How to Add RSS to Facebook

View this document on Scribd

How to Add Photos to a Facebook Business Page

View this document on Scribd

Event Marketing Using Social Media

My friend Janice at Pierpont Place asked me to help her put together a last minute social media blitz to help market her fundraiser/Halloween party.  I have a few days off before I start the next phase in my life/business so I said, “sure!”  I called Janet Thaeler because she recently put together a successful last minute event.

Here’s what I did:

You need a hub.  Where are people going to go?  In this instance, it’s Facebook…specifically an event page.  Because it’s a fundraiser, there’s a potential media hook, so here’s the press release.  I also paid to have the release distributed to local news people.  Additionally, it was sent to several local bloggers who talk about the local social scene along with some photos from last year’s Halloween event.

I also used Twitter to promote by creating a Twitvite that is easily shareable and a hashtag for the event: #spookbash.  During the event  Visible Tweets will be showing, so people will be encouraged to tweet their location while they’re there.  Attendees will be encouraged to check in on foursquare in hopes of getting a “swarm” badge.

Finally, I put together a paid search campaign for Facebook that targets people in Salt Lake with an ad for the event.  I created a custom landing tab with the event flyer and 140 plus visitors have been sent to that page so far.  The campaign will end tomorrow.

For me, this isn’t just about an event.  By using Facebook, Pierpont Place will be able to get better traction with their audience since people are engaging directly with the company by “liking” their page.  Janice will be able to send future events and news to people who actually want to hear about it.

Misusing Social Media in America’s Legal System

When Rod Blagojevich began his corruption trial, he was admonished by the judge to refrain from tweeting.  Since that time, I’ve been thinking about other social media behavior that’s probably a bad idea in the legal system.

Most normal people consider encounters with the legal system to be embarrassing or simply a pain to deal with.  Sometimes they’re both.  Despite this prevailing attitude, some people don’t stop to think before they tweet, update Facebook or check in.  Please don’t be like the three examples I’m about to tell you about.

1.  Checking in to court is a bad idea.  A friend of mine has a nasty little court problem she didn’t want to broadcast to her network, but she still wanted to check in on foursquare for the points.  Even though she didn’t broadcast the check ins, the second time there, she became the mayor and that did get published network wide.  Ooops!  Unless you want to explain to your friends and family why you’re in the District court, don’t check in.

2.  On the other side of the law is a Detroit juror who couldn’t wait to find the defendant guilty.  She updated her Facebook status saying,

it was “gonna be fun to tell the defendant they’re guilty.”

Now she could be facing jail time for contempt!  How did she get exposed?  The defense attorney’s son was looking up all the jurors and found Ms. Jons Facebook account unprotected.  I don’t know what was more foolish…discussing the case or not using the privacy settings on her account.  We don’t always think before we post something, but we can certainly limit the number of people who see it.

3.  Don’t tweet about going to jail.  Unless you’re an up and coming rapper who needs the street cred, don’t tweet about your jailhouse experiences.  Arguably mentally unstable, Amy Steele blogs about her ex-boyfriend who now has a restraining order against her.  When she decided to leave a voice mail to him, the police wound up at her door.  She tweeted,

Spent last night in the clink. Thanks for finding a phone call threatening Brian Schofer. 11:48 AM Aug 27th via Twitterrific

Later,

pretty sure i’m going to prison as even my mom blames me not the a-hole who took out restraining order. guess it solves my issues. #fb about 8 hours ago via TweetDeck

You can read more about Ms. Steele here and the full NSFW or for the easily offended version here.

Hopefully, you won’t have any the problems these case studies did, but if you do, now you know what not to do;

1.  Don’t check in at court or jail

2.  Don’t post jury information until after the trial is over

3.  Don’t tweet about your legal problems.  For that matter, you probably shouldn’t tweet about medical or relationship problems either.  Save that for the face to face.

Real Life User Benefits of Foursquare

In this series on foursquare, Janet and I have spoken a lot about business impact of the location based social media platform.  Though that is our focus, I’m going to take today to discuss the consumer side and what that means for business.

When I proposed a foursquare special for a a Salt Lake bar and grill, the first thing the co-owner did was add the special to the register.  That’s when I knew I was dealing with a smart business person.  I love tracking!

Though he was new to the idea, the first thing that came to mind was to measure it.  Smart.

It’s too bad the person that posted this receipt on Twitter didn’t include the business’ name because Foursquare picked it up and shot it out to 70,000 plus Facebook fans.  That doesn’t actually matter, because the people in the original poster’s network saw it and they are the most important people to see it.

