Don’t forget we have a great show offer on our upcoming social media training courses if you use the promo code wbc2012. But be quick code expires at 10pm on Monday 30th April!

As promised to everyone who attended and for those of you that couldn’t make it, here is the presentation:

Download (PDF, 2.47MB)

Take it back a step – what is your goal or objective for using social media in the first place, and be really clear about this. The immediate answer is “more sales” or “more leads” – but you need to dig deeper than that.

If you’re new to online networking then you have a few steps to get through before that becomes your first objective. No one knows you’re there, or what you do, or who you are – you get the picture. You need to get dressed and introduce yourself before you start attracting any interest!

Here’s some tips to ensure you’re fully dressed!

• Complete your biog in a friendly chatty but professional tone
• Keep it simple, straightforward & to the point
• Include contact details so people can get hold of you / view your site
• DON’T SELL! or spam obviously

Once you’re past that you have a whole education process to go through and this is where a blog comes into place. Remember you’re sharing your knowledge of your industry and marking yourself out as an expert, not blinding readers with science.

A blog should be:

• Short – no more than 250 words.
• Contain bullet points so it’s easier to read.
• Answer readers pain – what is the benefit of what you do? A mattress maker offers a good nights sleep – your readers could be insomniacs, new parents, the elderly – deal with their issues in your blog posts.
• Have a strong call to action but don’t overtly sell.

So now you’re getting the picture and you can start to put measurements in place;

• How many new Twitter followers have you gained in a week / fortnight / month?
• How many likes / fans on Facebook?
• How many connections have you made on Linkedin?
• How many circles have you been added to in Google+
• How many subscribers to your blog?

Keep a track of the above, set targets and see how it goes. Once you’ve established engagement, built relationships and rapport you can then move onto an inbound marketing strategy and start measuring the leads or whatever your true objective is.

Social media is not a quick fix solution, and you must be prepared at first to put the effort in in the first place to reap the rewards at the end. Of course the real core measurement of success is that your business will still be here and relevant in another 12 months time.

Let us know how you get on, or of you have any other methods of measuring ROI with social media.

On 26th May 2011 the EU Privacy and Communications Directive was enacted onto the UK Statute Books as the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations (PECR) and they have wide reaching consequences for many businesses with physical bases in EU states. These regulations are overseen in the UK by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO).

This is the first of a two-part article looking at the Directive and associated UK Regulations which will look at the duties imposed by the regulation and then look at some of the solutions available.

What there’s a new law in town?

Yes indeed, these Regulations have passed into law without any real fanfare or guidance. Indeed the ICO issued its first set of guidance a mere 17 days before the Regulations became law. However due to the technical issues around compliance the ICO issued a statement that it was giving businesses 1 year from the enactment to come into a state of compliance. So you are legally required to be compliant by 25 May 2012.

What’s it going to cost me?

As a really brief guide here are the potential penalties for failing to comply with the regulations:

• impose civil monetary penalties of up to £500,000 for serious breaches of PECR
• audit the measures taken by a provider of public electronic communications services (a service provider) to:
  • safeguard the security of that service
  • comply with the new personal data breach notification and recording requirements
• impose a fixed monetary penalty of £1,000 on a service provider that fails to comply with the new breach notification requirements
• require a communications provider to provide him with information needed to investigate the compliance of any person with PECR (a third party information notice).

So what is new about the Regulations?

The regulations cover a whole host of electronic privacy and communications issues. Of particular note (and the subject of this article series) is the new legal requirement to obtain consent before a web site you control places tracking files (often referred to as cookies) onto a visitor’s computer. Tracking files sounds ominous and a bit Big Brother doesn’t it? Surely your site doesn’t do this? If you use Google Analytics or a similar web traffic analysis service then chances are it does.

Cookies? Say what?!

On the whole, there’s nothing particularly sinister about these cookies. they are simply text files that a web site can place on a user’s computer to store information. Often it’s used to remember your login details for a site where you’ve ticked the “remember me” box or perhaps to keep track of a shopping site’s basket contents for when you return later. They’re also used by traffic analysis programs like Google Analytics so that the sites you visit can count your computer as a unique visitor. That information can then be used to see which parts of a site you use so that the site owner can concentrate on improving your experience when you next visit.

