 Comments

5 tips for getting the most out of your Facebook page

by Sarah Bale

1. Networking with other platforms

For example, make sure you link to your Facebook page from your website and anywhere else you may be online to enable the maximum amount of people to “like” you and interact with you there.

Would it be appropriate to add your Facebook link to your email signature for example? You would be amazed the number of people who have a Facebook page but do not tell people about it at every appropriate opportunity.

2. Content is king

A great way to keep your audience engaged and ever expanding is to create great content. Content that is interesting, relevant and most importantly that people will “like” and want to share. Use the information you gain from Facebook to help you create useful content. For example, if similar questions keep popping up on your Facebook wall from customers, it is clear that this is an area where people require further knowledge.

If you therefore create a document that fully explains the area that causes confusion, logic would suggest that people would find this very useful if they frequently ask about it. It also shows that you are listening to your customers.

If you are just starting up and do not have too many questions yet, why not look at your competitors’ Facebook pages and see if there are synergies that you can learn from? Are there things that keep coming up on their pages that you could use to your advantage?

3. Other reasons to “like”

If you do not want to become a resource portal and actually this way of engaging does not fit your business, then you need to still give people a reason to “like” you in the first place. This might be through use of a voucher or discount, for example having a Facebook only discount code , although this can be hard to monitor.

Alternatively, you could run simple competitions through Facebook. Competitions are a great way to tell people about you and introduce your brand, but also a great way to build your community. If the prize is good enough then people will be inclined to share the competition with their friends, a percentage of whom will then enter and share with their friends etc etc.

4. Develop custom tabs

Facebook enables you to be able to create your own customer tabs on your page. This can be very beneficial because it means you can have specific pages just for people who “like” you, which enhances a sense of community and also encourages people to “like” you just from a sense of intrigue and curiosity!

Clearly what people see when they do “like” your page needs to be worth it. This could be great content, a competition, a voucher code etc. Custom tabs also enable you to have a chosen landing page so that when people find you, they are not just taken to your wall but instead something a bit different, that tells them about you and why they might want to be a part of your community. As well as this, custom tabs enable you to be creative and show people what’s so special about your brand over competitors.

As we all know, it is no longer good enough to be one of many, you have to stand out from the crowd and be inventive. Facebook tabs may be a great way to do this and show off your USP’s.

5. Join the conversation

In order to get the most out of Facebook, you need to join the conversation and interact with customers. Where you think it is relevant, comment on photos, and videos.

Conduct polls to gain information as research but also engage your audience and show that their opinion matters. Share photos from events and encourage others to tag themselves. If people post on your wall, respond to them. Answer their questions and deal with any issues head on, honestly and publicly. People are often tempted to delete negative customer posts from their wall. Unless the post is categorically untrue, we would strongly advise against this.

Social media brings with it real time, in the moment feedback, and the way you choose to handle this feedback divides those who are in it for the long term and care about building a sustainable community, from those who are thinking too short term to understand the risks. Whatever the feedback, people appreciate honesty and respect people dealing with their issues quickly.

Thanks to Vasjen Katro for the image

24 Jan 2011

1 Comment

Digital Integration – balancing your hub…

by Guest

The problem we have is that we are all so busy. In fact, we’ve never been busier. Home working, mobile devices, customer pressures and business demands all take their toll on our already hectic lives.

And then in steps social networking to up the stakes and for many, dominate their very waking existence.

Tweeting, checking friends’ Facebook status, chipping in to LinkedIn message threads, trying again to create that elusive witty blog article, each of these potentially distracting activities adds up to an average 1.2 hours a day for each and every one of us. Add in the established communications tool of choice for many, email, and your total number of hours increases to 3.9 a day.

The signs are that this not going to go away and actually it’s going to increase.

So what do you do? Simply accept fate and become submerged in the technological wave, or stop, think and plot a way through the barrage of digital noise?

The answer could be more simple than you think.

Imagine a bicycle wheel. It has a hub at the centre and spokes linking it to the outer rim and tyres where contact is made with the surroundings. Well, your social networking is very similar.

You need to decide what’s at the hub of your digital communications, online marketing and social networking. Where are you trying to direct customers, suppliers and partners? Is it to your website? Is it to specific social networks? Is it to your regular blog? With one element carefully positioned as the core of your communications everything else falls into place and knows it’s role…. to feed people into the hub.

Strategically it’s vital you decide this carefully depending on what your overall objectives are. If it’s to have more conversations with potential customers then perhaps your hub is one of your social networks, Facebook or LinkedIn where you can engage with your targets on their terms and in their comfort zone. If your goal is to educate partners about your products and services you might need to drive them to particular pages on your website and in which case all of your digital marketing activity needs to point inward to there.

You need to decide what works within your own strategy. Once you have decided, use everything else you do as spokes, pointing inward to your hub. You will be amazed at the clarity that not only you will experience, but vitally so will your customers.

This guest post was written by Neil Wilkins, Managing Director of Viper Marketing and Communications Group.

Follow Viper on Twitter: @ViperMarketing and Facebook

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