I have friends who don’t see the value of foursquare.  The 10% this person saved can’t be that useful, but the advertising benefit they provided the restaurant is incalculable.  That’s exactly why businesses should provide an offer and promote it to death.  What will drive foursquare growth and local business profits is going to be local businesses promoting the medium and providing value typical consumers don’t see.

Department stores offer a standard 10% discount for getting a store credit card.  How much more powerful is that offer if a delivery mechanism to hundreds of like minded individuals is in place?  There already is one and it’s called foursquare!

On our podcast a few weeks ago, I suggested foursquare’s exponential growth was tied to a recent promotion with Starbucks.  Surely that is part of the reason, but so is the wider adoption of smart phones that can actually acommodate foursquare applications.  As more people upgrade to smart phones, foursquare use is bound to increase.

However…

People won’t continue to use foursquare just because of the game aspect.  They want awesome discounts and they want information about places they’ve never been before.  This is where businesses need to step up and offer compelling deals and provide information about their own venues.

My point of this article is pretty simple; businesses need to make compelling offers.  In Salt Lake the only one that seems to be of value to me is the one I engineered.  It has a great offer for the Mayor and a compelling offer just for checking in.

All the other offers I’ve seen are minor in comparison.  Sorry Starbucks…

Pizza Hut Builds Huge Following Across Platforms

You’ve got to give the marketing folks at Pizza Hut some kudos for their social media efforts.

In day six of Janet Thaeler’s and my foursquare case study series, I’m going to take a look at how Pizza Hut used foursquare, Facebook and Twitter to engage their audience.

Back in May, while the primary season was in full swing, Pizza Hut launched a social media campaign to expand it’s influence and asked customers to vote for a special offer they launched last Fall.

The vote for the offer was tied to Facebook, but supported by Twitter and foursquare.  It looks like it has worked out well.  Pizza Hut has 1.4 million fans on Facebook and about 31,000 followers on Twitter. 

Acting as “campaign manager” for the promotion was Alexa Robinson who is the official Pizza Hut Tweetologist.  (Sounds like a made up job title to me.)  Her story is interesting because she started out as an intern for Pizza Hut and that turned into a full time position as Tweetologist.

The campaign was successful and Pizza Hut’s $10 any pizza deal has no anticipated end date.  Pizza Hut is a division of Yum Brands and this promotion helped the chain see sales gains in same-store sales beat every other division in the fast food empire.

Largely on the strength of the $10 deal, Pizza Hut posted stronger sales than its sister companies. At Taco Bell, sales at restaurants open at least a year were up 1 percent in the second quarter but sales at KFC, the nation’s largest chicken chain, were off by 7 percent.

Yum’s other brands also have a large amount of Facebook fans, but those divisions engage differently with their customers.  KFC has no custom landing tab, while Taco Bell has a game and video to engage fans. 

Is Pizza Hut’s success due to foursquare?  I don’t think so, but I do think they managed to effectively use social media and a killer deal to build sales and customer base in an economy that is still feeling the pinch of recession.

Social Media Blunders – Please Don’t be an Ash

Some companies are extremely fearful of social media because people can actually say what they want – good or bad.  Yesterday, I watched a negative social media interaction unfold before my eyes.  Another Utah SEO Company, SEO.com made a post on their Facebook page and a disgruntled client responded.  SEO.com could have responded in several ways:

1. Ignore the post,
2. Delete the post,
3. Engage the complaint.

They made the right choice.  They engaged their client and even offered to re-examine their account.  Perfect response.  I posted it here as I love to see how businesses handle social media when it goes “wrong.”  This blog posts to both my personal Facebook page and my Fan page. 

Some of my friends commented on the personal page including my podcast co-host Janet Thaeler.  Some people from SEO.com found out about it and commented on the post over here, but I guess they found Janet’s comments through Facebook and read what she wrote.

As you know, my policy on Facebook is I don’t friend people I don’t know.  When two SEO.com employees sent friend requests, I sent back my standard reply to connect on LinkedIn.  Turns out they wanted to comment to Janet through my personal page. 

One of them, Ash Buckles, decided he didn’t want to do that.  Instead, he registered a website in Janet’s name and posted an article that libeled her and called me names!  Then he posted it all over Twitter!  Bad form Ash.  Do you do that with clients that leave you?  Absolutely unacceptable.

Janet was attending a conference and began texting me and then she called because not only did he put up this site, he direct messaged her some unkind words on Twitter.  Janet’s friends began standing up for her.  I decided cooler heads should prevail and tried to call Ash, but couldn’t get through on SEO.com’s phone directory.  So I tweeted my phone number to him to call.  By that time, I noticed the site in Janet’s name was down.  Thank goodness!  But the damage had already been done.  Thousands of people had already seen this unfold publicly.