Of course, as a cookie is simply a text file they can also be used for less useful purposes and, in theory, for more nefarious aims. And it is this less useful utilisation that has warranted an EU Directive and, as a result, a new set of UK Regulations to ensure people have control over which of their online activities are tracked by the sites you visit.

OK so how do I get compliant?

The ICO has, so far, issued two sets of guidance for companies on what the regulations mean and the legal implications for those covered by them.

The ICO acknowledges that the issue of providing visibility of what tracking you do and then going on to gain permission for such activity will cost time, effort and cash to solve the technical issues surrounding seeking and logging permission. Of the two sets of guidance issued the December 2011 version begins to provide some ideas on how to meet the requirements of the legislation but falls short of outright recommendation.

So we all find ourselves in the position that we have to comply with a law but the law maker is keeping schtum about how we can do it and be sure we’re legally compliant…

The major analytics companies like Google, Overture etc are also being muted in their response advising end companies to seek legal counsel to ensure their own compliance within the territory they’re in. And this is one of the key points; it doesn’t matter where your site is hosted in the world, it’s where you as a business has bases. If you have a physical base in any of the EU states then you are likely covered by the Directive.

Next time: solutions

The second part of our article will cover some of the solutions available to ensure compliance and the complexities of managing users’ preferences.

We appreciate that not everyone will be on top of this, or will have made the necessary changes in advance so we’re making tomorrow Facebook Friday.

We’ll be on hand all day, by phone, email, Twitter, Linkedin or Skype to talk you through the changes and help you set up your cover photo, profile picture, populate your timeline and understand the various new tools in the admin panel.

You can tweet us @catcreativem #facebookfriday  (remember to use the hashtag)

You can call us on 01924 566317 / 318

You can Skype us at Catcreative

You can email cat@catcreativmedia.com

You can join our NEW Linkedin Group

There are 4 area’s in particular that businesses need to focus on to see if your marketing strategy is working. These are;

• Total Likes.
• Friends of Fans.
• People talking about this.
• Total Reach.

Let’s look at these individually.

Total Likes
This is the number of unique people who like your page. However they’ve found you and your page or whatever marekting message you have sent out will directly reflect in the number of likes.

Friends of fans
Why does this even matter? Because Facebook wants users to share. With  800 million users the potential for reaching a previously unreachable audience is HUGE!

So you have 36,000 likes? Each of those have approx 134 friends, who in turn have an average of 134 friends – see what’s happening here? And people are much more willing to buy a product or service or even interact with a brand if they can see their friends have already done so – POWERFUL STUFF!

People talking about this
This tells you how many people are are actually talking about your business away from your page. So likes, links, comments, shares and mentions all fall into this category.

Total Reach
The number of unique people who have seen any content associated with your page (inc ads & sponsored stories.)

All of these metrics combined show you just how powerful Facebook is for brands and this is only set to grow with an expected user total hitting 1 billion in the 3rd quarter of 2012.

At last you can hit that hard to reach target market by creating an engaging and interactive page that will not just gather likes but will play a massive part of lead generation for your business ongoing.

If you would like to find out more about timeline and how to create an engaging page just drop us a line cat@catcreativemedia.com and we’ll happily show you how to future proof your business.

Facebook Timeline

Unless you’ve been living under  a rock recently, there can have been no missing Facebook’s unveiling of Timeline for brand pages. We’ve been busy bringing clients onto Timeline, and optimising their offerings. One of the brands many of us look to in admiration is Red Bull who totally get social media and it’s no surprise that their Timeline offering is a stunning visual feast. However what caught our eye this week is not so much the beauty of their page but this article on Social Media Today which details how Red Bull went to town to promote and engage with their audience with specially created content peppered through their timeline with a thoroughly modern scavenger hunt.

