Posts tagged ‘Facebook’
since when did clicking ‘like’ become the price of beginning a conversation?
I got a press release from Lemsip’s digital agency the other day, rather belatedly letting me know about their ‘It’s a Man’s Flu’ facebook campaign. I dutifully headed over there to have a look…but you couldn’t have a play with it unless you ‘liked’ the page first
It’s not just Lemsip, they’re all at it. The new Justin Timberlake film In Time, Yeo Valley, Heinz baked beans, Innocent Drinks, BMW and so on all require a Like for access.
Brand manager’s (and sometimes their digital agency’s) obsession with racking up as many Likes as possible doesn’t seem to be abating, but now they’re increasingly using clicking Like as the price of entry to interact with their content or receive special offers.
But I thought social media was all about having conversations? And the last time I checked, I didn’t have to offer a public endorsement of someone I’d recently met before we could start having a chat. After all, I might need the chat to know if they’re the kind of person I’d like to be friends with anyway.
It feels like brands want consumers to pay for access with Likes. Which means that there will be higher expectations of this ‘paid’ content and a relationship that has been wrong footed from the start.
In fact recent research suggests that over half of US facebook users expect to gain access to exclusive content, events or sales after “liking” a company, while a similar amount also expect to receive discounts or promotions. In the same piece of data, a quarter of users disagreed that marketers should interpret “like” to even mean they are a fan or advocate of the company.
As I’ve posted before, I only feel a real connection with maybe a dozen or so brands – and therefore don’t feel the need to Like everything in my wardrobe, kitchen and medicine cupboard.
You could of course argue that putting this content behind a wall is a way of rewarding brand advocates. But it doesn’t do much for those other consumers that the brand should really be wooing to eventually perhaps win a coveted space in their list of Likes.
How *not* to do social media
It seems that Nestle haven’t quite got the hang of this Social Media malarkey. Their facebook fan page has been hit by a lot of people not happy about Nestle’s use of palm oil and the link to rainforest destruction.
But Nestle’s problems really started when the Nestle facebook moderator responded to facebookers who had changed their profile pics to altered version of Nestle logos (‘KitKat’ becoming ‘killer for example):
A quick google search throws up 200 neagative news stories since Nestle wrote the first comment above. The moral of this story is – in social media brands don’t set the rules, users do. And you’d better be blumin sure that your moderators are on-brand, in-tune and on-message.
(via AdAge)
Thanks to facebook, you now get papped at parties
Late last Friday night I wasted a good half hour of my life I could have better spent sleeping having a major Clothes Crisis.
The crisis was in response to my sister’s Hen Do the following day, but it wasn’t the event itself that meant half my wardrobe was flung across my bedroom – it was the thought of the avalanche of photos on facebook that would inevitably follow.
It used to be that you could rock up to a party having a bad hair/ clothes/ skin day and the only evidence would be a blurry 4×6 photo kept in its Snappy Snaps envelope, never to see that light of day again.
But what with mobile cameraphones complete with flash and zoom, digital cameras, flickr and facebook, no social event goes unrecorded for posterity. That particularly unflattering camera angle, slightly too revealing top or ill advised snog can be easily viewed by friends, relatives, colleagues, prospective employers and blind dates.
I’m starting to feel empathy towards the celebrities who can’t step out of their front door without getting papped. At least I know that I only have to watch out for the tell tale flash at social events, not when putting the bins out too.
Perhaps soon every wedding invitation will carry a polite note asking guests to leave their cameras at home – not because some magazine has bought the photo rights, but that the poor bride wants to control the quality and quantity of pictures recording her big day for eternity.
In this example of Bad Facebook Picture Syndrome, it would have probably helped if any of us had actually been looking at the person taking the picture…
when market research met social networking
One of my lovely colleagues in the Research team at work introduced me to Facebook Polls the other day.
Having the ability to canvass the opinions of 100 Facebook users for just $26 (complete 
with online results charts) and to turn it around in just 24 hours is A Good Thing. Being able to ask Prison Break fans whether they followed the series from Channel 5 to Sky or Leeds residents what they think about the development of the Headrow shopping centre for this kind of money is amazing.
But:
- you can only filter your audience by age OR gender OR location OR keyword
- obviously, the audience is exclusively facebook users so you aren’t getting a representative sample of the UK population
- you’ve no idea how robust the results are as ‘Facebook will not verify the statistical significance of response data’.
These are all A Bad Thing.
On balance, its going to be a usefull tool for last minute pitching and proving a point generally and its going to be interesting to see how other online brands respond – how about online polling on google based on search terms, using GeoTargeting and invoiced on a pay-per-click basis?
(facebook polls image by Dave & Bry)
totally changing my mind, sort of…
I’ve changed my mind and signed up to facebook. Not because I was desperate to connect to everyone I worked with in 1998 or did my GCSEs with, but because I couldn’t get to all the brand facebook pages, plannery things and blogs without signing up.
So thats a dormant facebook account to add to the dormant myspace, second life, vox, plannersphere and god knows what else that I’ve forgotten about. I keep forgetting to twitter and then there is the three email adresses, this blog and my flickr that I actually manage to keep up to date with.
Surely someone is going to have to come up with a better way of accessing and monitoring all this social networking malarky? Or the entire economy is going to grind to a halt. How about an RSS-style single page that pulls all your social networking sites together? Has anyone heard of one? Please?
not that fussed about facebook
I’m not that fussed about getting onto facebook. I know that a lot of planners-who-blog are moving across to it, but I don’t think it’s a good fit for me.
In one way, shunning facebook is a self-preservation strategy, designed to retain at least some of the working day for doing actual work (i.e. not faffing around on the internet). And I’m just not sure that I have the headspace for anything new right now what with flickering and twittering and blogging.
I went out with a freelance creative chum last night who has just signed up to facebook. Her take on it: “some stranger threw a cow at me on facebook. I haven’t got time to find out why”.