I spoke to Janet again and Ash called her during our call.  Apparently he offered half an apology, because he thought he was right and apparently the VP of Marketing at SEO.com had made the suggestion as well as making him take down the site.  Then he called me, because of my tweet.  No apology.  He suggested I friend him and then unfriend him so he could comment on my page.  No Ash, that’s not the way I do it.  If you want to respond, copy and paste the conversation to a public forum like my fan page or my blog and respond there.

I told him he needed to publicly apologize to at least Janet.  This is what he said:

FTR: I apologized to @NewspaperGrl. HUGE misunderstanding. Everybody can get on with their Friday.

So the moral of the story is be really, really careful about how you use social media.  Hijacking someone’s name and then calling them a plagiarizer is not good business, especially when they didn’t do anything wrong!

I think Ash should take the new domain in Janet’s name and put all her social media contacts on it until the name expires next year.  At that time, he should let Janet decide what to do with it.  That would be a fitting apology.

SEO.com Gets Called Out

Thoughts?

Change – Sometimes Waiting is a Good Thing…

It’s been a while since I’ve “updated” this blog with a real article.  It’s not from a lack of trying.  I have two drafts sitting in queue that I never published and in the light of day, don’t know if they’re worth publishing.

Part of the reason is I’ve had to make a few reassessments on strategy and because there is so much reliance on third parties (Facebook) that seem to be reversing course as quickly as a feather in a hurricane, it’s actually been worthwhile to step back and watch.

This is not to say I haven’t been active or working.  Nor is the blog stagnant.  Anyone who follows the Twitter feed that posts on the right side knows it keeps moving.  So do the images.  In real life, I’ve been speaking regularly on Fridays and had two big events I presented at in May.

At one of them I actually said if I were starting this blog today, I wouldn’t do it.  I’d work more on my Facebook fan page than a blog.

Heresy!  I know.

Here’s what’s changed.

1.  Facebook “like” becoming ubiquitous.  This is a game changing development.  While it has created a privacy backlash, what it does is allow easy sharing of things like-minded (friends) people, well…like.  I compare it to watching Superbowl commercials during the big game.  Everybody looks forward to it.  If you were only shown commercials that interested you, wouldn’t you watch more of them?  That’s the like button.  It’s word of mouth on steroids and I recommend everybody install the button on their website.

The average Facebook user has 130 friends, so instead of speaking to one person with your message on a website, email or blog, you can speak to more by using Facebook.  On average, I see somewhere between 120 to 160 people on this blog.  If I published on Facebook, with the number of “fans” I currently have, I have a reach of 13,000.  It’s a multiplier effect.

Besides, pulling in the RSS feed of this blog to my Facebook page, each article is pulled into the “notes” feed which creates a separate, search engine optimized page, plus the multiplier effect.  I’ll let you know how this goes, but I suspect it will go quite well.

2.  Curating information is almost as important as creating information.  One of the really great things I got to do last week was meet in real life one of my online mentors Pat Kitano.  We both spoke at REbar Camp SLC and wound up sharing the stage all afternoon.

Pat has a great project he’s working on regarding local, breaking news.  He creates blogs that are essentially completely automated that develop an audience and search engine rankings in a very short time.  The site owner doesn’t have to do anything to keep it running and Pat has some great ideas on how to monetize them.  Meanwhile, the site owner, typically a real estate agent, gains great credibility because the sites are so informative and relevant on a local level.

A few months ago, Pat made a prescient observation about Facebook fan pages.  I’ve been playing around with FBML and really took his post to heart.  He said that within a year, stores would be putting their weekly circulars on Facebook.  That prediction inspired this page which I created using existing graphics or RSS feeds.  With the graphics, I have to manually update, which I’ve stopped doing.  I’ll soon dump those vendors or convince them to convert to RSS.  For Smith’s and Fresh Market, the feeds update automatically.  With Smith’s, the feed even sends an update automatically to Facebook when it updates.  I don’t have to do a thing.  I’m supplying great information that every local person should be interested in.  We all have to eat, don’t we?

3.  Automating social media in a meaningful way is actually possible.  At the same time Pat was presenting his breaking news idea, I was actually testing another idea that utilizes Google alerts.  By tying keyword sensitive alerts to my Twitter account, over the last 12 days, I’ve been able to automate my Twitter updates with useful information and gain new followers, i.e. build my audience.

I can actually create a second Twitter account that will update to a Facebook page with a lower frequency to match that platform.  The end result is I have an automatically updated social platform that people like and value.  I actually get more followers and retweets from this method than painstakingly creating and promoting my own content.  Of course I mix in my foursquare updates and personal content to create my own personal and authentic “voice.”

In the mean time, I’ve been anxiously waiting, but I still get to “update” this blog through Twitter and I update my fan page on a daily basis too.  You don’t have to “be everywhere,” but you need to be where the people are.