Source: Social Media Today

The Social Network that Time Forgot

Remember Google+? It would be easy to forget about Google’s latest foray into social networks having launched with little fanfare and never really seeming to catch on fully. What caught our eye this week was a Mashable article about Plus that stated (according to Google’s own figures) the network has 50million users using Google+ enhanced products daily; so far from an old western town with tumbleweed blowing down the main drag.

Of course as seasoned watchers of all matters social will know stats can be made to mean anything and we’d question what exactly defines a “Google+ enhanced product”…

Perhaps more telling are independent stats from Comscore which cite monthly engagement time of just 3.3 minutes for Plus compared to 7.5 hours for the behemoth Facebook in Jan 2012. Our take is that it’s all well and good having large user bases to brag about but the defining metric of any online platform in a more social world is the user’s engaged time.

Source: Mashable

What Gowalla did next

When Facebook consumed the location check-in platform, Gowalla, many wondered what the upshot would be. Well, according to reports on Tech Crunch and Mashable this week, the Gowalla team have been hard at work on a new API for Facebook to act as a location backbone for both developers of apps for its own platform but also other third party apps as well. The addition of SoLoMo capability is timely as this new paradigm in online interactive engagement starts to mature. As if Facebook didn’t already know enough about you this extra location layer of data will no doubt have profund effects on marketing capabilities for advertisers and app developers looking for more engagement opportunities.

Sources: Mashable & Tech Crunch

Brand Pages for Twitter

Whilst most of the net chatter has focussed on the Facebook Timeline for Brand Pages introduction, Twitter also is in the middle of a brand page feature launch.

Twitter is being a little coy about committing to a firm release date, having so far launched brand pages with a select few advertising partners. Like Facebook Premium, Twitter appears to be reserving such things for those with deep advertising pockets, at least initially.

The key aim of the new features seem to be the enablement of contests and sweepstakes, but one has to wonder how that will work in 140 characters…

Source: Mashable

Just a minute

What can you do in a minute? Not a lot? All too much? Ahem.. Anyway we love a good infographic here at CCM Towers and this one designed for Social Jumpstart caught our eye. Social Media/Networking stats always give us a goosebump as the appetite for all things social continues unabated.

So did you know in just 60 seconds and for each and every 60 seconds in a day 2,000 people check in using Foursqaure, over 7,000 searches are performed on LinkedIn, 175,000 tweets are made? But the Big boys dwarf even that heady figure: Facebook passes on 700K messages and Youtube serves 2 million videos a minute…

Source: Social Media Today | Infographic only

Well that’s it for this week, we’d love to talk to you about your digital marketing needs so drop us a line or speak to myself or Cat on 01924 566317/8.

Pinterest’s Female Social Media Audience

Since its huge 6-month boost from 1.6 million to 11.1 million users from 2011 into 2012, Pinterest is still becoming more and more popular.  It has promising potential among business social media marketing, and holds some interesting statistics.

Women make up around 82% of registered users on Pinterest, which has got a lot of brands thinking.  Businesses will be thinking of compelling ways to target and engage a female audience, since this would be essentially targeting over ¾ of the Pinterest community and could obviously hold very potent advertising potential.

Trends suggest that women are more ‘dedicated’ to social media sites, often embracing and using it more than men.  It wouldn’t be at all surprising if these trends were to continue and more brands began to tailor their efforts to engage and reach female audiences.

Read more

Facebook introduces real-time Analytics for pages

Facebook is intending to implement real-time analytics for their pages which will, for the first time, allow brand page administrators to view the real-time activity of a page.  The main impact this will have, is that it’ll allow brand page admins to monitor campaign activity instantaneously, giving immediate feedback on success rates.  It’s meant to roll in within the next few weeks, and is expected to provide real-time tracking and metrics for the following:

• ‘People Talking About This’
• Friends of Fans
• Weekly Total Reach
• Total Number of Engaged Users
• Post Comments

Facebook isn’t the first company to implement real-time analytics to their site, and they certainly won’t be the last.  Saying this, it certainly gives a helpful breakdown for page admins to tailor their content for more positive results, and will undoubtedly be useful for businesses who are both already on Facebook, and for those who are just getting started.

