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The Not Rules of Managing Facebook pages

Monday, April 19th, 2010

Here at Shiny Red we’re lucky enough to manage several high profile Facebook Fan pages including Cobra Beer’s ‘We Love Curry’ page, a page Facebook themselves frequently cite as an example of best practice. The 61,000+ fans of the page have strong opinions about beer and curry so can be quite a handful!

As the number of branded presences on Facebook increase, it’s undoubtedly getting harder and harder to cut through in light of competitors and really hit the target demographic. However from our experience, it’s about knowing your audience and what interests them.

I’m not going to preach ‘100 rules to make your page the best in the world ever’ as I don’t believe there are any die-hard rules in social media, every brand is different, ever page is different. Instead, here are a handful of tips that might help:

- Read the Facebook T&Cs: You risk ending before you’ve even started if you break the rules – for example did you know you should only run Facebook competitions through a Facebook app (such as building your own tab) or on an external Facebook page? Anything else will lead to your page being deleted…

- Know your audience: When you first start the page experiment with your updates to what interests your fans, see what they like and don’t – you’ll soon get an idea what’s working

- Use Facebook metrics: They’re not perfect but they’ll still give you a pretty good insight into the above – e.g. what time of day should you post updates for maximum interaction or what content has proved most popular in the past week

- Ask questions: It’s an obvious one but it’s an easy way to interact with your fans. Just make sure you don’t ask anything that could lead to dodgy answers…

- Keep content fresh: Link to news stories that might interest fans, update photo galleries when you can link to videos

- Make it as interactive as possible: At a bare minimum upload interesting and engaging images or video, if you can build a tab to host more then that’s a bonus! Anything that your fans can comment on is a good start

- Keep learning: it’s an art not a science, listen to your fans and you’ll be fine!

So there you have it. My ‘not rules’ for Facebook. What about you? Any other not rules for Facebook?

Tags: Cobra, Facebook, fan pages, managing Facebook pages, We Love Curry
Posted in Facebook, brands | No Comments »

Microsoft sends journalist his own dossier

Friday, March 30th, 2007

Leaked email Oh dear, it looks like Microsoft has taken the concept of transparency a little too far. In an article for Wired magazine journalist Fred Vogelstein explains how he received a 5,500 word dossier from Microsoft’s US PR agency, Waggener Edstrom, all about himself!

Imagine how the poor journalist felt when he read that “it takes him (Vogelstein) a bit to get his thoughts across so try to be patient.” Apparently the 5,500 word dossier described him as ‘tricky’ and said ‘he looks deeply for any dirt’. Despite this bad report from the software giant, the journo seems to have taken the error in his stride, almost in good humour, saying he wasn’t surprised that Microsoft kept such a dossier but that he was taken aback by the number of people who were behind the memo (around 12 apparently).

Ironically, Vogelstein was writing a piece about how Microsoft was at the cutting edge of the internet, using its video blogging initiative Channel 9 to become more transparent!

Interesting links:
Original blog post: http://blog.wired.com/business/2007/03/enough_about_me.html Waggener Edstrom President Frank Shaw responded in his blog, Glass House

Michael Arrington’s reaction TechCrunch

Posted in PR and Marcomms, Web 2.0 | No Comments »

Apple iPhone – hit or hype?

Thursday, January 11th, 2007

apple iphone Unless you popped off for a couple of days break to the moon, you can’t fail to have heard about Apple’s latest iPhone gadget. Unveiled by Steve Jobs – Apple’s CEO, chief publicity seeker and God-like genius to Apple aficionados – it is, admittedly, quite a nice looking piece of work. Which, undoubtedly counts for a lot, especially when some of your competitors’ products (Rim’s Blackberry and Palm’s Treo) are so ordinary looking.

But will it revolutionise mobile communications in the same way as the iPod has revolutionised personal music? My view for what it’s worth is probably not. Unlike the iPod, a product that was genuinely ground breaking when it launched, and which is still much better than the rest of the competition out there, there is nothing particularly remarkable about the iPhone gadget.

(more…)

Posted in Mobile, Music | 1 Comment »

CES 2007 – next gen Xbox 360 to take over the living room?

Monday, January 8th, 2007

If you thought that the Xbox 360 was just a games console, then think again. In his keynote speech at the CES Show in Las Vegas, Bill Gates announced his plans for the next generation 360 console due out later this year.