I love writing original content, but in a regular week when I’m finding content, posting it and creating in person live content, the ability to automate part of it is extremely valuable.  The fact that it’s shared and increases my audience is further proof of its’ worth.

Speaking of automation, Pat shared a semi-automated way to blog that I’m going to try out.  Until then, it will be slow, but steady….

Social Media for Businesses and Entrepreneurs

Today’s article is a guest post by Jeremiah Kephart, owner of Coffee Connection in Salt Lake City.  I’ve followed his company’s social media efforts and he was a recent guest on the Web Marketing Weekly Show.

Hello everyone!  Jeremiah Kephart here, and I am writing a guest blog for Nigel Swaby. It’s a follow-up from our live interview that we did a week or so back about Social media for businesses and entrepreneurs.

As a quick refresher, I own a local business called Coffee Connection.

We refer to the website mentioned above a number of times during the live interview so you might want to go sign up so you can follow along… I even give you a free drink just for becoming a member, and who does that? 😉

And of course since we are discussing social media, you will probably also want to go and become a fan on Facebook.  And the all important twitter account is here.

Now that you’re a racing fan, let’s get going! :3

In the interview we were discussing how I had paid catastrophic amounts of money over the course of several years to advertise my business in a million + different local rags, on the radio, passing out flyers, screaming into a megaphone on top of a soapbox, and praying for the rain which never ended up falling, no matter how much money or time I spent on it.

Luckily for all of us small-business owners and startups, there is a solution…

And that solution is social media.

By the way, if you haven’t listened to the interview, you might want to go and do so because there’s a lot of good candid information in it.

Don’t worry, I’ll wait 🙂

Great.  Now I’ve done my very damnedest to maximize all of my time in ‘social media,’ because who really has the time to sit around and post all day? We’re business owners. We have enormous bags of bricks to carry!

This being the case, I really needed all of this ‘social media energy’ to count for something as much as humanly possible. So as discussed in the interview, what I did (which was really really easy and stuff that anyone at all can do) is I went and set myself up a Facebook fan page (that you just became a fan of right?!) and MySpace account for the coffee shop before I started tweeting.

Because it’s crazy crazy easy to “link up” your Twitter account to these two other accounts (just click on the links provided for this purpose in FaceBook and MySpace) there is really no reason not to do it.  It takes all of 10 min.

So now when you or your staff posts content, everything that you have to offer goes out not only to Twitter but also to Facebook and MySpace. It’s a no brainer.  So now you don’t have to manage all three accounts, or suffer an aneurysm when all three screens at your office are filled with Web 2.0 blogging.  Everything that I do multiplies itself just like magic.

Now that’s all cute and everything, but there’s more.  And if you’re already excited, hold onto your seat… because if you’re a business owner like I am you’re going to like this a lot.

The funny thing about being a business owner, is that you get to set a job description for your employees. So now as part of my employees job description, they are tweet monsters! To my knowledge (and I’m pretty damn up-to-date with this stuff) no one else anywhere has ever figured this out, until now. I expect it will be repeated everywhere in the universe inside two years, but that’ll be fun because you get to get the jump on it.

Now, I know how painful it sounds to sit in your office and generate original content all day long.  I get it.  I don’t actually like doing it by myself. While I recognize the power of social media, I just kind of have better stuff to do than to make it my full time job.  So this is all perfect for me.

You can hear all about how to do it in the interview.
It’s episode 14 btw.

Now, something that I don’t think I got to stress enough in the interview is that with a little creativity you can take what you’ve done with your social media efforts, and maximize it over and over and over and over, making it way more worthwhile that it seems from the offset. (I’d like to take a moment to note that if you’re one of those evil marketers out there that uses the dark side of the force and produces crap, this will probably not work for you.)  Because people just eat up solid good content.  They love it.  And they love it because there’s so much “dark side of the force marketing” out there plaguing the world.  When they feel like they have a solid and genuine connection with your company that’s real, and legitimate, you can then syndicate the hell out of it, and it goes off like fireworks.

Never produce crap!  It’s a big pet peeve of mine.

In fact, getting slightly off topic, I did an interview for IN magazine in which they titled me “Scene Maker in Salt Lake,” which you can read here – and I think you’ll see the spirit of what I’m talking about.  This article was a big big hit because it was so authentic.  And there are really only two keys to success with social media.  Half of your success will be your CREATIVE STRATEGY, but the other big half is AUTHENTICITY.

To wrap up, I’d like to just say thanks to Nigel for providing the show for everyone.  I think he has some really strong material and he’s all about resources that are fun and cutting edge, and as we all know there’s no better way to get ahead than to not be behind.

This is Jeremiah Kephart, signing out.