Read more

Social Media & the Medical Field

Social media has made many recent strides in uses including business embracing the platforms, but recently we’ve seen something new.  There’s a team of volunteer doctors who call themselves “Floating Doctors” who have been serving along Central America and the Caribbean, traveling via boat to setup mobile medical clinics for communities who lack this kind of support.

It’s been revealed that Twitter, and to a degree Facebook too, has been an essential tool to help spread awareness of the project and to keep it alive.  They’ve been able to keep their Twitter account up to date via the various 3G posts throughout the region, and in some cases, get help from further afield.

When they encountered a rare case which required a specialist’s advice, they tweeted about it and got almost half a million responses, and got in contact to a specialist in orthopaedics.  Without social media, they claim, they wouldn’t be able to do the job they are doing today.

Keep up the good work, guys!

Read more

Google’s new Privacy Policy

Google have introduced their new privacy policy, which came into place on March 1st.  There’s been a lot of concern over just what Google would be doing with information gained, however Google shed light on some user options regarding the new policies.  The new set-up would enable it to tailor search results more effectively, as well as offer better targeted advertising to users.

More than 60 sets of guidelines for its individual Google-owned sites were merged into a single policy for all of its services.  It means browsing data and web history, which is gathered when a user is signed in with a Google account, can be shared across all of the websites.

They suggest users can access, and delete, their browsing and search history on the site by logging in to google.com/history.  There’s also options to negate the new changes all together by simply not logging in with an account to Google, and the site should stay as it always has been.  Overall, Google seem to be confident in their efforts, and don’t believe they have violated any type of privacy laws.

Read more here and here

Bringing brand pages into line with personal pages the changes in appearance are striking and more importantly whilst your existing imagery will work it may look odd or there may be unintended consequences of not optimising your brand page imagery for the new screen estate. So we’ve put together a brief guide to the differences and will give you the information you need to ensure you have a brand page that looks the part!

Cover Photo & Profile Picture

The old

Figure 1

This is the largest change along with the change in information presentation itself. Pre-timeline brands had the ability to have a profile picture that was originally 200 x 600px and recently reduced in screen estate to 189 x 540px. The profile thumbnail was then a square crop of part of the profile picture. So in Figure 1 above Image 1 is a 189x430px profile pic and Image 2 is the profile thumbnail which is created by using the bottom portion of the larger profile picture.

The new

Here is the same page with a cover photo but the profile picture unchanged:

Figure 2

As we can see in Figure 2 because we’ve not changed the profile picture the new size is causing an issue with some of the old profile picture showing at the top of the image. We also get a cracking piece of screen estate for big bold graphical statements. Figure 3 shows the same page with an optimised profile picture:

Figure 3

So moving to Timeline will require a few changes to our graphical representation for Brand pages. The cover photo is a real opportunity to grab attention and is an image that is 849 x 313px. We’ve seen other posts claiming it’s 840 x 310px and 851 x 315px but our dimension values are taken from Google Chrome’s element inspector so are accurate.

Profile picture still prompts you to use an image that’s at least 180px wide even though the container is 125 x 125px. We think this is simply to minimise code changes Facebook is probably trying to accommodate Timeline and non-Timeline brand pages with largely the same underlying CSS. The key thing here is that your profile picture with Timeline is square, and we’d recommend a value of 250 x 250px as this is a multiple of 125 and when Facebook resizes the image you shouldn’t get any unwanted side effects of automated resizing. One key consideration is that you profile picture will be used elsewhere at 30 x 30px so it needs to also work at this small size.

Page Tabs

The positioning of page tabs has also changed with timeline. Their position is shown at position 3 in Figure 1 and are to the right of profile pic in Timeline (Figure 3). Again the dimensions of the icons for page tabs has changed with Timeline. Pre-timeline it was 75 x 75px but now it is 111 x 74px. As you can see in Figure 3 the icons haven’t yet been optimised but they have in Figure 4:

Figure 4

In position 1 and 2 the 2 icons for these landing page tabs have been set at 111x74px. Also of note here is the length of the tab name and you can see the tab in position 1 has been truncated so you need to bear this in mind when naming your tabs. The cut-off seems to be after 17 characters. The order of these tabs is also amendable.