Not content with being just a device for playing games, a Media Center extender and portal for TV show/movie downloads, it seems the next XBox 360 will also be an internet protocol TV (IPTV) device.

This will allow users to take advantage of high-definition TV programming over a standard broadband connection without the need for a PC. Already US firm AT&T uses Microsoft IPTV software and is likely to sign up. And the new device will feature a 120Gb hard drive, rather than the current measly 20Gb hard drive, for digital TV recordings a la Sky Plus.

According to Gates, 10.4 million XBox 360 games consoles have now been sold worldwide and people have downloaded more than 100 million pieces of content to their Xbox 360 consoles, including game content, television shows and movies. Whether the XBox 360 will take over the living room, though, remains to be seenl

Posted in Broadband, Broadcast, Events and Conferences | No Comments »

Le Web 3: Final thoughts from the conference

Wednesday, December 13th, 2006

It’s very easy to be cynical about this whole Web 2.0 phenomenon, to think it’s based on a load of hype rather than any solid businesses models like the the first time round. However, having spent two days at the conference, I’m utterly convinced that this time it’s entirely different. The barriers to entry are much lower than before, technology has improved considerably (thanks largely to the proliferation of broadband) and entrepreneurs are making decent money – in many cases without even having to turn to venture capitalists (though of course there were still quite a few present).

For example one guy, Gabriel McIntyre from XOLO.tv told delegates how he’d made “500,000 Euros since June just by video blogging.” One of the campaigns his company had been involved in producing was for Mini. Another was for Coca Cola for its We All Speak Football campaign. “By creating interesting content people are finding they can quit their day job,” he told the audience. “It’s just all about making sure you have a recognisable brand.”

Posted in Le Web 3, PR and Marcomms, User Generated Content, Video, Web 2.0 | No Comments »

Le Web 3: Is TV dead?

Tuesday, December 12th, 2006

The simple answer is no (this could be a very short post indeed). Actually the slightly longer answer is ““ at least according to a bunch of internet experts – “˜it’s not dead, it’s just the way we watch TV programmes is changing’.

So video iPods, mobile phones etc. will all be increasingly used for watching content on the move. They’ll also enable us to watch the content when we want rather than when the broadcasters want (40 per cent of TV in the US is time shifted according to stats etc.)

The big debate focused around video search with some really sensible comments coming from Blinkx.tv’s Founder and CEO Suranga Chadratillake. He made the point that it’s nowhere near as easy to find video content as it is with text because “˜metatags’ ““ such as content descriptions, user ratings etc. ““ don’t fully explain what the individual piece of video is about. “That’s why we use speech recognition to understand the content as much as possible, as well as meta tags.”¿

For Chadratillake video on the internet is set to boom. “Lower barriers to content creation and the breakdown of broadcast style distribution network will combine to make it much easier and cheaper to upload videos.”¿ Currently Blinkx searches 7 million hours of video content.

Posted in Broadband, Broadcast, Le Web 3, Video | No Comments »

Le Web 3 – Technorati’s Dave Sifrey and the state of the blogosphere

Monday, December 11th, 2006

It is the afternoon session at Le Web in Paris, and now we are listening to presentations about blogs. So give it up for Dave Sifry, CEO of Technorati, a big brash American, who seems pretty pleased with himself. It is perfectly understandable though given that everyone uses his wonderful blog search engine.

The good news is that he is giving is that the blog universe is continuing to grow. Since May 2002 the blogosphere has doubled once every forty days. Dave says that there is a slight slow down now, but still lots of new blogs are being created. So when will the rate slow down? Dave doesn’t know. “It has to slow down at some point, but it’s still growing with 100,000 new blogs every day.”

Now we are moving on to posting volume which Dave sees as a more interesting/accurate indicator as to who is actually creating content. There are 1.3 million legitimate posts each – Dave acknowledges that some of them are spam – but adds that “˜all healthy eco system have parasites.’ He also adds that 55 percent of all blogs out there have been updated at least once in the last six months. 11 per cent – 7 million blogs – update once a week or more. Dave then talked about the global nature of blogosphere. To illustrate this we have a slide that shows huge spike in terms of posts each time a major world event happens. Another interesting snippet is that only 39 per cent of blogs are in English, 33 percent are in Japanese and 10 per cent in Chinese.

Posted in Broadband, Le Web 3, User Generated Content | No Comments »