Re-cap

So there are a few new screen estate possibilities for your graphical representation and these are:

Cover photo: 849 x 313px

Profile Pic: recommended 250x 250px

Page tab icons: 111 x 74px

We hope you find this article of use. If you have any Facebook questions please do drop us a line or ask away by leaving a comment.

If you’d like some advice on how to maximise the new Timeline for your business then don’t hesitate to give us a call on 01924 566317/8 or contact us.

The phrase “Mission Control” is being banded about by all the Facebook bods, and that is how they want brands to utilise their Facebook page.

Timeline: love them or hate them the Timeline is not going away and it will hit business pages on 30th March  2012. Read the full blog post here

Admin permissions: 5 new levels of admin will be introduced, each with differing levels of access. More details to be announced.

Apps & Tabs: these will no longer appear on the left hand side but underneath the cover photo. All existing apps & tabs will still function.

Messages: consumers can communicate directly and privately with brands.

Ads: Sponsor stories will appear in newsfeeds and more importantly now on mobile.

Page post: these can now be pinned to the top of the page for up to 5 days.

Promotions: a new function “offers” can now be shared directly on the page as a status update, and will also be available on mobile.

Insights (page stats): The focus here is on engagement, sharing. REAL TIME insights will streamed into business pages! The opportunities for brands with this capability is amazing.

Timeline Hallway: There are no words for this, and unfortunately was only available at the conference, sorry!

Anyway, here it is. What do you think?

By far the biggest change is, as with personal profiles, there’s this REALLY BIG piece of ‘real estate’ or cover photo that sits right at the top of the page. Now Facebook have already said that this cannot be used for advertising or promotions and MUST contain both images and text. Our logo was given the go ahead, but I guess to a degree we’re lucky that we have a logo that can be scaled up in this way.

It’s time to get your creative head on (or ours) and decide how you want to use your cover story image. It’s perfect for a strong CALL TO ACTION!

In the bottom left you can see the smaller profile pic – use it to your advantage – who’s running your Facebook page that day? Put their photo in here, think of it as your shop front and “Happy to Help” staff who greet customers as they walk through the door. You don’t have to be retail to take advantage of this, it has to be about people connecting with YOUR people. Or you could simply replace it with your logo.

OK, so let’s move further down – simple principle – whatever has happened previously on your Facebook page will stay on your Facebook page. Past promotions, likes, shares, updates, news stories – you get the picture. How can that ever be a bad thing? Well, make sure any past comps are either hidden (click the X in the top right hand corner of the update) or that you clearly state “this competition has now closed”

You’ll also note that there are no more tabs or apps on the left hand side. Instead they’re replaced by 4 blocks which brands can change and expand if all options want to be seen.

Could this be the end for landing pages & welcome gates? Possibly! You can now ‘pin’ the welcome / like gate to the top of the page. Existing landing pages will still be available in the 4 blocks to view, but according to Mike Hoefflinger, Director of Global Business Marketing at today fMC Facebook want brands to share stories, and create engagement in all kinds of ways – not just through status updates.

Facebook Ads will change from today with some major changes to the Facebook Premium ad platform. It will be a story that will be shared by Facebook, using their algorithm to decide which news feed it appears in, which position and when it appears. You will however be able to decide the placement you want your ads, sorry stories to appear. In addition there will be a new ad option for the logout experience, though this won’t debut until April. There is a minimum monthly spend attached to Premium ads though and we’re talking big – $10k. Think Yellow Pages on days of old – you pay to appear in a premium position.

So how is this going to affect you and your brand? It can only be a good thing, it should be embraced and acknowledged as the normal way we now do business. The way we buy, sell, listen and interact has changed and you and your business need to be part of it to stay relevant in today’s business environment.

To learn more about the new Facebook changes come along to our Facebook for Business workshop on Tuesday 3rd April here at our offices in Wakefield where we’ll look at Business pages in detail and share with you some of the guidelines that will help you engage with your audience.

Call 01924 566318 to reserve your place.